“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
Many people attribute this quote to Abraham Lincoln. While it’s questionable if our 16th president actually uttered the phrase, the appeal remains. Preparation—produced by strategy and sustained by patience—is key to success in almost any endeavor. Rather than immediately jump into action, the quote suggests, we should take space to ready our tools.
For all of us copywriters at MarketSmiths, these are words to live by. Give us 12 hours to develop your next ebook, and we’ll spend a hearty portion of it asking questions of your SME(s), challenging surface-level statements, and culling information to find the best path forward. This preparation, which comprises quintessential on-the-page content strategy, is integral to the writing process. Without it, the piece’s positioning could easily spin off course. Assumptions will be made, and it wouldn’t take long before brand inaccuracies, audience misses, and other misalignments crept in.
More so than for any other marketing discipline, in-depth strategy sessions are essential for writers. While details of your offerings can elude your branding, digital, or web team without hampering aesthetics or performance, truly effective writers must understand every nuance to make appropriate, on-the-page choices. So, when the time comes to produce marketing materials, we recommend vetting your writers on an oft-forgotten metric: the depth of their content strategy sessions.
The below is a guide with which to evaluate a content kickoff with any new copywriting team—and ensure its validity toward strong, on-strategy work.
Survey the landscape.
Effective content cannot and does not exist in a vacuum. When your writers understand the underpinnings of your market environment, they can truly ensure their work passes muster for industry-savvy ears. This includes clear-cut market positioning, so that every message and piece, no matter how tangential, is always appropriately laced with a few well-placed “whys” and “hows.” It includes industry trends, so you benefit from powerful hooks, timely angles, and a stance of genuine authority. It includes diving headlong into sales cycles to gain insights to what audiences want, and how you help them get there, along with all the bells and whistles that bring your customers value. To seasoned industry experts, there is no room for a single phrase to land falsely, causing you to sound uninformed, lose credibility, or worse.
At MarketSmiths, we tap into our experience across 13 industries and 40 sub-industries to fully grasp the market environment. We also keep pace with industry developments to uncover trending themes—while also giving them a unique twist, so you don’t see the same conclusions reflected back from all of the other content marketing in your space. It’s a delicate dance of weighing the “what’s interesting” against the “how it’s said,” and coming out on top.
Questions to ask: What various steps do they take to get clear on your market positioning, and your industry landscape?
Break the ice.
No way would we ever rely on a written brief or questionnaire to download the insights we need to write a single first thing for any of our clients. This is true no matter how seemingly simple their value prop, how seemingly thorough their written explanations, how seemingly minor their ask. Nor should you allow this to be done. During an initial kickoff and download, there’s too much potential for misalignment at every turn, from understanding audience motivators to grasping the brand and topic.
This is a hard and fast rule we will never break. Go with a live kickoff, with writers who require them, live and breathe by them, and know how to use them to your best advantage.
Questions to ask: How do they approach kickoffs? Is it a live conversation, a written brief, or a combination?
Mine your audience.
Ask your content writers how they get to know your various audience constituencies—and learn, by example, how they will adapt their writing to specific psychographics. It’s only by knowing what to do with a disparate set of values, lifestyle factors, cultural and geographical proclivities, priorities, fears, desires, and other motivators and behavioral characteristics that your writers will produce messaging that resonates with your targets—beyond simple cognitive persuasion. After all, you don’t need them just nodding along: you want them doing. Sharing the post. Adding items to a shopping cart. Scheduling a demo.
Discussing audience intent with your writers will ultimately lead to a better work product, too. Does your audience want to learn something new? Be part of a relevant community? Make a purchase? Our team at MarketSmiths has a tried-and-true method of downloading these insights—then applying them to smart copy and content.
Questions to ask: What’s their approach to understanding audience mindset? How do they take the insights learned and ensure the writing will land? What do they do to humanize the ultimate messaging and copy?
Visit rabbit holes, appropriately.
Every conversation, no matter how scripted, has its tangential moments. Do you indulge these, and if so, how far? Or do you ignore them, in favor of returning to your agenda?
Good question. It takes wherewithal to know which route to take. And it takes the command of a room to redirect a line of questioning, productively visit that rabbit hole, bring everyone back on track, even cutting people off (politely, of course) if need be. These are a few of the reasons we are so fixed on assigning a seasoned content strategist to each client account. They have that wherewithal, and so should your chosen writer(s).
Questions to ask: What do they do to ensure they are covering every aspect of a kickoff thoroughly?
Bring a pick axe.
Effective copywriters don’t take anyone’s word at face value. It’s not that we’re skeptics: it’s that leaving “x” unexplored so often results in concluding “y,” wrongly. This then results in developing one or a few pointers (or an entire piece) in an off-strategy way. What we do to counteract this is to try the assumption on for size, e.g. see if x means x, what it looks like in practice, and why. This takes real fluency with the material, as well as the experience to know that there are many different ways to interpret seemingly definitive thoughts and statements.
Questions to ask: How do they test assumptions? Is there a defined process for this? Can they give any examples of misalignment, due to assumptions, which caused them to home in on this more?
Channel personality.
Consistency is key to building brand trust and recognition. Whether your brand has a well-defined personality or is still finding it, your writers should work closely with you to ensure coherence across all touchpoints.
At MarketSmiths, there’s only one written questionnaire we distribute to clients. Prior to our kickoffs, we ask them to fill out a brand voice and tone questionnaire. Their responses provide our teams with clear tonal direction and/or tell us that the brand personality is still a work in progress.
Questions to ask: If your business doesn’t have an established personality, ask how your writers approach this step. Do they gather examples of the brands you like and don’t like? Do they provide examples that align with your target audience for inspiration? Your writers should help move your brand’s distinct personality forward.
Excavate details.
All copywriters need to be comfortable wading into the weeds, whether that’s related to miniscule product specifications, meticulous fact checking and research, detailed tonal do’s and don’ts, compliance with regulatory guidelines, consistent punctuation and spelling, or carefully nuanced phrasing that sends the exact right message to readers.
Regarding style guidelines, a law firm client of ours has very specific rules on when to use periods for degrees, and how to italicize case names in federal vs. state court (hint: it’s not the same). For a CPG client, we must get clear on minute differentiators among similarly named, closely priced products. A hospital system we work for asked that their bullet points be meticulously alphabetized. And there is the usual regulatory landscape: for healthcare, financial, legal, insurance, and similar clients.
Our team takes these rules seriously—and even goes a few steps further with style conventions, maintaining a parallel style guide with updates culled from substantive client feedback, so our clients never even need to repeat themselves. It’s all in the name of long-term partnership.
All of this is easier said than done. Creatives are often broad thinkers, shooting from the hip as they overlook the rules. Similarly, strategists can be big picture thinkers, ignoring details they may inadvertently feel are beneath them. This can lead to unnecessary rewriting, as you or your teammates are left having to clean up.
To take this to an extreme, think of a situation in which a piece is finely, even spectacularly, written. But you have to extensively redo it because it’s overreaching, out of compliance, factually inaccurate, tonally off, etc. That’s wasted effort: for the writer and for you.
Questions to ask: Can they cite an example of when they took the time to align on a client’s preferences from day one? Can they provide an anecdote of how closely they followed a previous client’s internal style guide? Can they prove the ability to grasp the big picture, while also keeping the smallest details straight?
Start writing.
Abe Lincoln, or whoever said that opening quote, needed four hours to sharpen his ax. That leaves two hours to write. Those two hours are important to get to ASAP, without unnecessary delay.
Kickoffs aren’t meant to be drawn out forever. Truly seasoned copywriters know when to stop asking questions—and start writing. Brand immersion is seldom a thing. Instead, your writers should complete their deep dive in one or a few efficient sessions of active listening, and jump promptly into the writing.
Questions to ask: What is your kickoff process? How do you know when it’s time to stop asking questions, and start putting pen to paper?
At MarketSmiths, we leave nothing to chance. Every engagement begins with a detailed CSS (Content Strategy Session)—leading to unfailingly impeccable, results-driven work.
