Jenn Marie: Brand Copywriting & UX – Episode 36

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Jenn Marie helps small businesses share their authentic selves online. She focuses on personality-driven content marketing that helps her clients start conversations with their customers and prospects.

Jenn and I talked about:

• how her diverse business background prepared her for internet marketing work
• how her work in experiential marketing informs her branding expertise
• the confluence she observed about 10 years ago of experiential marketing and influencer marketing
• her first online marketing customer, Idaho Beef, a cowboy/firefighter/fence installer whose well-established personality she moved it to the internet
• how that work led to her work with less-well-branded clients
• how she helps folks understand what their brand is – “It’s what you do, not who you are.”
• how she sees the relationship between content strategy and branding strategy
• her focus on content marketing, which she has to explain to clients to differentiate it from SEO, paid ads, etc.
• her answer when clients see her plan and say,”I can’t write that much.” – “I can.”
• how she moved from writing 3,000 to 4,000 words per day herself to employing, editing, and managing a team of six content writers with varying skills (experts in blog writing, copywriting, clickbait, translation, etc.)
• how branding and user experience/UX work together
• how her journalism background helps her stay focused on answering customer questions, instead of marketing-oriented concerns
• her approach to conversational content: “Don’t sell. Just talk to the consumer.”
• her take on purposeful content: “Every piece of writing has a point.”
• the shift in conventional internet writing style from generic “blah blah blah” writing 15 years ago to the current focus on emotionally powerful content that inspires action
• how the Amazon Marketplace style guide helps content creators master web/UX writing
• the origin story of her branded business name, Jenn Marie

Jenn’s Bio

Jenn is the founder of Jenn Marie Writing & Marketing, a boutique content marketing provider that crafts branded content for solopreneurs and online businesses. Her background is a mixture of print journalism, experiential marketing, and e-commerce. In addition to 18 years as a freelancer, Jenn has also worked in sales supportive roles for Dell, Microsoft, and Amazon. She loves helping individuals find their voice through words and is currently working on a Patreon-funded passion project where she tells the stories of underserved communities through eBooks.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. This is episode number 36 of the show that used to be called the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I’ll do a separate post on the rebranding. But, branding is kind of an appropriate thing to talk about because today I have with us an expert in branding. Jenn Marie is kind of a typical content strategist, in the sense that she has a really diverse background. She’s been a model and spokesperson, she’s been a freelance journalist, she’s done technical support work as well as technical sales and pre-sales and she’s written poetry. So, she’s a word nerd, a word person like all of us, with a lot of diverse business experience. I’m gonna let Jenn tell you a little bit more about herself.

Jenn:
Hello everyone. So, thanks for the wonderful introduction. Wow, I don’t know where to start. As you said, I do have a bit of a diverse background and my explanation for it generally is I did whatever I needed to make money. I’ve always been the type of person that I do things that I enjoy. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to have multiple jobs that I’ve enjoyed.

Jenn:
So yeah, I started off … my first job was … what was my first job? I think my first job was telemarketing. So I was on the phones, trying to get people to make donations. From there, I started working in tech. I was selling computers for Dell and I never really intended to go into sales. That was kind of an interesting thing. It just looked like a cool job. It was through a staffing agency and the lady goes, “Have you done sales before?” And I said “No.” She goes “Well, sell me this pen.” I’m like “What pen?” She’s like “The pen right on my desk.” So, I had to come up with a pitch right there, on the spot and apparently it was good enough because I ended up selling computers after that.

Jenn:
I’m not really the most aggressive sales person, so what ended up happening is I got back into customer service and the next job after that was Microsoft and then Amazon and the cool thing about Dell was that it was their direct stores. If you think about Dell, mostly they sold online, especially in the early 2000s, you call and order your computer. So, what they did, they realize that it’s hard to sell people a computer for using the internet, when they don’t know how to use the internet. So, they needed people like me to explain to them “Hey, this is how you use the internet to order a computer and this is what you can do with it once you have it.”

Jenn:
So, that really got me into the mode of being more of an explaining type salesperson rather than just, you buy this because you need it. I was really teaching people how to use services and that led to software as a service, eventually.

Jenn:
So, the next job was Microsoft in pre-sales and then Amazon, which was amazing because I really got to go deeper into the internet aspect of the world of Amazon being a huge internet based company and really learn a lot about branding and marketing ’cause that company is really, really good at marketing and copywriting and all that wonderful, good stuff.

Jenn:
So, I did a lot of reading while I was helping customers, explaining product descriptions and going through and making sure that content is written in a way that a customer can just go in and be like “This is what I’m buying, this is what it’s going to do for me.” Eventually, I took all that experience and just said “Hey, I could possibly do this myself.”

Jenn:
In between all of that, because those jobs weren’t really enough to support my family, I had second jobs and my second job was working as a spokesperson and my first client was for Dove. They had a project that a lot of people are familiar with their campaign for real beauty, which was … what year was that? 2004 to 2008 I believe. And what they did was interesting. I think it was the first time we really started seeing this in marketing, now it’s super common. You go on Instagram, you see this all the time nowadays.

Jenn:
What Dove did was put the marketing back into the everyday person. So, the campaign for real beauty was trying to show that any woman could be beautiful. Any size, any complexion … if you use Dove products. So, the way they promoted this was to hire a whole bunch of average looking females to hold soap samples in Costco’s and say “Buy this soap. Try this soap.” The idea was that when customers saw someone with good looking skin, that they would associate that clear, good looking skin with the product and then they’d buy the product.

Jenn:
Brand experience, experiential marketing is what that’s called and I got heavily involved into that. Although I was at the side of, I was the person that they were using to create that experience, I was really interested into this whole concept of experiential marketing. Really? You can create an entire experience of something that makes people react a certain way and get them to buy things? This is fascinating.

Jenn:
That is where my experiential and my marketing background really came into play is doing that. I got to work with a lot of brands as a spokesperson and it was very fulfilling.

Larry:
That’s interesting to me because I know we’ve also talked about … you’ve been an internet enthusiast and practitioner since like the mid 90s like me.

Jenn:
Yes.

Larry:
Way back. So, as you’re doing this Dove thing, I kinda picture you going like “Wow, if only there were a global, interactive medium where I could also do this.” Was that part of your transition to where you are now?

Jenn:
Yeah, no. Because what I’ve learned with a lot of these big brands, they have very separate departments for internet and for experiential. They kept it really, really separate at first at least in the mid 2000s. I got out of experiential marketing in about 2009, 2010 and I was noticing a shift that they were starting to expect the spokespersons to also be internet influencers. So then, as you were getting hired for products, they’ll ask you for your Instagram and your Facebook as well and ask you to promote to your friends.

Jenn:
I think it becomes a little bit problematic because it’s like … didn’t you have to screen the spokesperson to make sure that they’re network is the network that you want? Whereas before, you can put them in a certain experience and make them part of what you’re looking for. If that makes any sense. You see more college branded promotions where they’re like “Okay, we’re gonna send you on a college campus and we actually need you to be a student at that college,” because they’re trying to get all the students at that college.

Larry:
Right. But now, I want to kind of jump forward to today because you’re working more with smaller companies now, right? Certainly not Amazon and Microsoft and Dove, the big brands like that. Did you take lessons from those experiences and does that translate to the branding work you do now?

Jenn:
Yeah. I definitely did. Out of that background, what happened was I was working as a spokesperson for a LASIK company and I met a small business owner, a company called Idaho Beef and he wanted to reach more people and I just saw a really good opportunity to take all that experience I had and do it for him. So the first thing was like … okay, first of all, you need a website. We went back and forth for like two years as to whether or not he needed a website. He’s a traditional, cowboy, firefighter. He makes posts, fences and stuff. He doesn’t deal with internet marketing and stuff like that, so I eventually was able to build my website and a Facebook page and an Instagram and it made a difference for him.

Jenn:
I didn’t really have to brand him per se because he was already a brand. What I had to do was take that brand that he had and put it on the internet. So, my idea was that he was using only experiential marketing in terms of he went to the Puyallup fair when it was called at the time, here in Washington and he’d go to other events and he’d just show up. He was that experience. People liked the experience. “Oh, this is an actual cowboy.” Yes. So I had to take that experiential side and put it into the internet so that when people went looking for him and they pulled up a website, they got the same experience as if they met him at the fair. It was a tall order.

Larry:
Well that’s everybody’s order now. If you aren’t authentically expressing yourself on the internet, people are just gonna ignore you or recognize that you’re a fraud or whatever. So, that’s great. You had sort of a slam dunk in terms of his profile as somebody to work with, but I assume you’ve been able to take those principals that you used with him and … well, how has that worked with other people? Have you done the opposite like kind of cultivated or extracted a persona from people? How does that work?

Jenn:
Yeah, so based off of him, how that went, I now like to have clients like that. I prefer working with entrepreneurs or creatives. A lot of times, artists and musicians, they have a brand, they have a personality, they’re not just a product, they’re a person. If they have something about them that’s unique, I meet with them, I talk with them and I try to figure out what that is.

Jenn:
Now, when we talk about okay, who’s your ideal client? Who’s your target demographic? We look at what they say to those people and what those people are looking for and put that in a website. When I say I do branding, that’s the branding aspect of it is helping small business owners and entrepreneurs understand what their brand is ’cause a lot of times they don’t realize it. They’re like “Oh, I’m just being me.” Yes you are, but you have people that are following you. You have people that are paying you, not necessarily because of what you do, but because of who you are.

Jenn:
So, if you’re an artist, people aren’t really paying for the fact that you made a painting, they’re paying for the uniqueness of that painting. They’re paying for the story that came behind the artist making it a lot of times. So, you have to really bring that out into the website. Explaining that to some people, they’re like “Oh, I never thought of it that way.”

Jenn:
It’s a little bit of counseling and business development, but it’s also branding and copywriting too ’cause you end up writing all that stuff too in your website.

Larry:
In all those that you just mentioned, I kinda picture this as venn diagrams. Two of the bigger venn diagrams are branding and content strategy, there’s a huge overlap there. They can each inform one another, but for you, the way you’re operating, I’m gonna guess that you’re … just part of what you’re bringing to people … or have you thought about that relationship between branding and your content strategy with other folks?

Jenn:
Yes, well they’re two different things, but when I say I do internet marketing, I say I specifically only do content marketing ’cause obviously there’s different types of internet marketing and when you’re explaining this to an entrepreneur or a small business, they don’t really understand that. So, the first thing I start with is “Okay, let me break down the different types of internet marketing. You’ve got SEO, you’ve got content, and you’ve got ads.” First, we have to figure out who you are and what your brand is going to be and then second, we need to figure out what’s the best type of marketing.

Jenn:
Generally, I use this purely as a way of weeding out clients that aren’t gonna be a good match for me because if they say “Oh I just want to show up in Google” I’m like “Okay, well go see an SEO person.” But if they say “I want people to know who I am. I want to be matched with my ideal client.” Then I’d say “Well, let’s do a content strategy. Let’s get who you are out there. Let’s build as much content as possible for people to know who you are. I’m not saying flood the internet with spam, I’m saying flood it with helpful information that gives people a taste of the services you offer, that you can afford to give away.

Jenn:
Generally, the next thing is “I can’t write that much content.” Then I say “But I can.” That’s the whole ecosystem of how they work together, but if I do get a client that just needs branding, I’ll just do branding. I prefer not to. Or if they have branding already and they’re like “We already have a brand, we already have our strategy, we just need you to do the content.” Fine. Tell me what your branding is and your target and we’ll make it perfect. But they all work together under one large umbrella of what I like to focus on.

Larry:
Got it. How does your work break down? I know you have a lot of writing experience and are a good writer and have written a lot. Is that most of what you end up doing or do you end up doing a lot of strategy and … I love the table setting work you do in explaining to them the difference between SEO and content marketing and things like that. How does your typical client or day break down I guess?

Jenn:
I wish I had a typical … first of all, I should clarify that I have a team, so I don’t do as much writing as I used to. When I first started, I think I set a limit of three or 4,000 words per day of writing, so I just write that much and that was it. Oh and I spend some time soliciting new clients. . . they got proposals, for to five hours of writing per day. That’s what it first started out.

Jenn:
Now, what I would typically do is check with my clients for any clients and if it’s a project that I need to do personally, to write, I’d write it. I’ve kinda limited my work to about 2,000 words per day now. The rest, I outsource to my team. I have a team of six content writers that all have varying skills, so I specialize with who gets what projects, based on the writer’s interest, backgrounds and type of writing that I know they’re good at.

Jenn:
I have one writer who is really good at blogs, she does the blogs. I have another one who is an excellent copywriter. She’s got a marketing degree from Gonzaga. She’s really good at writing copy. I have another one who’s an excellent click bait. Excellent. It just depends on what the client needs and a lot of times, I’d have to figure out the strategy that we’re gonna be doing, so they only write. Anything outside of writing, I have to do. Once I get the stuff back, I edit it and do all final copies. Sometimes I have to edit it a couple times for the clients if they don’t like what we turn in.

Jenn:
I will say most of my day nowadays is management of the process and relationship building with my clients and sometimes strategizing new content. For one of my clients, I’m the blog manager. There is a website manager who, he’s in charge of all the marketing for the site, as well as all of the management of the WordPress site, making sure it’s a Shopify site. So it’s a huge setup. He manages everything involved. He also comes up with marketing strategies, but I’m in charge of the blog. A lot of the content, he strategizes himself, but if I have another idea based on what the users would want, what the readers would want, then it comes back on me to come up with ideas. He’s more of the … this is the content we need for marketing and I’m more of the … this is what people want to read.

Larry:
I’ve been dying to work in the other thing you talked about when I saw you speak in Seattle, UX; User Experience and I wonder if that … so that’s kind of getting at that. You’re saying, “It’s fine that you have this stuff that you want to get out there, but we’re equally concerned with the users and the customers.” Tell me how that fits in because you articulated that as I think the title of your talk was something about UX and content strategy or UX and brand-

Jenn:
Branding and UX.

Larry:
Branding and UX, yeah. Tell me how those fit together for you and your work with tour folks.

Jenn:
So, just to add as a seque, the background to that, the other job I left off is I was a journalist. So, between the time working for Dell and telemarketing, I got a part-time job as a journalist because I wrote something in college, I was delivering newspapers, I shared it with the editor and they go “You’re writing for us now.” I’m like “Oh, okay.”

Larry:
Nice.

Jenn:
Having a journalistic background, I had a scholarship to UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism. I’ve been trained in journalism, I just never actually worked after that. I did like two years of it, as a contributing writer, but I never went into it full-time. Having that background of really focusing on the content and the readers, has made a big difference in internet marketing. I think if I didn’t have that, I’d get caught up in the more copywriting form of it. I don’t know the better way of putting it, but the numbers. You get caught up in “How many times did I put this word and how many times did I do this.” And not really thinking about “Did I answer the question that the user is looking for?

Larry:
I think you’re getting a thing I see all the time and I’ve talked to enough people in the field now that I think sometimes the marketing oriented copywriters struggle more with content marketing than journalists ’cause journalists are perfectly suited to put out authoritative and interesting stories about stuff, whereas marketing copywriters are “Oh, I’ve gotta convince them, I’ve gotta persuade them.” You mentioned you have in your group of folks, both people with marketing backgrounds and people with … it sounds like with journalism backgrounds. Do you see that play out like the way I just described it?

Jenn:
Yeah. It’s very interesting, the girl that does most of my copywriting stuff, her background is public relations and marketing and I have to remind her all the time, don’t sell, just talk to the consumer. I told you who we’re writing to, just talk to them. That’s it. Whereas the other girl, she’s not a journalist, but she’s a translator that’s her professional background.

Larry:
Oh, interesting.

Jenn:
So she plays with words a lot and she likes the idea of just talking. So I give her an assignment and she’s basically just talking. So I have to remind her, “Hey make sure you put this call to action in there.” But I have to spell out the call to action and tell her what it is and where to put it. So, there’s definitely that different background.

Larry:
Well what you just said is interesting to me. I know this varies from project to project, but I think everybody’s so concerned now with measuring content effectiveness and figuring out how a piece of content is performing. Personally, I think a lot of that, like if you’re doing SEO or a bigger content marketing campaign that you’re not always gonna see instant, identifiable results, but for the most part, do you try to put some sort of call to action in all of your content or most of it?

Jenn:
Every piece of writing should have some sort of call to action unless it’s … no, every piece of writing has a point. Let me just put it that way. Even poetry has an underlying message that you’re trying to relay. With copywriting, you’re trying to convince people to feel a certain way or to do a certain thing. I tend to do copywriting that convinces people to feel a certain way. I’m not a big person on the “Do a certain thing”, but if I’m given a call to action or if there’s a specific call out of this is what we’re trying to do, I’ll put it on there.

Jenn:
I don’t like the idea that you just write to write. No one just writes to write. You’re communicating. It’s a form of communication. Early on in the internet, when I first started like 2005, 2006, when I first started doing copywriting professionally, there’s a lot of writing that was just writing. It was just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then we started doing the call to actions, which I was just like “Yes, thank you.” That way, people can just skip all of the crap and get right to the “Okay, this is what you want me to do, you want me to click here. Okay, I can do that.”

Jenn:
So, I am a fan of the call to action, but I think the problem is that people just focus on that and they don’t make sure that the rest of the content actually says something and that’s when the user experience comes in because the words that are on the website are part of the experience that someone’s having. People will drop all of this money into the design and the colors and the fonts and all this other stuff and they’re just like “Oh, just throw some words on there. People don’t read anyway.” Yeah you know, they don’t, but when they do, they’re going to be very irritated if they find something that’s just complete fluff and nothing.

Jenn:
Make somewhat of an effort. That is really one of my pet peeves with user experience, I mean with the whole internet world right now is that, there’s not a lot of focus on the experience of the user. I think Amazon does an excellent job of user experience and copywriting. A good mixture of it. If you’ve ever been … I’ve been asked to do Amazon pages, they’re very specific in how they’re product pages can be written. They can’t have any claims that are not true. You can’t have this inflated writing. They try to tone down the over the top marketing copy.

Larry:
I just want to clarify real quickly there, are you talking about … a huge amount of the stuff on Amazon is in the marketplace, versus products that Amazon is just selling.

Jenn:
It’s a marketplace.

Larry:
This is in the marketplace? Okay, yeah. So they have a voice and tone and style guide?

Jenn:
Yes.

Larry:
Yeah, gotcha. Okay, sorry.

Jenn:
So, some of the upper end sellers, it depends on your sell volume apparently, you can be allowed to do a special Amazon page, rather than the generic one that Amazon builds out for you. If you’re of a certain level, then you can write your own page. A lot of those sellers don’t know how to write it within the guidelines that Amazon gives you and the guidelines are really hard. You really do have to hire a professional copywriter to write it within the guidelines that Amazon says they want.

Larry:
Once you’ve hacked that, that’s probably your full-time job, right?

Jenn:
Yeah.

Larry:
There must be people that just write those?

Jenn:
Yes, there’s people that just write those. I’ve gotten to do one of those and it was fun, but I totally respect their guidelines of … their point of view is we wanna make it easy and accessible to the readers. We want them to be able to scan through and not have to decide whether this is hype or not. Useful information. It was just really good. I mean it was a little dry. I like to add more personality than Amazon allows, but I think if anyone was looking for a really good way to write copy for a eCommerce site, just go through the marketplace and read some of the good ones on there.

Larry:
Well if anybody’s figured out eCommerce, I think they kinda know. . . Hey Jenn, these things always go so quick. We’re coming up on time. I always like to give my guests an opportunity . . . is there anything last, anything we haven’t talked about yet that I’ve forgotten to ask that you’d like to share with our folks?

Jenn:
Yeah, one of the common questions I get is whether Jenn Marie, which I go by, is my actual name. Sorta. So, my actual name is and then I do have a last name, but I have a very generic name by design. My parents named me a very generic name. It’s just great in the 80s, but nowadays it’s not so great because if you google my name, there’s at least 50 results of 50 different Jennifer’s. I even, working as a spokesperson got a check for someone with the exact same name as me. She lived in California and I lived in South Carolina at the time. So, I have a twin in the same industry.

Jenn:
I realized when I decided to work online that I was gonna have to be unique. I already have the domain WhoIsJennMarie.com for when I was modeling. It was modeling portfolio for me. That was when I was trying to brand myself as someone unique as a model. I didn’t want to get rid of the domain, it seemed really cool, so I said why don’t I just start my writing company with that name and it became Jenn Marie Writing and Marketing. True to content marketing, I used that name on everything. The only place that I don’t have Jenna Marie is my LinkedIn because my LinkedIn was made before all of this stuff happened.

Jenn:
But every other piece of content is authored by Jenn Marie and even my LinkedIn, I make sure it is as SEO-ed Jenn Marie. So you can Google Jenn Marie and still get my LinkedIn, but it has my actual, legal name on there, if you are able to find it. So, I think that’s important for anybody. Pick your identity, create it.

Larry:
And particularly important for a branding expert.

Jenn:
Yeah.

Larry:
Exactly, yeah. No, I love that. That’s a great story. Well, thanks so much Jenn. This has been a great conversation. And what you were just saying, I know you hate writing like “How To” kinda … it sounds like you’re more of a story teller-

Jenn:
Yes.

Larry:
But just what you just said about that, just for practical implications of a … like I just rebranded this podcast and I spent the last many hours over the last two days trying to make sure that it was correctly identified every place. A lot of things came up with that. So, I don’t know, maybe we could collaborate … you make them feel and I’ll just give them the dull details.

Jenn:
Yeah. All the feels. That’s what I’m about.

Larry:
Sweet, well thanks so much Jenn. This has been great.

Jenn:
Alright, thanks so much.