Copywriting Skills – How To Promote Business Writing with Paid Promotions

Blogger in Residence, Aidan Bennett, provides advice on using social media to promote a piece of writing for a client.

In my last blog post I described how to manage your client’s expectations, how to make sure they don’t get out of hand and start expecting the world when they’ve only given you little to work with. In this post, I’m going to describe how to save your backside in the short term, when your clients expectations have gotten out of hand past the point of no return, how you can jump slightly ahead of your client and how to do a quick fix.

When you’ve have mismanaged a client, when you’re overleveraged with a client, or when what you’ve delivered or are going to deliver is less than, you first have to have to realise a few hard facts, the main one being your client will not rehire you or endorse you. In realising that your relationship with a client maybe coming to an abrupt end, you need to work out your exit strategy. Depending on the circumstances, the most honourable thing to do is to admit defeat, to speak to your client in frank terms and salvage what you can. Speaking to your client in an honest way, one on one, is the best thing to do, usually the only way to salvage any damage they can do to your reputation, the issue comes when the client is unreasonable. Many copywriters, particularly sole traders, would be hard-pressed to wear a bad debt from a client or to simply write of their billable hours, especially after a certain tipping point.

So, if you’re past the point of no return, left holding a bad product or service in one hand and hope in the other, you need to work out how to rescue what you can. The cost of pursuing a client for a bad debt is again usually prohibitive for many copywriters, particularly sole traders, so what can you do? There are a few tricks you can use through utilise social media, these will help you to gain some traction for your client, depending on the quality of the materials you’ve developed for them.

The first and foremost trick is paid promotions over social media. These are a relatively inexpensive means of gaining views and impressions for your client’s business or company and their products and services—the catch is that you must have the client’s consent. Paid promotions usually only work for smaller clients, those without their own marketing teams, or those who haven’t engaged marketing professionals. Clients who’ve engaged marketing professionals will often have their marketing and media plans and paid promotions may not figure in these plans.

Using paid promotions over most social media outlets will mainly result in the following: views or impressions, people being exposed to the promotion; likes, people showing their appreciation of the promotion; comments, people leaving comments in the comments field of the promotion post and click-throughs or people moving from the promotion to the actual page on which your work and the client’s content is hosted. The numbers a promotion is likely to receive for each progression through the above decreases at each increment, meaning more people will see the advert than will ‘like’ it and so on.

Paid promotions, while exposing and attracting some people to your client’s business or company and products and services, will not result in a particularly large amount of business for your client, if your copy materials aren’t up to scratch. Paid promotions, when you’re dealing with the not the best of circumstances, can help to put a positive spin on things for your client and give you some breathing space.

While paid promotions may result in some business for your client, considering circumstances, if their expectations are already out of control, they will only serve to tide them over. Hopefully the paid promotions will tide them over long enough for you to have made arrangements to exit your relationship with them on somewhat favourable terms.