Producing content to market your business can be exhausting – you’re constantly having to come up with new ideas to say the same thing, essentially, and there’s never any end in sight. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you’re stuck in a content rut, and not getting the engagement you want. 1. Could
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It’s 4.53pm on the day before a public holiday. I get a call from the HR person at a prospective client. They want two things from me: an exploratory meeting with some of their senior managers on the public holiday, and a copy of my CV. I point out that it’s a public holiday, and
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I’m no design expert, but I do know about reading – and about people. And I know that we read more than we’ve ever been expected to read, and that most of us are overloaded with content – from social media, outdoor advertising, lamp poles, the cereal box. It seems impossible to escape. Which is
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If I could give you just one tip to improve your day-to-day writing, it would be this: give yourself permission to write badly. Bad writing, you see, can be fixed. That’s how we get to good writing – we write badly, and then we craft it till it’s good. A blank page, however, is no
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“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Those words by Michelangelo have always resonated with me, because great writing is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you keep. It’s
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I spend a good part of my time training business people to write. But by far the most rewarding part of my job is working with leaders in the C-suite to polish their written communication. As leaders, executives are tasked with influencing, inspiring and rallying their teams. Their ability to do this depends on their
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When you’re putting together a marketing or public relations campaign, don’t forget to invest in proper photography – of your people and your products. Human beings are visual creatures, and it has never been more important to present your brand well from a visual perspective. But please – and yes, I actually am begging here
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If a journalist is writing a news story about your company, don’t even bother to ask to see it. If they’re doing a feature, however – a profile on one of your people, for example – they might be kind enough to let you see it before it goes to production. Here’s how to behave.
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There’s a crucial mistake in many content strategies and I see it all the time. One topic seems to get the most engagement, so brands or individuals bang on about that endlessly, or constantly try to shoehorn unrelated topics into being relevant to that topic. It may get you a great deal of engagement –
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I am often involved in writing companies’ origin stories and narratives, but the most recent one came with an odd request – to obscure some names and details and couch them in more generic terms. I found this odd for two reasons. First, some of the details are readily available on the company’s website, and
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