When someone else messes up your perfectly-crafted work

In this post by Dianna Huff, she discusses the difficult situation marketers face when they have a boss rewriting their copy, often making it worse.

While I try not to press myself too closely into the inner workings of our clients' communications, I can usually tell when an ad was created by a boss or a committee of managers -- rather than by an intelligent copywriter who has an eye on results.

It's always wonderful to see the great performance a campaign that's well-crafted and "unfooled-around-with" (to steal the slogan of Simply Orange brand orange juice) can yield. But when someone in the process feels like they need to include "this is why our company is so great" wording, or they lose sight of the customer's desires and objectives, the results can be disastrous. I've seen click-through rates that have differed by a factor of 25 (yes, 25 times better!) when one well-written ad runs in the same medium as a poorly-written ad.

Aside from Dianna's suggestion of printing out that article and leaving it on your boss's chair, I'd simply recommend pushing back (delicately, of course). If you're dealing with a medium that's measurable, like most online ad campaigns, suggest some testing to see which ads perform best. Remind your boss to put themself in the prospective buyer's place (maybe using the personas you've developed). Sometimes it just takes a small nudge to make them remember the basics and snap out of their short-sightedness.

Developing personas for your web audience

Here's a link to a good video about developing personas for your web audience. How can you design a site, or add new features or content without knowing who you're targeting? Granted, personas are more art than science, and well-designed surveys and usability tests are other things you should be doing to learn more about your audience. But they can still be helpful.

Last summer, one of my colleagues and I put together a set of personas for the IndustryWeek.com audience. Unfortunately we didn't have the benefit of watching this video first, so it was a little more painful since we had never done it before and didn't know some of the helpful pointers covered here. But it was still a good exercise that helped our sales team (and even us) internalize some of the key attributes of our audience.