Selling Hamburgers to the Chick-fil-A Cows

I love the descriptions used for great sales people: "That guy could sell snow to Eskimos."

"She could sell a PC to Steve Jobs."

"Billy Mays could sell ketchup popsicles to ladies in white gloves!"

You can hear a bit of respect and awe in these descriptions, but, let's face it, the statements describe salespeople conning their victims. How could a lady in white gloves really want or have any use for a ketchup popsicle?

Like any field, sales and marketing has its detractors.
Plenty of their criticism is warranted. Everyone hates telemarketers and spam. Too many companies look at customers as replaceable, see them only as groups of demographics to be sold to. They blare their marketing messages loudly and widely, trying to reach as big an audience as possible.

What's cool about the Internet is how it's shifting the power structure.

It's so easy now for customers to change their settings, unsubscribe, fast forward through TV ads. Blaring marketing messages is less and less effective. Companies are having to listen and be more creative about how they attract customers.

Successful marketers--especially in the B2B world--are the ones who are shifting from broadcasting what they want to say to finding out what their customers want to know.

All this prologue to get to my point:
I've officially changed my company name from Impact Copywriting to Hooked, with my new tagline, "Marketing Content that Captures Interest."

"Haven't you just gift-wrapped a perfectly serviceable term ['copywriting'] by calling it 'content writing'?" one colleague asked when I told him my plan. But copywriting is a different skill from content writing.

Copywriting, in the strict sense of the word, refers to creating copy for ads. It gets used for other sorts of writing too, but top copywriters make their money writing ads for TV, magazines and direct mail.

They are masters at persuading an audience to take an action, whether it's to buy something, call a company or visit a website.

And it's that persuasion in this new age of savvy Internet surfers that people begin to detect. It can feel like a little like manipulation and it turns them off. People like to buy things, but they really don't want to be sold to.

Content writing, on the other hand, is about businesses making it easier for customers to buy. It's about sharing information their customers find valuable, usually online.

It's the email newsletter I send out. It's a white paper that helps an architect decide if his firm really needs to investigate cloud computing. It's the website that's structured to address buyers' problems, not promote the company's products and services.

Content marketing helps companies transcend the practice of blaring messages people want to ignore. They can build relationships with their market by providing expertise on topics customers genuinely want to know more about.

It allows companies to position themselves not as vendors but as trusted advisers, to steal Ardath Albee's observation.

I'm really excited to be focusing my business in this area.

And I'm curious if people disagree that there's a difference between copywriting and content writing. Leave a comment!