Do you have new products or services to introduce this coming year? How do you plan to advertise them to potential customers? This may be the perfect time to find a freelance writer to help you—a copywriter, technical writer, and/or blogger, depending on your product type and method of introduction.
Hiring a Copywriter
Let’s say you are a saddle maker who has watched young children clambering onto the backs of big dogs during play. One day you think of the small saddles made for miniature horses and wonder if you could make one for dogs. You experiment and it works. The dogs are ok with it and your kids love it, so you decide to advertise.
This is a general product for an audience bigger than horse riders. You would choose a copywriter who knows horses and dogs to help you write attractive, exciting copy for a brochure or newsletter, including instructions for recognizing and/or training a dog to accept the saddle. You would send the copy to traditional customers the way you normally do, and also to dog lovers. You would use that same writer or a blogger to introduce the product, including its link, to dog lovers on discussion boards. (The style of writing on discussion boards is much like blogging.) And you would use that writer to write a description of the dog saddle for your website, Amazon.com, and other sales sites on which you advertise.
Hiring a Technical Writer
Let’s say you make computer shells to house motherboards. You’ve long noticed that old computers are not recyclable, primarily because the housing is made with hard plastic. So you’ve experimented with using bioplastics (made from corn and potato starch) that dissolve in a landfill, and are now ready to introduce your bioplastic computer shell to computer manufacturers.
This is a technical product for a technical audience. With this and other such products, you would hire a technical writer to explain the contents and advantages of using a bioplastic cover. You would show your writer the traditional ways in which computer shells are advertised, then give them the specification sheet on your new product (or have them write one) and let them write articles for trade magazines and your website, and wording for a technical brochure to hand out at trade shows.
Hiring a Blogger
Some new products aren’t necessarily innovative, but they are newsworthy. New books, games, works of art, CDs, and videos are good examples. If you are a busy publisher whose marketing arm is swamped with work and has no time to write promotional text, you could hire a blogger to advertise your new book release. You would provide the blogger with whatever text the author has given you, and the blogger would rewrite it several times in conversational form to post on your website blog, your Facebook account, and relevant discussion boards.
If you can’t place your product in one of these three categories, look at your customers and see what “language” reaches them best.
Susette H is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
