Here, guest writer Olivia Poglianich explores a few of Pixar’s tried-and-true storytelling techniques.

Pixar movies have been captivating audiences of all ages since 1995. Movies like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E represent the magic of storytelling: leaving a lasting impression on hearts and minds everywhere.

But the film studio’s lessons extend far beyond the silver screen. Here are a few tips marketers can follow to channel their inner storytellers—and enchant customers across the globe.

Characters come first

Many companies get caught up in the nuts and bolts of their business. (And understandably so. Of course you’re excited about that newly launched feature!) But products and services aren’t the heroes of your brand story—characters are.

As in any Pixar movie, each character has a unique history. You may start by considering your customers: When do they use your products or services—and why? What problems do you help them solve? What do their lives look like outside of this brand relationship? 

Your company founder is another critical character. Ask yourself: What brought them here? Why did they launch this business? What mission drives them, each and every day? 

By discovering who your characters are and what they want, you can create an authentic brand story—with a memorable (and maybe even magical) touch.

Define your beginning, middle, and end

Storytellers are masters of structure: setting the stage with an introductory scene, packing in the action, then wrapping things up with a clear conclusion. 

As a marketer, you may already exercise these tactics by including a table of contents at the beginning of a presentation to tease what’s to come—or by featuring recap slides at the end to ensure your core message hits home. But many people forget to weave an underlying thread throughout their communications.

To combat this, Pixar suggests creating storyboards. In the marketing world, this often manifests in the form of outlines. By adopting your audience’s mindset, you can develop a structure that strategically captures attention, addresses pain points, and secures sales. 

Imagination is everything

To inspire out-of-the-box thinking, Pixar uses a trusted brainstorming technique that resurfaces ideas which would be shut down by the rational brain. This method poses the critical question: What if there were no boundaries? 

It’s how Pixar came up with countless creative concepts. (For instance, “What if the toys in your childhood bedroom could talk?” became Toy Story—and “What if our feelings could talk to us?” inspired Inside Out.)

Marketers can use this exercise to keep imagination front and center—creating new storylines and imbuing messaging with dreamy, descriptive language. 

Show, don’t tell

Companies often tell audiences what to expect from their products and services—but Pixar suggests doing just the opposite.

Instead of saying you’re fiercely loyal, prove it (like Sully does by saving Boo in Monsters, Inc). Instead of telling customers to trust you, recall a time when you had their backs (like when Inside Out’s Bing Bong realized Riley no longer needed him—and selflessly let her go). 

Be as descriptive and visual as possible when telling your brand story. Ask yourself: Will readers be able to easily picture these scenes and identify with characters? Do I have a solid story arch—or am I rambling on and on (and on)? 

While fancy, abstract words may sound impressive in academic journals, everyday writing calls for a much simpler approach. Concise, vivid language allow readers to see what you’re saying—from beginning to end. 

Need help bringing a human touch to your business writing? Connect with our team of storytellers today. 

Yesterday, a friend told me she was headed for Paris. “What?! When?!” I said with amazement, thinking wistfully of my own June trip to Cannes, canceled weeks (eons) ago. “Soon,” she laughed. “I think if I say it, I’m going to wish it into existence.” 

When travel isn’t possible, our imagination rises to replace it (often aided by Netflix). Here are four effective B2B marketing communication tactics—swiped from my decade-plus career spent writing about cities, islands, and other far-flung destinations.  

1. Appeal to the senses. 

Wringing hot sand with your toes. The crisp crunch of sea salt, breaking up a velvety expanse of dark chocolate. The fresh smell of a waterfall in early spring. 

You have five senses, maybe six. There’s no rule to say you can’t rouse some or all of these in your reader—even in a piece of down-to-earth b2b copywriting. Innovative ways of saying things trigger new associations for your brand—capturing audience attention and making it stick. Here are a few examples: 

Example 1: AI

Like harnessing 10,000 clever hands to your computer, AI accomplishes ordinary tasks at lightning speed, and with blinding precision. 

Example 2: Insurance

It’s Sunday, 1pm. The sun is gleaming, and you’ve driven with your family to your most beloved brunch spot, hiking trail, shopping mall. Your spouse says something hysterical, and your kid spit out her gum laughing. This day is brilliant—and it will fuel your bond for years to come.

Yes, but how much have you protected this memory? Of course, you’ve got insurance—for your car, health, home, business, life. But if push came to shove (and we hope it doesn’t), your current policies may fall egregiously short. 

We’re XY Insurance Company, and we work hard to make sure our clients are adequately and affordably covered. We’ve been the top choice for personal and business insurance in ABC County for 50+ years—for good reason.  

Insurance is a rich enabler for life’s greatest pleasures and possibilities. Without it, you couldn’t walk out your front door—much less start a business or have a child. You’d be putting everything on the line. 

At XY, we’re well aware of this massive responsibility. And we’d be happy to show you that getting sufficient coverage doesn’t have to mean a dramatic increase to your current premium. Etc. 

Create tactile, tangible, and sensory content—and help your audience feel, smell, and taste your value…not just read about it.

2. Demonstrate—then explain. 

Remember the funnel introduction? For the uninitiated, this is a widely taught way of writing intros that starts with a sweeping statement—then narrows things down line by line, until you’re left with a (relatively contained) thesis. Later, once you get into your points, you might feather in an example or two…but not till waaaaay down, maybe on page six. 

That’s fine. It’s also like serving dessert by unfolding a tablecloth, then presenting a spatula, followed by forks, napkins, a pie plate…all in slow succession. By the time you roll out the pie, your dinner guests have dozed off. 

That’s why an effective copywriting vendor turns this structure on its head. After all, the whole world gravitates toward a story, a living example, some healthy dialogue. Uttered right, “once upon a time” can hypnotize even the squirmiest child.

For your brand, this means populating big-picture ideas with powerful, relatable examples.

3. Create a storyline—and outline a clear takeaway. 

Which article would you click on first: 

• Fiji by Jean Tang
• Fiji: A Honeymooner’s Story of Land and Sea
• Fiji: The 15 Things You Must Know Before You Go

If you said #1—cool! But you’d probably be in the minority. 

All content creators rely on story as a tool for engagement. In the realm of travel writing, this includes pithy anecdotes, memoir-style musings, and narratives about amazing meals (and the cooks that made them). 

For you, it might be time to take customers on a journey, inviting them to strange and enticing lands (where your solutions sit). Let your imagination run free.

4. Keep them entertained. 

Your audience is everything, and above all—at any time but especially now—they are looking to be engaged. Our inner travel writer would take this a few steps further, and advise us to throw in a pinch of fun and half-cup of delight. 

Whatever your cause, use your words to give people a little reprieve from the current events—even just for a moment. 

— 

Now more than ever, your words can bring you closer to those you seek to serve. Use them to transport, excite, and connect with your audience—building relationships that last long after this crisis has passed, and clearing a path toward future success.

If you’re in need of carefully crafted copy in this time of uncertainty, MarketSmiths can help. Tell us about your copywriting needs. 

Here we are, an entire world of professionals suddenly housebound. Some of us are still working. Others aren’t, unsure of what the future holds. All of us trying to stay calm. And—aside from sequestering ourselves indoors with squeaky clean hands, there’s little we can do to help. But wait! Is that true?

People who have seen Contagion, I Am Legend, and a handful of zombie epics can join me in counting our blessings in several significant ways: 

• We’re not the last people alive. This is not, thankfully, the apocalyptic New York City of Severance.
• There are neither zombies nor vampires lurking (none known, anyway). We can read, write, reason, relate, do yoga…and imagine.
• Unlike in those (admittedly Hollywood) movies, COVID-19 does NOT cause a near-certitude of death—not even for the very vulnerable. We protect and treat, and we can also stay hopeful.
• We’re all here, working. Ensconced at home, we’re online even more than ever—and many have commented on how staying away weirdly (wonderfully) results in feeling unified and connected.

For a content creation and copywriting team, here’s what it comes down to: Content—backed by actions—matters now more than ever. Whether consciously or not, people are searching for a source of light—levity, certitude, kinship…all of the above. 

And each of us can give it. By posting our stories and ideas—whether about life in the time of COVID-19, or something unrelated and delightful / thoughtful / touching—can all help scores of others to find reassurance, to spark hope, to build resilience, to consume something awesome. Better if it’s personal, fact-filled, or counterintuitive. Best if it’s magnanimous, not self-serving. 

Against the dire backdrop, we come into the true meaning of thought leadership (not the cliched one). And so we gathered some everyday inspiration to share. 

• Journalists, a famously competitive lot, have joined forces for the greater good. “We stop the virus together, let’s make responsibility go viral,” announced the front pages across Argentine newspapers. “When you’re on your own, we are there with you,” announced rival British newspapers. If grumpy old hacks can show some marketing solidarity, the rest of us probably can, too. 
• Gov. Andrew Cuomo has delivered a Powerpoint presentation with a winning combination of facts, urgency, and compassion. 
• Entertainers, musicians, nutritionists, yogis are selflessly sharing their expertise to keep us mentally, physically, and spiritually well. For the most part, these are donation-based events—and truly incredible. 
• Without being asked, Ford Motor Co. is partnering with 3M and GE, repurposing its factories, and manufacturing medical supplies for COVID-19 patients. 
• New Yorkers have joined in ad hoc coalitions to take care of one another, using Google docs to get unused MetroCards to essential workers, Google forms to coordinate childcare in certain neighborhoods, and just their handiwork to hand-sew masks to provide to healthcare workers. Circulating on Twitter (and now, in media coverage), these lists speak to the ways that neighbors and strangers are looking out for each other.
• People everywhere are showing their love for small businesses. In Washington D.C., Capitol Hill Books started putting together “mystery” book packages available for order. Within days, they had more orders than they could fill—with fans all over the world writing in to support the shop. 
• Even as restaurants have had to close, they haven’t stopped serving. In Westchester, New York, a coalition of chefs pledged to make a million gallons of soup for the surrounding community. Chef Michael Psilakis let his staff shelter at home, but he is back in his restaurant kitchen, cooking alone—with one menu for the employed, and the other for people who have lost their jobs. 

So no matter how bad everything seems right now, all this and much more should give you plenty to smile about. Here’s just hoping we can keep up momentum even after the crisis passes—and start seeing everyday inspiration as something for everyone, always.

In these times, when easily 97% of your qualified customers are online, the web presence and content marketing efforts of nearly every company can be powerful drivers of rich, ready-to-engage leads for strong YoY growth. 

If you are with us in accepting this new paradigm, then you’ll probably also agree that the benefits derived from great copywriting can turbo-charge your results. (If you’re skeptical, read ways to make any old website an online sales engine.) 

Of course, for many companies, the next question is a tricky one. Say you don’t have an on-staff copywriting team—or you do, and they can’t meet every internal demand. 

How will your marketing team resource this need? Do you hire (more) in-house W2 copywriters? Do you find one or two good (1099) freelancers? Do you leverage your own marketers—and somehow make it all work? 

Let’s look at each of these options in turn. 

Option 1: Hire one/several in-house copywriters (W2s)

Once you get approval for headcount, in-house copywriters are an attractive option. Yes, it’ll take time for them to ramp up. But once they do, they can align with your priorities: managing marketing assets, creating new ones, developing key internal relationships, continuing to grow their knowledge base, and building a consistent voice and tone for your brand. All of this solves a host of pressing issues.  

The very first thing is to ensure that your expectations of an in-house copywriter or content marketer are realistic. You can probably think up an amazing, robust job description for this role. Yet with shifting on-the-job dynamics, things may not get done in the tidy, productive way you’re anticipating. It’s common to have misconceptions about what can be achieved. 

• Say you’d like your new copywriters to strategize and write your email campaigns, generate topics for and write blog posts, and manage your social channels. Sound attainable? Maybe. In reality, your in-house talent will likely find themselves dealing with multiple competing priorities, leaving deliverables to take a back seat. Long-forgotten blog posts. Sporadic social posting. Back-burnered marketing strategies: take your pick. There are going to be limits to how much your new in-house copywriters can produce, write, and scale.  This is why outside copywriters or a copywriting agency like MarketSmiths can be helpful in augmenting output—and ensuring that it stays timely and consistent. 
• Every in-house marketer was once an outsider. After a few months, in-house talent risks flying too close to your company—and thereby losing that all-important arm’s length perspective. As a result, it’s easy to forget how to speak to the real outsiders: your prospective clients. Copy iterations run together. Jargon crops its ugly head. Internal copywriters grow long-winded, throwing in every last detail (along with the appropriate highlights). This is also a place where copywriting agencies have a unique advantage. Evaluating your company from a distance, agencies retain arm’s length perspective—and stick to powerful, client-centric value propositions that open minds and close sales.

Let’s say hiring an in-house copywriter is still your best tactic. There are some hurdles you’ll need to jump before you get there. 

RECRUITMENT

The first hurdle? Recruitment. You’ll write and post the job ad, socialize your need, and either onboard a recruiter—or go through perhaps thousands of resumes yourself. Even with a recruiter, you’ll green light and conduct interviews, make decisions, and sell both the job and your management. 

Compile a list of wants

As a profession, copywriting isn’t typically guided by boards, or governed by industry educational or licensing qualifications. So it’s important to spell your specific requirements out clearly. 

Basic requirements include:

• Level: Would your new copywriters be senior, junior, mid-level, or a mix? 
• Industry: Should they be familiar with a certain industry? 
• Format: What will they be writing on a day to day basis? Will they be focusing on a certain type of content writing, like video scripts, or web pages? 
• Other responsibilities: Outside of writing, what will their responsibilities be? This could include performing campaign analytics, managing assets, managing external vendors (like copywriters, web designers, and SEM vendors), and more? 
• Success: How will you measure success? 

Deepen the list—and target copywriters

We recommend you don’t stop there. Think closely about your company culture, desirable personality traits, and skills specific to this job. Sure, everyone wants a motivated self-starter that fits into their culture. But here are a few questions you might not have thought about: 

• Pace: Is the pace of your marketing—and your company culture—quick and productive (requiring fast work and precise deadline orientation), strategic and thoughtful (requiring productive ideas and careful execution), or somewhere in between?  
• Strategy vs. execution: Do you need creators or executors? Another way to ask this: if you had to choose only one, would you prefer that your new copywriters create strategies—or make them happen? If you had to choose one, is it more important that they contribute to your big-picture strategies, or be painstakingly attentive to details (such as your brand style guide)? 
• Creativity vs. logic: If you had to choose only one, would you want your copywriters to be brilliant at creative right-brain concepts (think ads and taglines) or logical left-brain narratives (think blog posts and ebooks)? 
• Reporting: Can it be tough to pin down time with your thought leaders and subject matter experts—and extract information from them? If so, you may need a particularly gifted and inquisitive reporter to chase them down and draw them out.  
• Industry foundation: How necessary is it that they bring industry chops to the table? (This is not a trick question!) 

Consider weaknesses, too

If you already manage people, then you know what we mean by weaknesses. No one—no matter how talented—is perfect. No one can possibly meet every expectation. 

In the writing realm particularly, there tends to be an assumption that a writer is a writer (is a writer). But that’s a myth. Even the best copywriters are not endowed with a 100% comprehensive range of skills and strengths—or a 100% absence of weaknesses. Here are some examples: 

• A certain consumer-facing copywriter is fantastic. But their knowledge base does not translate across formats and industries. When it comes to writing (say) pitch decks or sales collateral or more complex material, they can get stuck. 
• You speak to a solid journalist. But she has no experience writing copy. (This is largely because copywriting is a whole different skill set than journalism.) 
• You interview a strategist whose ideas make a lot of sense. Later, you find that he is not at all strong on execution. 
• A candidate has stellar writing samples, but shows signs of being tough to work with. 
• Another candidate seems easy to work with. But their writing samples show they’re not great at following guidelines (or the rules of grammar or spelling). 
• Some candidates excel at the creative…but have no idea how to write more linear pieces like an ebook or PowerPoint deck. 
• Other writers possess inexhaustible logic. But their writing is tedious to read: there’s no flash of light or life. 
• Some writers don’t communicate (at all). Others have a case of TMI. Pick your poison.
• Some writers are generally strong, but may be slow…which could cause a bottleneck for campaigns. 

We recommend spending some time strategizing which weaknesses you can live with, and which are flat-out deal breakers. 

Try a test

It’s often helpful to administer a small assignment to test the waters. Think carefully about how to do this: 

• Which content format (blog posts, a web page, etc.) should you test? 
• Will you administer the test in-person (if so, why) or remotely—and why? 
• How will you brief them—how much should they know in advance? 
• Who will score the test? How do you score it to be helpful but unbiased? 
• Will you compensate them for the test? Think carefully about this one—especially if you are testing freelance writers. What kinds of candidates do you want to attract? 

Take your time. The process can be successful, but refrain from rushing: it could take you months to find the right person. 

Best of luck. If you need advice on any of this, hit us up at info@MarketSmiths.com. 

ONBOARDING AND MANAGEMENT

Congratulations on finding and hiring great new copywriters! Now for the next hurdle: providing a thorough onboarding experience. Here are some potential activities: 

• Listening tour: Send your new writers on a listening tour with key stakeholders in marketing, sales, and business leaders at your company. 
• Industry primer: Give them a primer of the industry landscape—and have them do some branding homework. 
• Inventory: Let them riffle through past and present branding guidelines, competitor audits, user surveys, and other assets that have been created over the years. You might give them a side project—to catalog past and current assets, and note pieces that require updating (or tossing!). 
• Deliverables: Give them live assignments—what better way to get them acclimated and move forward with initiatives!

Once they’re onboarded, it’s important to take stock of management skills specific to copywriters:

1. Growth: Beyond clear communication, constructive feedback, and regular one-on-ones, it’s best if you can give your copywriters structured and unstructured ways to expand their craft. If you are not yourself a copywriter, this can be challenging to do…and you might want to seek outside help.

2. Editing: Because every good copywriter learns well through osmosis, you’ll want to apply the work of an editor that can improve on each writer’s work product, effectively reword things, and give powerful tips and tactics for improvement. Again, if you’re not yourself a copywriter, you might bring in an outside set of eyes to assist.

3. Workload: Marketing can often be feast or famine. Keep an eye on bandwidth and utilization, and help your writers to pace their workflow so it’s balanced and achievable at all times. 

4. Limits: There will be times your copywriters are too busy to handle new initiatives that pop up. You might need to manage your stakeholders to understand this, or shift priorities as they crop up. 

Whether as an alternative to hiring or a way to augment your team, it’s imperative to have a trusted copywriting agency on your speed dial to help you meet workflow demands. An agency that focuses on quality can fill gaps in your staffing needs, and scale when your initiatives come fast and furiously. 

Option 2: Hire Freelance Copywriters (1099s)

Say you don’t have headcount, or know you won’t have sufficient work to justify a full-time salaried copywriter. You can bring a 1099 copywriter on board on an as-needed basis—for a few hours, for six months, for a particular project. (There are legal limits for using 1099s—and of course labor laws governing whether or not they can be on-site.)

VETTING PROCESS

To narrow down freelance writers, ask yourself: 

• Can your writers be remote or do they need to be on-site (and why)? 
• How experienced do your writers need to be—and why? 
• What do you need these writers to deliver—and how much of it? Will they be focusing on a certain content format, like white papers or infographics? 
• Will you compensate them by the hour, day, week, piece, or word? (We’d suggest thinking carefully about your internal processes—and cutting out any steps that aren’t needed. The most efficient writers can charge by the piece or by time—and in doing so, perform only what’s needed to get the job done.) 
• Should they be familiar with a certain industry? (Again, this is not a trick question. Consider the possibility that the best writer for the job can get up to speed quickly.)
• How—and when—will you measure success? 

While freelancers offer critical arm’s length perspective, they can lack consistency. When your favorite 1099 sojourns in the South of France—and deadlines continue to creep up—you may find yourself craving the reliability of a well-staffed copywriting agency partner.

Option 3: Leverage Internal Marketers and Other Existing Staff

In a line, we wouldn’t recommend doing this. 

A copywriting agency is the best of both the freelance and in-house worlds. The agency option offers:

• An on-demand, always available service—with no overhead and no need to recruit.
• Writers at all levels to meet all your needs. 
• The practiced ability to get up to speed on your company and your industry—quickly.
• Versatility between mediums and styles.
• Volume. 

Option 4: Outsource Work to a Copywriting Agency—and Reduce Friction

This might be news to you: there are copywriting agencies armed with writers at all times, ready to dive into the complexities of your business, uncover resonant value propositions, and turn them into effective, lead-generating copy. For projects with a tight turnaround time, the preparedness of an agency makes them an excellent choice.

As a premium copywriting agency, MarketSmiths offers the following benefits: 

• Excellence across a range of formats—converting web copy, narrative-driven blog posts, punchy ebooks, crisp sales collateral
• Confidence amidst complex industries and topics. (Basically, it comes down to asking the right questions, which enable us to harvest the right insights. And yes, we always insist on a kickoff conversation—that’s where 90% of the work is done!)
• Quality. Our content strategists act as you—applying powerful strategies and flawless quality control, making your part in this process easy and seamless. 
• Speed. We can kick your project off within a day—and we never miss deadlines. 
• Effectiveness. Ask for examples of our ROI and other metrics. You’ll be impressed!
• Scale. Need copy for 20 campaigns at once? We’re on it. We have the size to scale your team—and deliver what you need, when you need it. 

No more hiring headaches. At MarketSmiths, we’re committed to delivering only the words that work—and doing it repeatedly: at scale. Ready to fuel your marketing efforts with consistent, high-converting copy and content? Get in touch today.