• Can an outsider understand my business?
• Can a ghostwriter sound like me or like my business?
• Will it take more time and effort to manage a ghostwriter than it would to do the work myself?

All three questions can be answered in a word. “MAYBE.”

I ghostwrite for financial professionals — primarily advisors, accountants and attorneys. When someone asks me whether they’re a candidate for a ghostwriter, I ask questions of my own:

• Who’s your audience?
• What are your key messages?
• Do you have an editorial calendar?
• What’s the “voice” of your business?
  • Is it edge-y because the business develops cutting edge technologies?
  • Is it reassuring because it’s in health care?
  • Is it frisky because it sells to teens and tweens?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’ve got work to do before you begin your search for the perfect ghost.

Start with an editorial calendar

No matter what kind of product or service you provide, if you’re going to publish anything — from a newsletter to a social media update — you need a plan. Start with key messages and an editorial calendar. If you need help with this or other marketing/public relations tasks,  look for a writer who can provide that expertise.

A ghostwriter should have a working understanding of how search engine optimization (SEO) works, but beware the writer who tries to convince you to write in a stilted style to feed the search bots; this does not serve you well with human readers. If a prospective writer says something like “I  write according to a formula — I’ll put your top three key words in the title and front load the first two sentences with the top ten,” you’re not talking to a ghostwriter, you’re talking to a copywriter. There’s a difference.

Create a pool

Key messages and an editorial calendar in hand, tap your professional circles first. With so many corporate communications departments being downsized, domain experts who write well are a LinkedIn search away. I focus my practice on financial and economic topics because I know them best and don’t require any ramp up time. If someone called asking me to write about biotech I’d decline.

Whether a domain expert can effectively ghost for you is another matter. You’ll need to refine the search by chemistry, mutually-acceptable work styles, pricing, etc.

Audition

A good ghostwriter is in demand. Plan to interview a few potential writing partners and perhaps audition one or two of them.

Already writing a newsletter? Give the writer an earlier version and ask what they’d do differently. Never written one before? Give the writer three news topics and ask how they would propose to learn your voice before delving into the writing process. I use a voice recorder to interview my client on the topics (more on that below).

I will sometimes offer to do an audition piece on spec with the understanding that if the client hires me I’ll bill them for the work, but only if I feel the chemistry is right and there’s no risk on my side that they’ll love my work. If they don’t hire me they can’t use my audition piece in any shape or form.

Getting the voice right

If your business is more than “you” I recommend appointing a spokesperson for whom the ghost writes.  A spokesperson need not be a real person — think Geico gecko. The ghostwriter needs to slip into the spokesperson’s persona so if you don’t want to appoint a spokesperson you don’t need a ghostwriter, you need a copywriter.

I ask my clients to use a digital recorder when working with me; the digital file is easily attached to email. Listening to their recordings, I  glean from their inflection what matters to them most and pick up key words or phrases that they favor. I also find that people say more when speaking than when writing.  Clients may think they have two articles for their newsletter but when they start talking about the subjects I might “hear” three articles and a blog post.

One final note: In a ghostwriting relationship there’s a fair amount of front loading before the ghost can successfully get into a productive rhythm.  Hire someone who already knows your business/industry/profession so they’ll hit their stride more quickly. While a current staff member might be qualified for the job, don’t foist the job on an insider if they’re not the RIGHT person. The right hire will save time and effort.

For more on this topic, here’s my blog.

Good luck.

Tamela Rich, “An MBA Who Writes like an English Major,” lives in Charlotte, NC. Follow her on Twitter @TamelaRich or sign up for her monthly newsletter.

During tough economic times as these it’s important to know where all of your marketing dollars are being spent.  For many companies, this becomes a time when they pull back on their marketing budgets for no other need than to simply cut costs. For others, this is a time when they increase their expenditures in an area of their business that they realize can actually increase their revenue as it has the ability to gain new customers and market share.  For either of these situations, it’s important to take a look at where your marketing dollars are being spent, the effectiveness of the strategies employed, and a firm understanding of what you will need to do to improve your strategy’s overall performance for the future.

Here’s a quick 5 step way to mapping out your marketing:

1. Create a Simple Process Map
   View this from a very high level.  If I were to ask you, “How can I buy your product or service,” how would you answer?  What are the steps you would take me through?  Though many would view this is your sales process, think “simplicity.”  If you have more than five steps in your process, try to group some together to shorten the process. Customers usually do not have patience.  Their buying decision can easily sway if it takes too long to satisfy their instant gratification that comes with the purchase.  If you have too many steps, you have too many ways for them to change their mind.
2. Take a Look at What You’re Doing
   Every piece of marketing and sales collateral that you have should be currently used to support one or more of the steps in the process you listed.  If you find an item that you feel is not doing this or is even poorly supporting a step, stop producing it! You need excellence in your marketing when times are tough! Spending the marketing dollars that are still getting you SOME prospects, but just barely simply won’t cut it in the long run!By the way… CA-CHING… money saved! You’re welcome!
3. Group Your Current Marketing Pieces into Activities
   Successful strategies are about spreading your marketing activities over multiple mediums, channels, and tools to reach the broadest representation of your targeted audience(s). Take each of your marketing pieces and group them into activities such as print advertising, radio, TV, search engine marketing, online advertising, social media, etc.Count up the number of pieces in each activity.  This is a quick way to determine how much you’re focusing on each area.  Are you evenly spread in your activities?  Or are there some imbalances? Imbalances could be a sign of wasteful activity and therefore wasted marketing dollars.
4. Check Your Success Rates for Each Activity
   Success in any marketing strategy is dependent on data that is captured and measured against your established goals.  In this case, we’re going to focus on how each activity performs against your sales goals. So, hopefully, you’ve been capturing data behind each activity you’ve engaged in.  If not, we need to talk! Without data there is a high likelihood that you are overspending in multiple areas that may be producing little or even no results.Write on a separate sheet of paper for each activity the following metrics:

    

   - Total amount of dollars (E) committed to this activity – including support/administrative
   – Total amount of transactions (T) attributed to this activity – translated sales transactions
   – Total amount of revenue (R) from transactions attributed to this activity
   – Total net profit (P) attributed to this activity

   Calculate the Following Success Rates

   Goal Achievement by Activity: R/E x 100

   Profit Margin from Activity: P-E=M, M/P x 100

   Average Revenue per Transaction per Activity: R/T

   Average Profit per Transaction per Activity: P/T

5. Determine the Adjustments in Your Activities
   Now this step requires some insight about how to move and adjust your marketing activities, but let me break this down into some simple thoughts that can help you make your decisions about how you spend your marketing dollars.Look at the “Goal Achievement by Activity” rate.  If you have some activities that are falling in the single digits, it means one of two things: 1) You just started this activity or possibly not investing much into it, OR 2) You are potentially overspending marketing dollars in an area that is not translating into transactions.

    

   If the answer is #1, you may choose to continue investing in this area, but I would encourage you to measure this again in 30 day increments to determine if it has any effect.

   If the answer is #2, then maybe you should stop investing in this activity or rethink how you are leveraging this strategy to attain your goals.  By doing so, you can move the allotted marketing dollars for this activity into another area where it can produce higher results.

   Next, look at the “Profit Margin” metric.  If this is high (say even over 10%) then this should tell you that this activity is able to not only produce results in terms of acquiring whatever it was designed for (awareness, traffic, sales, etc.), but it also has the potential to produce the best results in terms of translating into higher value transactions.

   Now, I say “has” because of this.  If this activity generates the least amount of transactions (and by quite a bit) then even though the metric sounds good, it is really not producing long-term gains.  Think of a situation where you have one transaction that had a 90% profit margin or two hundred transactions that had a 50% profit margin. In this case, consider how the activity could be adjusted to generate more high-value transactions.

   Finally, look at the “Average Profit per Transaction” metric.  The activities where this metric is high shows you potentially how and where you are acquiring your best customers – meaning those that may have spent the most with your organization!  What you may want to do here is to look at how you can increase your use of this activity to hopefully increase the number of transactions.

   Now, an important note, oftentimes this activity would be the same as that found from the “Profit Margin” metric.  Remember, we need a good balance in the number of transactions to the amount of profit gained in each transactions.  I only mentioned looking where this metric is “high” not the “highest.”  Therefore, you actually want to find somewhere close to the middle in terms of profit and number of transactions.

That’s it!  Five steps later and you will have a much clearer understanding of not only where you marketing dollars have been spent, but the effectiveness of what you have spent those dollars on!  During these tough economic times, you DO have the chance to increase your market share as well as the number of sales and revenue made from each transaction.  The important thing to start with is this clear understanding of where you are currently.  Once you have this, it is much easier to see how you need to formulate your next marketing strategy to increase your overall performance and make your marketing dollars work for you!

Map your marketing dollars and you can map your future!