Jason Debacco

Chances are, the answer is HECK YES.

In fact some experts say that bad writing costs businesses nearly $400 billion each year.

Why? Let’s do a quick run-through of the skills you need to run a successful business – project management, financial know-how, sales, marketing… You know, stuff folks get degrees in.

But writing? That’s something everybody can do, right? It’s one of those ‘soft’ skills people talk about. I mean… English majors? What a joke!

Erm, except that this joke’s on you :-).

Because good writing is faaaaaaaar from easy. But it’s also the one skill that every single employee needs to do well – not only to do his or her job well, but so that others can do theirs well, too.

It’s all about communication. And these days, communication mostly happens in the form of good ole writing (texting included).

Which means that whether you’re communicating internally to colleagues or externally to customers, being understood and getting people to do what you want them to do, is critical.

Then why are so many people so bad at writing?

The good news: you’re NOT alone. Companies spend more than $3.1 billion each year on remedial writing training for employees. Obviously, that’s also the very bad news.

Because that’s just the basics. Forget the crafty, purpose-driven, high-quality writing required for marketing and sales teams to be even remotely effective.

Whether it’s basic writing or advanced, overwhelmingly, folks just plain HATE doing it.

Partly because we’re all a wee bit lazy. Writing takes time. It takes work. You have to practice at it.

But also, writing is hard. English language grammar rules are exceedingly unclear, with so many exceptions that one wonders why there are any rules at all. And as technology has morphed the way we communicate and the way we write, the rules have evolved in practice but in a way that no one actually teaches.

Then there are emojis. Love them, admittedly. But let’s be frank… Thanks to emojis, the majority of our communications have been reduced to a one tap, pictorial “grunt,” which often boils down to:

1. patronizing dismissal (thumbs-up = no thoughtful response required),
2. disingenuous expression of affection (c’mon, who doesn’t “heart” everything?) or
3. over exaggerated reaction (really, are you really crying with laughter?).

3 Ways to Improve Your Writing Right Now

1. Do Unto Others

For gosh sakes, have a little compassion. Remember that the person on the other end of that email or Slack thread is busy, like you. They don’t want to spend a long time reading and trying to figure out what you’re really saying.

Take, for example, meeting scheduling convos with team members in other time zones… Do them a favor:

WRITE THE TIME IN BOTH THEIR ZONE AND YOURS.

Save them the confusion of calculating (c’mon, we’re all crap at math, too). Even better, preempt their response and prevent additional back-and-forth. Chances are, they’ll accept. Like so:

Hey Jim! Would 12 PM Eastern/9 AM Pacific work for you? I’m sending along a calendar invite now. If that doesn’t work, let me know what does and thanks!

2. Don’t Bury the Lede

In school, we a were all taught to warm folks up with a long preamble, setting the stage for what would come next.

STOP THAT.

Because the more time peeps have to spend reading, the less time they’re spending doing work.

Get to the point faster by merciless editing. Start by writing as you normally would. Then, go back, read everything you just wrote and identify the extraneous. Hack the fluff. Get ruthless! You can do it.

#ProTip: Look for passive voice and rejigger to active, i.e., “The bone of the dog” becomes “the dog’s bone.”

See?

3. Write with Your Eyeballs

The same way we eat with our eyes, we read with our eyes; it’s a visual experience. Which means how what you write looks, matters.

Think spacing. Think, bold, italics, all caps. Think numbers, exclamation marks, question marks, percent signs, semicolons, colons, en and em dashes, parenthesis, ellipses – and yes, even emojis. Anything that stands out from the norm, that breaks up the text… that shizzle is your friend!

Make smart use of this tool kit. Because how you arrange your words can make what you’re trying to communicate more, erm, digestible.

For example, see all of the above :-).

Most importantly, loose the jargon. Acronyms, cliches, biz blab… BLEH. That stuff is a communication killer. Your readers will thank you.

Are you a marketing army of one? Just a wee bit short on “army”?

Chances are, you’ve got a thousand things to do (due yesterday) and admittedly, social media marketing – which you know is super important – is, at best, an afterthought.

Besides, where to even start? I mean, creativity is for people that have serious time on their hands. Not to mention imagination, cleverness, originality and enviable wordsmithing-skills.

Let’s be honest, writing just isn’t your thing. (Truth be told, you hate it.)

But don’t worry. You are NOT alone.

Did you know that, on average, it takes a marketer 12 minutes to write a single social post from scratch? 12 minutes!

Ever watch water boil? Writing a social post takes longer.

How Marketers Write Social Posts Now

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar…

1. Stare at blank screen
2. Get coffee
3. Stare at blank screen
4. Read other people’s posts for ideas
5. Stare at blank screen
6. Scarf leftover Easter chocolate
7. For gosh sakes, write something already
8. Stare out window
9. Type half-assed sentence that probably starts “check out…” [see Marketing’s #1 cardinal sin]
10. Publish single half-assed post as though flushing a toilet (good riddance)
11. Repeat

A Slightly Better Way

What if you could use longform content, like blogs or newsletters, as a starting point? Scroll through each sentence, find the most compelling quotes, add a shortlink on the end of each one and maybe a couple hashtags and… BOOM.

You would have a whole lot of sweet social posts that you didn’t have to pull out of your, ehem, arsenal.

You could even manually schedule them to publish once or twice a week out over a long period of time – so they felt organic and continued to drive traffic back to the original link. Talk about a great way to repurpose all that longform content!

But that would be soooooooo 2018.

A WAY Better Way: Small Businesses, Meet AI, Your New Best Friend

These days, Artificial Intelligence can write dozens of amazing social posts for you. Social posts that are smart, compelling or even a jumping off point for inspiration. Social posts that give you confidence and that take away the pressure of trying to think of what to say. Social posts that are even in sync with company keyword guidelines, so that your messaging can stay consistent. Because that’s how the big dogs do it!

In other words: Bye-bye, fear of the blank screen.

Hello, life-changing technology!

And we mean life-changing. As in, “designed to help you market your small business like a mega-brand – without breaking the bank, losing your mind or barely lifting a finger” kind of life-changing.

AI can even automatically schedule all of those amazing social posts in bulk, spread out once or twice a week over a long period of time and automatically include short links, hashtags and tags.

A.k.a., technology that turns underdogs into big dogs. Growwwwwwl.

How Marketers Write Social Posts with AI

1. Copy and paste a link to a blog in Lately’s Social Post Autogenerator (BTW, we also do videos and podcasts!)
2. Click “Autogenerate”
3. Save the ones you like, edit a few as needed, trash the ones you don’t like
4. Click a publishing frequency (i.e. “once every two weeks”)
5. Click start date
6. Click bulk-publish
7. Repeat

Average total time spent for dozens of social post: less than two minutes.

Life. Changed.

You Do the Human Part. We Do the Hard Part.

Remember: the root of all marketing is emotion. If you don’t have emotion, it might as well be math (sorry, math people). And emotion is inherently human. Which means you should never take the human out of marketing. It just won’t work.

That’s why Lately’s AI always starts with 100% human-created content. Then, we use a series of keyword analysis-based algorithms to identify the most compelling components of that original, 100% human-created content.

Generally, 60% to 80% of the artificial intelligently autogenerated social posts are ready to go. (Hard part, check!) Although, some might need a slight (you guessed it) human touch – but a quick edit is all it takes, as it’s always easier to edit than to create from scratch. (Hard part, double check!)

Marketing = saved. Sanity = saved. (Hard parts for small business owners, especially, check and check!)

“Before Lately, social media was a weak point for me to do super consistently – because I didn’t have the time and didn’t want to sound dumb or boring. Now I have confidence because Lately takes the pressure off and makes me sound smart!”

– Alicia Jimenez

Set It and Forget It with Lately’s Artificial Intelligence

You can even have longform content automatically curated for you, then automatically run through Lately’s Social Post Autogenerator which will then automatically queue up months’ and months’ worth of social media posts for you. Did we mention this all gets done automatically?

Imagine… Months of work done in under an hour.

In other words, your army of one just got a WHOLE lot bigger.

“Lately’s single tool takes the place of an entire social media company so that a solo entrepreneur can do all that work without any need to hire outside help.”

– David Allison

National Small Business Month

And the best part? Underdog pricing.

To celebrate National Small Business Week/Month, we’ve made it so that small business owners can get in on the same awesomeness that the big dogs have access to – but at a small business-friendly price.

Learn more about Lately’s Small Business Week pricing here.

AI for everyone!

Now that’s something to howl at :-).