B2B Copywriting: Wide Load Ahead

Have pity for the poor sentence that is asked to do too much

By Robert Celaschi

I did promise not to get all grammatical in these blog posts, and I’m not going to bring out the chalkboard today. I’ll only make a quick mention of nouns and verbs.  You can say a lot with just a pair of nouns and a verb.

You probably remember: A noun is a thing, and a verb is what the thing does.  If you have a company — for instance, Niftycorp — that’s a noun. If you introduce a product, “introduce” is a verb. And “product”? That’s another noun.

Now, in a product announcement you need a few additional words or else you’ll sound like Tonto: “Mmmm, Kemosabe. Niftycorp introduces product.” But watch out when you start loading up the sentence with details.

B2B Email: Your subject line can kill your pitch (or, Hi, I want to talk to you about … uh, stuff)

By Robert Celaschi

Something strange happens to people when they send marketing email. They’ll take a powerful, persuasive marketing message, and torpedo the whole thing by slapping a lousy subject line on it.

What makes it really strange is that the email might contain a press release or other message with a really great headline. The sender could have cut and pasted it. But no, instead they type a vague or garbled mess of words that makes me shrug and move on.

“Solution” is not the solution in B2B marketing communications

By Robert Celaschi

I won’t buy your product or service if you don’t tell me what it is.

B2B content: search and destroy

By Robert Celaschi

You want your marketing materials to carry a wallop, right? So don’t waste words. Here are three words that are almost always a waste. Take a few extra seconds to get rid of them, and nine times out of ten you’ll improve what you just wrote. 

From the Shocking Marketing No Nos Department

A high profile marketing automation company assuming permission — in an email with subject line “B2B marketing best practices”? Sounds too ironic to be true.

Humor at work: 10 tweets that killed me

It was hard to pick just a few ‘best’ tweets from this fall. I started with dozens of favorites. Here are 10 that killed me.

Humor at work – 10 entertaining finds

Here’s a countdown of 10 toons, articles, and videos I can’t stop laughing over.

Wanted: headshot with personality

The last time I had to send in a photo of myself, I automatically asked a coworker to grab the standard formal portrait. You know the kind, the head-and-shoulders photo also known as a mug shot.

To do: clean grill, write will

I received this email from LegalZoom this afternoon and can’t get over it the wry humor of the copywriter.

Staying flexible about marketing plans

While reading B2B magazine’s Interactive Marketing Guide earlier this year, a cluster of graphics caught my eye. They had to do with expected marketing allocations for online video, podcasts and other technology through 2012.

Through 2012?!?