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We’ve all been “just a customer.” On the phone with your cable company (blahrg), at the post office, in a restaurant — whether indignant, blasé or robotic, that distinctly “just-a-customer” treatment from a seemingly inhuman human is universally frustrating.

So we set out make Lately’s customer service 100% world-class (even though the world doesn’t quite yet know about us :-)).

Sounds easy enough: treat customers like family — everyone knows that. 

But all relationships travel a two-way street. Meaning, “just a customer” isn’t only someone a business doesn’t know. It’s also someone who doesn’t know the people at that business. And it occurred to us that to truly be world-class, we’d need to get our customers to think of us as family, too. 

How do you get customers — a.k.a. people — to care about you? Be human.

Rule #1 – Talk and Write as We Actually Do

Emojis, contractions, idioms, hyperbole, exclamations and all manner of naturally human vernacular (including the occasional spelling errors!) is the Lately way… Formality has no place in our brand of human, “warts and all” is our motto and Emily Post is not our queen.

When we communicate genuinely, our customers do, too. Which means we learn more, faster and can help, better. 

Rule #2 – Share a Little Life

We have kids, wives, husbands, girlfriends, stepmoms, half-brothers, younger sisters, nephews, dachshunds and unwanted groundhogs. We also love rock n roll, making tie-dies, playing rugby, swimming with sharks (really!) and shooting traps.

We’re on a first name basis with every customer and do our damndest to get to know them. We’re personally connected with nearly every one of our customers on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter (including me). And we’re proud to say that many of them have become friends.

When we let our customers into our worlds, they reciprocate. Which helps us both gain a greater understanding of all the factors that may impact someone’s marketing workflow but also to gain the trust that we’ve got their back — because that’s what humans do.

Rule #3 – Own Up

Saying sorry is easy. Saying sorry and meaning it is harder. And when you’re a startup, you say sorry a lot (hi, customers reading this now who are nodding their heads). 

But sorry alone doesn’t cut it. Because our customers take a gamble with us. We’re new and they’re willing to try us out. We know this is a BIG deal. 

So when we make a mistake… man, oh man, you should see our Slack threads. It’s a team event, trying to figure out the best way to solve and apologize, let me tell you. 

Which is why it’s essential our customers know that we mean it. We must be upfront, honest and give thoughtful explanation. We must also express empathy. No scripts. Just a real, human apology. 

And we of course must make amends, whenever possible. 

And if the mistake isn’t ours? We still say sorry. Because we are. 

When we apologize, genuinely, our customers are more forgiving. And boy are we grateful. After all, we can only learn from mistakes if we’re allowed to make them. And that’s what being a startup is very much about.

So, thank you, wonderful customers, for letting us. 

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 :-).

How do you tell a good story?

Answer 1: “Come friends, gather round the campfire and listen to our wondrous tales, full of folklore, magic and high-jinks…”

Okay, that’s certainly one way.

But what about using your marketing dashboard to create connections between you and your audience…without relying on Phil Collins power ballads.

This way is muccccch easier.

It’s a marketers’ job to bridge the gap from data to person-you’re-trying-to-communicate-with. This could be your customer or your boss…or maybe your incredibly intelligent genius cat – whoever it is you’re trying to deliver a convincing message to.

Dashboard data helps you to tell persuasive stories, show trends and get creative by beefing everything up with stats and sparkling insight.

Look at how Lately can lend a hand.

Data + Storytelling

When you’re crafting messaging for an audience, being able to add poppin’ data visuals to your comms makes your claims smarter and backs them up.

All while looking fabulously slick.

Lately’s Omni-Analytics tool gives you 100% visibility across 100% of your channels. You can click through to specific data-points and get suuuuuper up close and personal with times, dates and trends.

The best part is all this data you generate gets sorted into awesomely clear and simple graphs and visualizations. You can add them into ebooks, blog posts, or reports to give your messaging some intellectual clout.

Stories help connect with an audience emotionally and data taps into their intellectual side. Combine them together and it’s a match made in heaven <3

Our Report Generator is great for converting your analytics into totally boss-friendly reports too. You can customize it and add or subtract bits you do or don’t need. It’s up to you.

This way, you can show what’s working, what’s not and why – helping you to build a narrative around your business moving in a particular direction or taking specific actions. The Consistency Scanner audits whether story/narrative features (keywords, messaging, design) are effective across all your channels too.

Remember, good analysis doesn’t have to be amazingly long or complex to show a particular story, especially when it’s to communicate something super timely and relevant. It just needs to make sense and add value.

Consistent Narrative

Keeping everyone in your team on track is vital when you’re launching a new marketing campaign. Making sure that members are sticking to the same stories and helping to create a consistent overall narrative arc means your campaign looks like it’s got it’s shiz sorted…

Even if you sometimes feel like you don’t know what day it us!

Using a Key Messaging Guide and Campaign Tags and Filters gives you a smart, simple way to monitor keywords, taglines, hashtags and check writing for consistency. You can tag campaigns too with names, colors and brief descriptions, so team members can dip in and out of campaigns to access handy details about narratives and stories you’re creating for different products and services.

When team members are working on separate bits of content, they can follow the same themes and trends to help inspire them and generate new ideas.

All your content can be stored in a Content Library, so you can quickly reference back and reuse content for certain campaigns and narratives.

Which helps when you need to create social posts to push your content. The Social Post Autogenerator can take any piece of evergreen content and instantly generate dozens of pre-hashtagged and pre-shortlinked social posts.

You can easily create engaging, consistent social content that your audience recognizes for its similar theme, voice and tone.

Try Lately

Lately makes content creation, rich in quality storytelling 12,197% more simple, so you can stop staring at a blank page, wishing you knew what the heck to write.

There’s a whollllle lot of marketing tech out there and it can easily push you into a deep dark hole of stack HELL.

Trying to juggle 1,219,801 (roughly) software packages all at once to help you gather more data, analyze more data and look like you know exactly what you’re doing. There are so so so many tech solutions on the market, but are they creating more solutions…or just more problems?

Spoiler alert: buddy, it’s problems.

You can’t dedicate enough time to all the things that make your business truly unique, if you’re toggling through loads of different marketing packages all at once.

What about a marketing dashboard that can do the job of tons of packages and:

• Reduce social media marketing costs by up to 60%
• Cut creation and posting time by 90%
• Boost traffic by an average of 5x
• Supercharge reach by up to 700x

Sounds pretty awesome, right? And helps you cut through the noise of endless stack hell chatter.

Layers, layers…and more layers

There’s always some voice ready to pop up and say ‘hey, well to solve that problem, you DEFINITELY need this thing’. There are some very persuasive tech arguments out there to convince you that your business will be wayyyy better off with a new sparkling marketing plaything.

What you’re really doing is just adding more layers and more complexity into your marketing strategy.

More layers mean that you’re just getting further away from your what makes your business great, your creativity, core messaging and ultimately, your fabulous customers.

Everything starts to get a little bit muddled.

And you’re not spending time on the stuff you’re good at. Instead, you’re juggling this weird, massive tech stack.

What to do?!

Aiming for a streamlined, simple structure gives you much more control and a better view of your marketing strategy.

Count your lucky stars cos Lately does just that!

Custom Dashboard made for you

Lately saves you the slog of gathering, organizing and building a custom Marketing Dashboard made up of random software packages and automatically creates one for you.

You’ll be ready to kick some butt with core marketing tools that turn you into a swash-buckingly awesome command-center for your business or project.

Start showing off your marketing prowess and spending more time on the main elements of your business, cos you’ll be getting hours and hours of work done in less than 60 seconds.

Plenty of time to take your marketing up a notch or 5 AND look way smarter…than you do already of course 😉

Maximum Visibility

Why get a bunch of tools when you only need one?

Here’s why:

Gain 100% visibility across 100% of your channels when you unify multi-channel analytics into single, whole-picture graphs that let you click-through data points, see what caused each spike and connect workflow to results.

Nail your social media marketing by automatically generating your social posts. In an instant, you can repurpose blogs, press releases, newsletters etc by parsing them into dozens of pre-hashtagged and pre-shortlinked social posts.

Get mega consistent and coordinate content, events, calendars and tasks. Align your planning, project management and publishing schedules so nothing falls through the cracks and your whole team knows the score.

Keep your marketing resources in check by collating your entire campaign, including content, tasks, files, links, team member activity, calendar entries, graphics, associated contacts, design elements and more, into a single report.

Try Lately

Lately is a super speedy, streamlined and simple way to get loads of jobs done from one dashboard, instead of 20. It lets you take back control of your marketing and your time too!

You: *staring at graphs, nodding and stroking chin*

Real you: “What the heck do these metrics mean?!”

A familiar scenario, am I right?

Sometimes, the amount of metrics you have to keep an eye on feels like you’re staring at the controls of the Millennium Falcon.

When you’re trying to get a handle on social media management, can’t it all be a teeny bit easier?

With Lately, our Omni-Analytics tool means you don’t have to flip between software packages or natively check social/web channels to see what’s goin’ down and how your content’s performing.

You’ll see a single, whole-picture view, so you can quickly AND easily toggle between metrics, campaigns and channels to track social success.

Maximum visibility, baby!

Metrics, eh?

When you enter Omni-Analytics, your life will change foreverrrr…well, that and you can pull in all your social performance stats and web data about every post you publish. And you can filter it all by campaign and channel.

Everything in one place! Streamlined, in-depth knowledge at your fingertips, boom. Feeling powerful?

For starters, to toggle through your data, we group together your social impressions with your website pageviews as one metric view.

So, what are Impressions?

This is how many times your content is displayed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s seen your content, but they’ve had the chance to, as it was sent to their feed.

Impressions can be made up by people having content on their feed on different devices too or seeing a friend share the same content, so one person can cause several impressions. This is the same with website pageviews too, it can be one person visiting a lotttt.

Reach is different – this tells you how many people have actually seen your sparkling content with their bare eyes. Generating better reach means that you’re creating more awareness. Impressions will often be a lot bigger than reach.

Reach and impressions get your content in front of people, with a view to getting them to take, as our good friend Elvis would say, a lil more action.

And Engagement and Session Views?

Omni-analytics gives you real-time data on how customers interact with your social posts aka engagement stats. Session view is how long a user active on a webpage.

Is your audience engaging with your content and how do you know? Posting content is your business’ way to start a conversation and deliver something like a super useful blog post.

Each social channel has its own ways to measure engagement, so you’ve gotta dig deep and compare. Luckily, we make it so simple with omni-analytics to quickly notice patterns and click-through to data-points.

You can toggle through to a specific social channel and see how your content’s getting on.

For example – on Twitter, you can track engagement responses by looking at big factors such as likes, @mentions and retweets or use a branded hashtag and see how branded keywords performed. You can see which keywords are performing well across your content and Lately can suggest which ones to use. This can lead to co-marketing with influencers and user-generated content campaigns.

Here are a few differences between engagement metrics on big social channels:

• Twitter: Direct Messages, Likes, Retweets, Mentions, Organic Impressions, Links Clicked, Replies
• LinkedIn: Impressions, Clicks, Likes, Comments and Shares
• Facebook: Organic Likes, Paid Likes, Mentions, Impressions, Post Engagements, Links Clicked, Reactions, Comments and Shares
• Instagram: Likes, Comments, Direct Messages, Reactions to stories, Engagement per Media and Most Engaged Hashtags

Which social posts are causing spikes and why? Does certain content do much better on some channels than others – you can click through and jump into the native post and see specific engagement stats, which cuts down loads of time that you’d be spending endlessly shifting through software and channels.

Pick on individual data points and hone in on precise sources, which will give you data for individual social channels, instead of all of them.

You can also see which content is doing best and some of the engagement characteristics trends, is it text based links doing well? Attachment and text? Text and Link? And you can take a look at Day of Week and Time of Day performance to garner more insight too.

One of the coolest parts is that you can export any part of your analytics too, to share your marketing magic and wisdom with important playasss in your team.

Try Omni-analytics

Instantly see all of your analytics across all of your social media channels and your website in an awesome single, whole-picture view. Click through any data point to see the content published that day and analytic detail to go with it to help you succeed with your marketing goals.