Then Tommy bit the copywriter

Posted by Michelle Jones on May 16, 2012 No comments

Then Tommy bit the copywriter

At Ketchup we’ve evolved a way of working that is effective, fast and gives cost benefits we can pass directly on to our clients. It also means we can cherry pick the best talent for a particular project.

London. Manchester. Melton Mowbray

Let me explain. We work remotely. Our central office is the main hub and contact centre for client services and project management, and it’s where I’m based in my capacity as Managing Director. So I still have direct, face-to-face contact with our clients.

But our Director of Copy is down south, and the Design Team is up north, so we’re a truly national company in that sense. Some companies have ‘London. New York. Tokyo’ underneath their logos. We’re considering putting ‘London. Manchester. Melton Mowbray’ under ours.

We often go cherry picking

Actually, the advantages of working remotely are manifold. We don’t have huge offices with a reception area clad in Welsh slate to pay for. Except for our full time, core creative team, we employ people on a per-project basis, so our clients don’t have extraneous staff downtime surreptitiously woven into their costs. It also means we don’t have people sitting about in the office who we are obliged to use – we can cherry pick specific skill sets from a network of outside talent. People we’ve worked with extensively – from web technicians to SEO experts – over the years. The result is a more professional job at a more streamlined price.

This is an awful line

There was sudden silence as the copywriter thought his headline was being dissed. Then he realised the designer meant the crackly telephone connection. It’s the sort of misunderstanding that doesn’t happen any more – thanks to the wonders of modern technology. We conference call, we brainstorm electronically, we review rough ideas via dropboxes, we create in live time by sharing screens through Skype.

It’s better than meeting face-to-face in many ways. Creative ‘discussions’ can sometimes become quite passionate. Which used to provoke Tommy K – our resident Labrador – into showing the copywriter his teeth…

Ketchup Marketing

Melton Mowbray. Manchester. London

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It’s a civil partnership. Usually

Posted by Michelle Jones on April 24, 2012 No comments

It’s a civil partnership. Usually

Michelle - Ketchup MD

The dodgy sex aside, I sometimes think that long term client relationships are a bit like marriages. Both parties enter into them with eyes wide open and with the best of intentions; and learn to adjust their expectations as time passes.

At first it’s all passion and togetherness discovered. There are a couple of warm discussions as you feel your way around and operational guidelines are laid down.

Then something wonderful happens

Like all seasoned couples, you become perfectly aligned. The agency is so immersed in the client’s market that it responds to new challenges instinctively. Our creative/management team thinks proactively – without being briefed – to present new directions, ground-breaking ideas and early solutions to future issues. In short, we all work together in shorthand.

Blind date? Actually we met on the internet

A good number of our clients have been with us for over 5 years, some for even longer. Most of our new clients come to us via recommendations from established clients, or people who have worked with us previously. Which is gratifying.

But we do go on blind dates – or pitches, as they’re known in the industry. We also attract new business via the net and targeted marketing efforts. Lucky really, because if we can’t market ourselves…

Taking it personally

Gary - Ketchup Design Guru

And sometimes the personal partner merges with the professional. Our Director of Copy married his Art Director and our Creative Director met his intended over the garden wall when they were children, but he designed all my wedding stationery and table layouts. And our longest standing client was at the ceremony some – oooh – 13 years ago now.

There’s a lot to be said for long term relationships.

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Life’s a pitch – part two

Posted by Michelle Jones on April 10, 2012 No comments

Life’s a pitch – part two

Those of us in this industry with long memories talk glowingly of the time when prospective clients actually had something called a pitch budget. That’s right; they would see choosing a new advertising and marketing agency as akin to hiring new staff, and have recruitment costs built into their business overheads projections. They would pay agency pitch expenses. Those were the days.

Yes, they actually shot the pilot

Then they realised agencies would pitch for free, and the budgets disappeared. Of course, in advertising ‘free’ is a four letter word, so costs were recouped via other channels. But the expense was spiralling out of hand – some agencies were shooting pilot commercials for new business presentations – until a select band of London agencies stopped doing creative pitches altogether, relying on presenting their credentials instead. (Bartle Bogart Hegarty was one of them and they now work with British Airways, Dulux and Google, amongst others.)

Well, we tried that with The Caravan Club (see Life’s a Pitch – Part One) and it went down like an Elddis Buccaneer off Land’s End.

A hedgehog smoking a pipe

So for Parkers Cars – part of the massive Bauer Media group – we did it differently. We went in with three different strategic routes. We created concepts and wrote baselines for each route together with some carefully crafted copy. We created layouts with three different visual identities. And, because the art of advertising is to persuade people to buy stuff without them being able to see how you’re talking them into it, we produced full creative rationales for everything we’d done. So Parkers would see the full cunningness of our ideas.

Well, sometimes clients think you just make things up for the hell of it. I know – let’s stick in a picture of a hedgehog smoking a meerschaum pipe, that’ll flog a few cars!

A foot in the door. As it slammed closed

So did we win the business? Well, we made useful contacts and the people we impressed will certainly consider working with us going forward. So that’s a ‘no’ then. Maybe that hedgehog wasn’t such a bad….

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Life’s a pitch – part one

Posted by Michelle Jones on March 19, 2012 No comments

Life’s a pitch – part one

Busy isn’t it? We’re touching wood here, of course, but at the moment there aren’t enough hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in a month. Checking around, it’s not just our clients who are pushing through the work; the advertising and marketing industry as a whole seems to be pedalling furiously just to keep up.

Shhhh, the dog’s asleep

So why are we pitching for new clients? Isn’t that akin to waking up a dog you can’t feed? The point is that you can nurture contacts over a period of time, but you can’t choose the moment they invite you to pitch for their business. So it’s often a case of buckle up boys, here we go.

We recently presented our wares to The Caravan Company. And we didn’t exactly win ourselves a week in Great Yarmouth in a top-of-the-range Marauder. Or even in Gorleston-on-Sea, for that matter.

Off with the new. On with the old

Now, a lot of agencies cannot resist the glitter of prospecting for new clients. There be gold in them there accounts. But we make a point of putting keeping our clients long term, and that means them first.

So, for The Caravan Club we decided not to present creative work. After all, we reasoned, they can see our skill with words and design in our portfolio. So we concentrated on the thinking.

What, no crayons?

We discussed marketing strategy in some depth. We put together a marketing activity plan stretching over the next 12 months. We created on and off-line strategies. We talked about Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click advertising and alternative revenue streams like eBay and online stores. We even put together some wire-frame layouts of sample web pages, just to give them an idea of the content.

Did we win the business? Does a Ferrari have a caravan hitch point? Maybe we should have got the crayons out after all.

Rebrand projects, SEO Services, Web designCompany Rebrand, ketchup marketing, seo leicester, web design, website design leicester

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Dynamic by name…

Posted by Michelle Jones on February 14, 2012 No comments

Dynamic by name … website by Ketchup

The new website

What’s in a name? Nothing really, a name is just a name. Except. Well, who sounds the sexiest – Brenda or Roxy? Who sounds the most romantic – Stanley or Jean-Paul? The point is, you’d expect that a company with the chutzpah to call itself ‘Dynamic’ would be able to deliver an electrifying range of products and services, right?

Absolutely right. Dynamic create and produce some of the most jaw-dropping promotional displays and POS for company like Coke, McVities, Appletiser etc etc.

And we love working with them because they take, well, a dynamic attitude to using creative work to attract high profile business.

Make us stand out. We want to sound different. Push the boundaries. Nearly all clients say that, but these guys really mean it and that is like a red rag to a creative team.

Gauntlet plucked off the floor, our copywriting team started by writing a screed and a half of lovely, flowing, lilting, web copy. Then we took out a scalpel and assassinated it. Cut it to the bone. Down to five word sentences that stabbed home the prime points.

Terse, telling, selling points. Telegraph-ese bullets. Each with its own dramatic poise.

Then we carefully counter-balanced the bullets with longer sentences designed to nurse the reader through compelling sales messages, masquerading as passages of reassurance. Works, doesn’t it?

Our sales record proves it; copywriting is like acting. You shouldn’t notice it, you should just believe. You shouldn’t be able to see the persuaders, you should just be persuaded.

Then we moved onto the proof of the pudding. We wrote case studies for Dynamic that eschewed the usual The Challenge/The Solution/The Result format and created fast, interesting slugs of proof – laced with performance facts. Proving to prospective clients that Dynamic could, indeed, deliver.

Of course, we wouldn’t do the same thing for you. We’d devise you a completely different stance, in order to achieve the results you want. Whatever your name.

Further project details and images are on our portfolio

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Copywriter’s blighters

Posted by Michelle Jones on January 24, 2012 No comments

They’re called ‘baselines’ because they sit underneath logos, or ‘strap lines’ because they tie all the other elements of communication together with a single thought. Whatever you call them, they are absolute blighters to write.

The summation of everything. In 5 words

Baselines must leave consumers with a single, over-riding thought when they wander out of your communication. They’re the manure that allows your communication to blossom. They must be memorable, apposite, incisive, umbrella ideas. They are a statement of intent. They represent the one single thought your company espouses, its appeal to consumers, its brand image. And you can’t use the word ‘care’. Everyone’s seen it 1000 times and no-one believes it anyway. As an example, here’s one we prepared earlier for a people’s health insurance company.

“Health-wise it pays”. It’s colloquial and memorable, yet it communicates the company’s line of business, the wisdom of being with them, the fact that it’s sensible to have some form of health cover, and the crucial proposition that the company will pay out. In 3 or 4 words. Took a couple of days to write, mind you.

Hire the dog, don’t bark yourself hoarse.

Of course, if you’re writing a website you’ll have to include SEO in your copy and that’s a completely new piece of nadgery; as Ketchup’s resident Search Marketing wizard – Simon Fisher – will gladly explain. But for the moment you’re finished. You’ve defined your proposition, devised a strategy, established a tone-of-voice, created a headline, written compelling copy and rounded off with an unforgettable baseline. Only one thing left to do – ask yourself if it wouldn’t have been a damn sight more cost effective to have called in Ketchup’s copy team before you began!

Coming soon… Copywriting for our clients

To avoid doing-it-yourself, call Michelle on 07747 604020 and ask her for a copy quote

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Copywriting. Let’s hope the camel knows the way

Posted by Michelle Jones on January 6, 2012 No comments

Now write your copy. Start by creating a copy skeleton with your product proof points arranged like vertebrae along the spine of your proposition story. Then add the flesh from your list of important selling points. What, you didn’t devise a copy platform of selling points? But that’s like setting off on a journey across Botswana without a route map. Let’s hope the camel knows where it’s going.

No-one was ever bored into buying a product.

Once underway, keep your body copy short and keep it interesting. You can seduce consumers, threaten them, bully them (sometimes), flatter them, bribe them, frighten or befriend them but you can’t bore them into buying your product. They won’t even bother reading it. Would you still be reading this if it was boring? Tell your story succinctly and strip out the stuff that’s only in there because you think it’s clever. You’re not here to show off; you’re here to convince your target audience to buy the product.

Keep a tight grasp on your commercial imperative, and have your reader fixed firmly in your mind’s eye. Choose someone you know, who is in your target audience, and write like you were talking to them. Then ask a teenager to read it. They can be brutally enlightening, can teenagers.

Above all, avoid doggerel and be original. Don’t use phrases you’ve read in other ads. Just because it looks like an advert and sounds like an advert doesn’t mean it’ll sell your product. It means your readers will yawn, think ‘same old crap’ and turn the page.

So that’s the easy part. The final part of the copywriting conundrum is writing baselines.

Coming soon… The tricky bit.

To avoid doing-it-yourself, call Michelle on 01476 588095 and ask her for a copy quote.

Copywriting, Marketing copycopywriting services, ketchup, Michelle Jones, Writing copy for the web

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Ketchup Bottle Race # part 2

Posted by Michelle Jones on November 10, 2011 No comments

You may have read our previous blog about our sponsorship of the local Rotary Club of Grantham, well looking at the images below it would seem that our saucy competition (a case of wine to be awarded for the most interesting photo of the bottle, taken in situ) has tantalised the taste buds. Below you will see images we have received so far .. please keep them coming

.. just add chips?

Ketchup with Accessories

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Ketchup in bottle race

Posted by Michelle Jones on November 7, 2011 No comments

Sometimes, running a busy marketing company with a wide variety of differently-sized, clients is like running blindfold through a zoo. You can’t envisage what sort of creature you’re going to bump into next!

Our sponsorship of the local Rotary Club of Grantham Kesteven springs to mind. The Rotarians had received a donation of 10 bottles of tomato sauce from Wilkins & Sons and challenged our graphic design and copywriting teams to come up with a way of using them to raise money for their ‘End Polio Now’ campaign.

Tomato sauce and Ketchup Marketing? Hmmm, obviously a natural fit in there somewhere.

We devised a bottle baton race, the sauce passing from person to person to create a…well…gravy train of £1 donations. With 10 bottles and 201 or more donors the race would raise over £2012 towards polio eradication by 2012.

The Rotarians were delighted and we set about a logo design, whilst our print design team and lead copywriter created a graphic but inexpensive advertising promotional leaflet to market the events to fellow Rotarians and prospective bottle baton participants.

We’re also sponsoring a saucy competition. A case of wine will be awarded for the most interesting photo of the bottle, taken in situ. So our web design team will be posting pictures on the blog as the bottle baton race continues.

Gives a whole new perspective to the idea of ketchup marketing!

Copywriting, Logo Design, Supporting good causes

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