Assure, Ensure & Insure – What’s on Second in Your Marketing?

Screenshot of Abbott & Costello, "Who's on First," YouTube

 

Assure, ensure and insure are some of my favorite tricky words. When I see them in marketing materials, they remind me of the hilarious Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” routine.

  • “To assure against natural disaster…” – Who?
  • “We ensure you that we know what we’re doing with…” – What?
  • “We insure exceptional quality in all our products and…” – I don’t know?

You don’t insure your boss you’ve given her accurate information. Granted, there are days when some of us think (or dream) we’d benefit from our boss’s death; unfortunately, you can’t purchase an insurance policy to guard against her untimely demise.

The word is assure – “I assure you, boss woman, this information is accurate.”

  • Assure means to provide some level of confidence.
  • Ensure means to make certain. 
  • Insure means to protect against loss.

You insure your car and house, ensure the bills are paid on time, and assure your clients your creative ideas will cut through communication clutter and be effective.

When I see advertising, marketing or public relations that wants to insure me I’ll get the best service, assure the best raw materials go into a company’s products or ensure clients against unforeseen circumstances, I smack palm to forehead, feeling sorry for the poor copywriter who doesn’t understand the difference between the words.

Forget who’s on first in your online and offline marketing materials and your organization will look just as laughable as the great comedic duo.

* Click the image above to watch “Who’s on First” in its entirety on YouTube.

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Tip Tuesday – In Copywriting, “Up” Gets the Thumbs Down

Old-style ink pen writing "Tip Tuesday" on paper

Elevate your copywriting – down with “up.”

 

All due respect to Mick and the rest of The Stones, but I do not want you to start me up. More specifically, I don’t want to see the phrase “start up” in any advertising, marketing or PR materials. In Mick’s words, it’s enough to “…make a grown man cry.” (Well, this one, anyway.)

For some reason, we Midwesterners love to add “up” to “start whenever we can:

  • I wandered over to start up a conversation.  /  I wandered over to start a conversation.
  • We started up deliveries in the southern part of the city about a month ago.  /  We started deliveries in the southern part of the city about a month ago.
  • There’s a dude in a mask with a chainsaw coming! Start up your car and let’s get aych-e-double-toothpicks outta here!  /  There’s a dude in a mask with a chainsaw coming! Start your car, and let’s get aych-e-double-toothpicks outta here!

In each case, dropping the “up” makes the sentence shorter. (We’ll tackle the overuse of exclamation points in another Tuesday Tip, mmmmmmm-k?) The only time “start” and “up” should show up as a pair is when they form a compound adjective – “It’s a start-up venture.” And, let’s face it, the only place it has to go is up.

There’s no downside to dropping “up” from your advertising, marketing and public relations copywriting. I’d lose that if I were you.

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Why, How and Other Questions About Writing a Press Release

 

One of the most basic tools of marketing is the press release. With a well-thought-out, well-written release that’s thoughtfully distributed, you can gain extra exposure for your company, product or service.

So how do you do it?


First Thing’s First

This post assumes that, before you even start thinking about a headline or lede (we’ll get to that in a minute), you’ve done all your research, gathered all the pertinent information and interviewed the right people.


Why?

The most important questions for a press release, just like a news story, are Who?, What?, Where? When?, Why? and How? We’ll also get to those in a minute, too.

Right now, I want to focus on a different Why? –

Why write a press release at all?

There are lots of answers to that, beginning with the obvious one, to get more sales. It’s true that a well-written and well-placed press release can garner extra exposure for your brand, your products and your services. It can also be a step in a longer process that ultimately leads to more sales.

But here’s an even better answer: do it right, and aside from a relatively modest investment in time and/or money, the exposure for your brand, your products and your services will be FREE.

Unless I’m sorely mistaken, that’ll sound pretty doggone good to every business owner and marketing manager on the planet. And it’ll sound like angels from heaven if your business has limited funds for marketing.


Reasons for Press Releases

I’ve written all kinds of press releases during my career. Here are just a few types:

  • New company / organization
  • New facility / location
  • New president / CEO / manager / employee
  • New product/  service
    Improved product / service
  • New money- or time-saving process
  • Annual report release / annual meeting announcement
  • Official statements
  • New company / organization name
  • Event
  • Endorsement

The most important thing about any of these types of releases is what’s called the “news hook.” This is the result of one or more of the answers to the previously mentioned Who?, What?, Where? When?, Why? and How?

Which brings us to what’s called the lede. (That’s journalistic jargon for lead, or first, paragraph. By the way, never use industry jargon in a press release.)


The 5 W’s and the H

My background is in journalism, and I’ve found it’s useful, not to mention effective, to craft press releases in the same way I would a news story.

Now, finally, about the Who?, What?, Where? When?, Why? and How? and the answers that will establish newsworthiness.

  • Who – Who is the newsmaker? Who did something worth reading about (think person or company) or to whom did the news happen (think earthquake or wildfire)?
  • What – What did that person or company do that’s worth knowing?
  • Where – Where did it happen?
  • When – When did it happen?
  • Why – Why did the person or company take this action?
  • How – How’d they do it?

You don’t necessarily have to include all of the 5 W’s and the H in your lede all the time. In fact, including them all in your lede will make for a mighty long paragraph. For example, sometimes where something happened isn’t crucial to a reader’s understanding of the story, i.e., the message you want to convey. If that’s the case, leave it out. Same goes for any of the other 5 W’s and H.


Other Newsworthiness Cues

There are other criteria, but in my experience they almost always come right back to one of the 5 W’s or the H.

Search the Web for “newsworthiness” and thousands of entries come up. The answer in a blog post from the State University of New York, Nassau Community College is as good as any. Here are some of its criteria, paraphrased for our purposes:

  • Impact – How many people are affected, and to what extent?
  • Proximity – Is it happening close to the audience, either geographically, demographically or in terms of industry sector?
  • Timeliness – Old news stinks like the proverbial fish wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. If your press release isn’t relevant right now, don’t waste your time writing it.
  • Prominence – People like to know what the big names in their industries are up to, whether the big names belong to people or companies.
  • Novelty – “Firsts,” “lasts” and “onlys” are news. New products, services, and in public relations, new BENEFITS, are all newsworthy.
  • Audience – Which of your target markets are you trying to reach?. If it’s not going to be news to them, don’t bother.

With those answers in mind, you’re ready to tackle the all-important paragraph.


The Lede

This is where you either hook or lose your two most important audiences:

  • Gatekeepers – Editors, news directors, bloggers and anyone else who will decide whether they’re going to run your release, or some edited version of it, in their publications or on their sites.
  • Target Market Members – The people you actually want to reach with your message – customers, prospective customers, investors and other stakeholders.

Think about it. With all the messages each of us is bombarded with every day, hour, minute and, with our mobile devices, every single second, you’d better make the first sentence or two pretty doggone compelling or you’ll lose the reader you so dearly want to influenece.

You need to grab attention, and that’s the job of a good lede. Keep it clear, concise and interesting – creativity can come in here, too – and make sure you give them the most important information first. That might be all they read.

Which brings us to release structure….


Upside Down is Rightside Up

You want people who read your release to take something away from it, preferably that’s going to help you form a stronger relationship with them. It needs to convey that your product, service, company or organization is better, easier to use, less costly, more deserving of their support and so on.

They have very little time; when they see your release in their favorite trade pub or online, they might read the headline and the first sentence or two.

If those are good, really good, they might read on. If they’re not, they probably won’t.

Given that, it’s critical that you start with the most important information first, in your lede. Continue with important, but not key, information in the body, along with supporting or clarifying information. Save your brand / company description or overview (known as “company boilerplate”) for the end.

Coincidentally, this is exactly what your first audience – the gatekeepers – want. They’ve been trained to write, edit and judge the quality of news stories in exactly the same way.

It’s called the inverted pyramid –

Fredricks Communications inverted pyramid for press release post

 

The Workhorse of Your Release

What doesn’t show up in the inverted pyramid is the headline.

Send a release with a bad headline, and the gatekeepers are going to toss it in the round file.

To get them to read on – to sneak one past the goalie – make sure you dedicate enough time to writing a good headline.

In my experience, the best headlines are straight-forward, factual and clear. There’s always room for creativity, but don’t get too fancy. If there’s ever a question in your mind, stick with the facts.

I usually wait to write the headline until the very end of the process. By that time, I have a really good feel for what’s in the release and how it flows, so I’m more apt to come up with a better headline. It might be different for you, with the headline you develop setting the stage for writing the press release.

Do whatever works to get you where you want to go – an attention-grabbing headline.

And don’t sweat it if a gatekeeper changes it. This happens all the time. What’s most important is your release makes it into print or online.


The Goalies

Editors, news directors and bloggers deserve a few more words.

As the gatekeepers to their audiences, they take their responsibilities very seriously.

If they don’t like your release, for whatever reason, they won’t run it and you won’t get to the audience you really want to reach – your customers, potential customers and other stakeholders. If you haven’t demonstrated newsworthiness for their audiences, your lede is buried in the fourth paragraph, you haven’t followed their preferred style and it’ll take too much time to fix it, you’re trying to get more news about something they’ve already written about before, hello circular file.

Aside from a good headline and a great lede, you can get closer to their good sides by making it easy to find key information:

  • Company logo and your contact information at the top.
  • A dateline. This is a line at the top of your release, usually right in front of the first sentence, that includes the place and date the release was written and allows the gatekeeper to find that information immediately.
  • A release instruction, i.e. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE or FOR RELEASE NOV. 3, 2018.
  • Proper grammar and make sure you’ve spelled everything correctly.
  • Proper style, such as Chicago or Associated Press. (The vast majority of publications and editors I’ve run into over the years have followed AP.)
  • Information flow. Make sure each paragraph is connected to the previous one with transition statements, that all the paragraphs related to one point, product aspect or service benefit are grouped together, and that it’s easy to read and understand.

These examples of releases Fredricks Communications has done for clients should give you an idea of what I’m talking about:


Who Again?

Let’s focus on a different Who? for a second, as in Who is going to write this press release?

Truth is, writing press releases isn’t difficult. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can get it done.

The real question is how good, and how effective, do you want your release to be?

If you want to sneak your release past the gatekeepers into the hands and heads of your target markets, and ensure the information sticks once it’s there, I recommend working with a professional PR writer.

If you decide to write your press release yourself and run into a snag, give me a shout.

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Tip Tuesday – You Might Be Fortunate to Read This Communication Tip on Writing…

Old-style ink pen writing "Tip Tuesday" on paper

But it is not fortuitous.

 

When writing copy, be careful with the words fortuitous and fortunate.

Fortuitous events happen by chance, randomly. While they need not be fortunate events, they often are, e.g., “It was purely fortuitous that the meter reader came along less than a minute after I returned to my car.”

Although fortunate events may be fortuitous, they might not be, e.g., “I was fortunate to return to my car just before the meter reader came around on his top-of-the-hour pass.”

When you mean random and unlucky, write random or one of its synonyms – accidental, haphazard, arbitrary, unplanned, unintentional. When you mean random and lucky, write fortuitous. When you mean lucky, write fortunate. Better yet, just use plain ol’ lucky to be sure everyone knows what you mean.

 

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Adapted from “Common Errors in English Usage,” by Paul Brians.

Picture of yellow lab lying down

A Down-n-Dirty Tagline Scoop

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I recently saw this tagline on the side of a truck from a local animal waste handling company –

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Got Poop? We’ll Scoop.

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Not bad, necessarily, but I’d have gone with this –

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We’ll Take Your Pet’s Business

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To be fair, there’s a lot related to company, culture, objects, products, services and people that goes into a tagline – references, inferences and meanings that don’t immediately meet the eye but stick with viewers, even if they don’t know it – so it’s nearly impossible to grasp everything on first glance.

Check out some of the taglines FredComm has developed for clients and the loose criteria I followed in creating them.

If you’d like to hear more about any of them, please feel free to drop me a line.

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When a Fake Google Rating/Review Shows Up…

Google Rating Screenshot

 

Fredricks Communications received a fake Google rating last week from someone named Blaine Houston. Mr. Houston gave FredComm two stars out of five with no accompanying comment. Only problem is, I’ve never met, let alone provided advertising, marketing or PR services to, anyone named Blaine Houston.

Before I get to my response to Mr. Houston, let me just say this is frustrating stuff. You work your backside off, try to provide the best possible customer service, eat, sleep and breathe quality work, and something like this happens. Well, as the old saying goes, it happens. Sadly, that is a fact of business these days.

If it happens to you, here’s an informative blog post about how to get rid of one – How to Remove Fake Google Reviews.

As for that response –

 

Dear Mr. Houston:

Thank you for taking the time to let Fredricks Communications know you are less than happy with… something… at some business… in Fargo, N.D.

Since we’ve never met, and Fredricks Communications has never served or done business with you, I’m left to assume something went wrong when you were attempting to rate another business – a slip of the thumb, perhaps? – and your two-star review mistakenly was connected with my business, instead.

I notice you’ve left less-than-positive reviews for 47 businesses in the Fargo, N.D. area. Perhaps the review you gave my company was meant for one of those?

Regardless, I share your frustration with having a poor experience with a business. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to mistakenly give a different company a poor rating that could impact it negatively and make it look bad in the eyes of its customers and prospective customers. And, finally, I now know firsthand, and all too well, how frustrating it is to get a poor rating that my business did not deserve or earn.

If we ever meet, I’ll be happy to tell you about my company and offer you a wide range of services related to communication, messaging strategy, advertising, marketing and public relations.

Again, thank you for your time. Fredricks Communications wishes you all the best.

Sincerely,

Martin C. Fredricks
President

 

Make sure you always respond to Google ratings or reviews, or reviews of your business on any other platform, whether they’re fake or genuine, good, bad or indifferent. If it’s a bad review, your response needs to include what you’re going to do to make the bad experience better, if possible, or to make sure it never happens again. Maybe offer the reviewer some sort of incentive to return.

Bottom line, always show people you care and you’re paying attention, whether you’re business is an advertising agency, a steakhouse or a cleaning service.

 

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