1. The legal eagles do not quite know what to do with visuals. Lawyers will focus on your verbiage the way a chain saw focuses on a tree limb. But lawyers have not yet realized that they could possibly police images. As long as you're not plagiarizing an image or publishing something offensive or illegal, your lawyers probably won't try to edit them.
2. On the other hand, your target reader most likely does know what to do with a visual. He'll check it out first and foremost and it may be the "hook" that gets him to read. So these are powerful tools that do not really get scrutinized by the kind of people who are trying to save the world from marketing.
3. Visuals can carry a pretty hefty emotional charge. It is often difficult in medical texts to get that much emotional power into text … but you can do it with a picture.
4. You can test images, just like you can test text.

Right now, there is such a rush to make all medical materials as bland as possible that I wonder if healthcare professionals are all asleep right now. If you want to stand out, grab some visceral visuals … even if it's just a diagram of a new molecule … and infuse your written text with power.

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This results in cheeseburger marketing.

The reason I call it cheeseburger marketing is that, like cheeseburgers themselves, cheeseburger marketing is fun, tasty, filling, and absolutely no good for you. After not much time, cheeseburgers make you fat and sick.

Here is how to tell if you're doing cheeseburger MarCom:

1. Creative choices as to formats, colors, media, images, photography are driven by personal choices and individual opinions rather than real reasoning. This puts personal taste ahead of what makes sense for your message.

2. Messaging is egocentric. You can tell you're egocentric when you want the first line of your brochure (about a product) to be the company's mission statement. You can tell you're egocentric when every line of the brochure starts out, "We at the Acme Anvil Company …." You can tell you're egocentric when nothing in the brochure has any emotional impact on the target reader.

3. Decisions in MarCom are made whimsically, haphazardly, more with an eye to what is fun than what is useful.

4. Nobody plans. MarCom has no crisis plan, no PR plan, no strategic plan, no publication plan. Add to this no archiving of documents, no formalized procedures.

5. Nobody measures. Now this is an area where I have a lot of opinions, because some types of marketing are very easy to measure, some types are almost impossible to measure, and a lot falls in-between. So even an expert team really can never measure MarCom results to the degree that they should be measured. Everybody falls short. But in a cheeseburger MarCom department, nobody even tries to measure. This means that successes get overlooked and failures get repeated.

6. MarCom projects are based on what feels right or seems like fun, rather than what works at selling product or even what the field wants and uses.

7. Vendors are selected by who takes the staff to the best lunches and hands out the most wonderful holiday gifts. Vendors who provide good service are ignored in favor of those who come bearing gifts.

8. MarCom staff remain vigil in their quest to be uneducated about their company, their products, their technologies, and new media. Not knowing things is regarded as a badge of honor; people who understand the company's products are considered to be hapless geeks and best shunned.

9. MarCom isolates itself from other departments. MarCom players do not know other departments or issues in the company. Most MarCom members spend their time sharpening their sarcasm skills rather than their people skills.

All of these traits compare to people who would rather sit around and eat cheeseburgers and fries instead of eating healthful food and exercising. It's the mindset that favors fun and excess over discipline and health.

If you have a flabby MarCom team, you may also have a flabby Marketing team. The keys to good health follow:

1. Develop a solid understanding of what your company does, what it sells, and who else sells similar stuff.

2. Get to know your customers and your field personnel. Spend an hour or so and listen to their stories. Process this information to the point that you know what keeps your customers awake at night. (That's crucial to good marketing … knowing hot buttons.)

3. Insist that MarCom people stay up to date with new technology in their field, including social media, Internet, electronic documents and so on.

4. Make MarCom people interact with lots of other people, including scary people like engineers and software guys and gals. If your MarCom people refuse this or are panicked, you have a bunch of cheeseburgers.

5. Measure, measure, measure. Even if you do it wrong, even if your results are dubious, even if you don't know what you're doing, keep trying and keep counting.

6. Take corrective actions. Measure so you know what doesn't work and stop doing it. Measure so you know what does work: do that more.

7. Weed out the culture of "I like green." Train everyone you can that personal preferences and tastes do not matter in the creation of marketing materials. You do what the customer wants, which you determine by what works. See #6. Create a world where it is possible for a marketing director to HATE the color orange but use it effectively in marketing materials.

8. Force MarCom people to think through different areas–to look at competitive ads or review websites from other companies. Encourage them to build "swipe files," cool stuff they have seen in other uses that might be re-purposed for your marketingt.

9. Don't allow MarCom to be the idiot department. Most execs tend to regard MarCom people as dispensable clowns who can draw pictures and make up stuff. That's not because executives are dumb, it is because MarCom does not do its own branding and upgrade its image. Let MarCom market itself.

You see cheeseburger marketing in medicine every single day–egocentric messages, pretty but meaningless pictures, and badly designed pieces that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars because teams of non-designers met for endless hours deciding on such crucial issues as line weight and fonts.
 

Even good companies can have cheeseburger marketing. So put down the cholesterol-heavy, artery-clogging fun foods and go grab an salad and hit the gym. You need to show discipline, courage, intelligence, and a lot of savvy … in your MarCom efforts. You wouldn't have much respect for a person who ate cheeseburgers all the time, talked only about himself and his pleasures, and became a big, fat slob. Your customers won't like MarCom efforts from a self-indulgent, self-referential, and self-pleasing bunch of marketers.

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The fact is: intelligence, when defined as “what’s going on,” is vital to your career and valuable in your marketing efforts. Plus, it’s more fun than doing spreadsheets. So here’s here are our best ninja spy tricks for 2010.

1. Set up some Google Alerts. Google employs an army of robots that regularly sweep every nook and cranny of cyberspace and, in so doing, they offer a nifty little free service. If you want to know every time a certain word or phrase comes up, they’ll notify you. Just Google “Google Alerts” and follow the prompts. Google will email you every 24 hours and tell you when your name (or your company’s name, your competitor’s name, your product, or whatever) came up.

2. Just Google. Periodically conduct searches for your own name, the name of your boss or colleagues, names of competitors, and so on. Another interesting thing to do is to pick your product or service and Google it and see who appears on the right-hand side. Those are people who pay to appear on the front page for certain keywords (in other words, ads).  Just who is advertising for your medical device or drug keywords (hint: sometimes it’s a lawyer).

3. Find out what they’re paying to advertise. There are lots of roundabout ways to do this, but the quickest and most fun is Spyfu.com. Just go there and type in the keyword (your product or keyword) and you’ll get a short report of how many entities are paying for advertising for that keyword and what they’re paying. You can also see their ad budgets in a nifty bar graph form. This is just for the free introductory Spyfu part–you can get even more information if you subscribe to the service.

4. Want to know who is on your website the most often? (Hint: it’s your competitors.) You should have a chat with the IT people who can pull up statistics in terms of how many hits you got each month (or even each day, if you want to drill down like that), the main locations of these folks, the keywords they used, and the sites they came from. This won’t be too specific but it will confirm that your site’s main visitors (especially to the in-depth technical pages) are your competitors.

5. So now you have to see how these competitive websites are doing. Actually, you can see how just about any large website is doing. Go to Alexa.com and you can get some stats. This does not cover every website–just the largest ones. Compare yourself to the other main sites in your field.

6. Ever wonder where your main web visitors come from? You can get stats from your IT guy but that just covers your company. Pick your industry keywords (ibuprofen, back pain, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, whatever) and go to Google Trends (just Google “Google Trends”) and enter the keyword. You get a nifty graph showing how popular these terms are. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the main countries that hit these keywords, the main cities, and the main languages of the people interested in the material. It’s an eye-opener. For instance, India is the top country for seeking information based on the keyword “pacemaker.” And “chronic pain”? Tampa, Florida.

7. Need statistics? This may not seem “secret” but you can uncover some amazing information if you spend enough time at the motherlode of all statistical information: cdc.gov. Just go to the site and search for whatever term you want and statistics (obesity statistics, kidney disease statistics). Many marketing people do not know even the basic statistics in their field, and that’s a shame. There can be good information there. For instance, obesity is much more common among Hispanics than other ethnic groups in the United States. Could that help you better market your obesity-related products and services?

8. Venture into foreign-language sites. Many medical companies have branches, offices, distributors, or associations with foreign offices developing or marketing their products. If you can grab a foreign-language brochure or some foreign-language web content, you can get it translated to get the scoop on a product that may very well be coming Stateside soon.  Here is a hint: Babelfish and other automatic translation services do not work well. They work well if you’re translating “cat.” They do not work well on complete sentences, words that might have more than one meaning, and complex texts. Hire a real translator.

9. Attend scientific sessions in your field. I have seen so many marketing people go to a medical convention as waste the opportunity by treating it as a schmooze-fest. Now if you make money schmoozing, that may be fine. But scientific meetings are great places to learn about cutting-edge therapies and–this is the best part–hearing real-world physician objections to these approaches. Most scientific sessions focus on problems, challenges, shortfalls; the doctors get together to share their troubles, not boast about new opportunities. Sit in on these meetings and you’ll learn a lot because doctors think they are talking just to their peers (not industry). Listen up and you may hear what doctors really think about morphine infusion pumps or direct-to-consumer ads for that purple pill or a new electronic records software system. You’ve got to attend a lot of sessions to get good stuff, but you can find real gold here. In many cases, what doctors say in these settings is more honest and valuable than what comes out in even well-run focus groups.

10. Read. Medical companies are like doctors in that they like to read and put words on paper. This is a big advantage for competitive intelligence. Monitor journals, the web, and get field force team members to get copies of product literature from competitive companies. Now there is a very secret trick to make this technique work that a lot of people don’t bother with. Don’t just collect the stuff. Read it. Analyze it. If your competitor just launched some new widget, gather all that information together and sit down and study it. Most marketers read competitive materials haphazardly, if at all. Bring it together and start to sift through it in a meaningful way.

Those are 10 ninja spy tips. But there are a still a few more. You should also spy on yourself. Is your own company really doing all it can to market its brand?

• Go outside the company and, for grins, call in and pretend to be a doctor-customer with a problem. See how quickly you get to the right person to help you.
• On a random day, take a tour of the facility. What does the lobby look like? What are conference rooms like? How is the cafeteria? Break rooms? Rest rooms? Parking lot? If you have customers who visit your facility, these things all matter.
• On another random day, check out the links on your website. You can do this yourself or get somebody to do it. (You can even build your own software to test it automatically.) The point is that links break–don’t ask me why. Check your website by clicking through at random, here, there, and in a few more places. If there are broken links, report them to the webmaster and consider running more in-depth tests. (Remember, the average visitor to your site who encounters a broken link will just leave; they won’t try to work around it or report it to you.)
• Send yourself a letter or package and see how long it takes to get to you. Some companies handle this like champs and in others, incoming mail has to go through the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. If your mail service is lacking, run and document a few more tests and then discuss it with your receiving department.
• Pick key people in your department and search for yourself online. You’d be amazed how many young professionals have knuckleheaded Facebook pages set up. Talk it over with human resources first, but then have a heart-to-heart with these young pups who think that funny half-naked pictures are good for business. (Many people who seem web-savvy are actually amazed that other people can find things online. These guys may think that their Facebook or other pages are “private” or too obscure for other people to find. Prove them wrong.)

As you can see, these things are not really spying. They are just information gathering techniques. But the thing that separates great marketers from mediocre marketers is often just a simple matter of research and extra legwork.

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Step one involves talking to them. I know many marketing people who take a perverse pride in never, even stepping foot outside the marketing department (or cafeteria). These guys realize that other areas of the company are populated by people who like math better than music and do not always have good social skills. But you can’t have good marketing success unless you get to know these people. Visit their departments; ask to sit in on relevant meetings that are run by “their side”; make every effort to call or sit down with a scientist whenever you need something explained.

Step two involves patience. You won’t get everything you need in the first sound bite of information. That’s why you need to do your best to create a relationship with these colleagues; you need some “name recognition.” They need to know who you are, what you do, and why you keep asking them all of these weird questions. Give your relationship some time. This is particularly vital since many engineering and scientific types live in the world of patents and proprietary knowledge. This makes them super-secretive by profession, and they’re usually already shy by nature. It can be tough to get one of these guys to share any information, so your best bet is making sure they at least know who you are and that you’re one of the “good guys.”

Step three: explain marketing to them. As much as Kaplan-Meier curves or polymer molecules or hermetic seals are a mystery to you, marketing is a black art to them. The best way to convince a scientist that marketing is good is to create a strong immediate link to sales, which is a world of numbers. Show the scientist sales figures and point to specific marketing endeavors that helped bring those numbers up. You may win an ally if you can persuade a scientist that talking to you will help the company translate his knowledge into sales.

Step four may involve instilling some controls, with which you may be uncomfortable. Most scientists are deeply distrustful individuals (scientist and skeptic just kind of go together, don’t they?) and they no doubt imagine you’re trying to hoodwink them. It can be useful for your relationship to include a scientist in a review of marketing materials, to show him or her interim drafts of materials, or to allow other access to “materials-in-progress.” You may not like this and it may be against your boss’s better judgment, but if you can swing it, it can really work. It helps the scientist see that you’re not out to con him.

Step five is the one you thought should have been first: research. You need to do some homework before you talk to scientific types. Now don’t go haywire. You’re not going to out-engineer the engineer. You just need to know what they’re working on and how they do things.

Last but not least, in step six, ask questions. Think of yourself as a reporter trying to dig out a story from a mad scientist. When in doubt, ask, “How does this work?” And if the scientist comes back at you with jargon, come back with more questions. “What does that mean?” You can even enlist his or her help: “How can we explain this kind of technology best to a physician?” or “What does a patient need to know about how this new device works?”

The weird thing is that scientists and clinical experts and all of these other people are mostly very interesting individuals. They’re usually a lot of fun and can greatly add to your expertise and help your marketing productions. The only thing is: you have to cultivate the relationship. In all the years I ever worked in marketing in medical device companies, I never saw any of these guys linger around marketing. You’re going to have to go to them.

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One of the most important responsibilities of the marketing department is to equip the sales rep for this 10 seconds.  In a lot of ways, medical marketing departments are like the companies that make bullet-proof vests for law enforcement officers or soldiers. It is not our job to fight the fight or go into battle, but it is our job to give the valiant hero who does go face-to-face with the opponent every conceivable chance of success.

So what do you do to equip your sales reps to turn those golden 10 seconds into success? Here are 10 things that you should be doing to help your sales reps in those precious 10 seconds.

1. EDUCATE THE REP. Most companies want to educate physicians, some reach out to educate fellows, a few want to educate patients … but who thinks to train the sales reps? Every new product, every launch, every new change in your industry should be a cry to get training materials out to your rep. The quickest way to shoot yourself in the foot is to call this “Mandatory Training” and make it be a bunch of boring online stuff with a quiz. Reps, like the rest of us, hate efforts to school them. So create launch and news materials for the rep that play on emotions (like his desire to earn, his desire to present a hot new product, his desire to counter objections to his product line). Depending on your field force, you may want to do periodic live meetings, webinars, as well as rep-facing brochures. A membership site built for your reps can be a great idea, particularly if you keep it well-stocked with tips that really help the rep earn more money. Most people don’t mind listening to lessons if they can see an immediate and tangible benefit.

2. OFFER A VARIETY OF TOOLS. Many companies like to promote their products with certain specific vehicles: a selling sheet, a trifold or “slim jim,” a big full-color brochure, a folder stuffed with journal reprints, or whatever. However, if your sales force is larger than one guy or gal, you are likely going to need different types of materials. Some sales reps work well with a pocket card; others need a glossy brochure; somebody else will make her own folder with an assortment of “leave behind” materials; and a third will want to bring in a laptop with a short presentation. Instead of trying to make everybody do the exact sames sales presentation, recognize that good reps play to their strengths and will do better with one tool than another. Offer a big basket of tools for reps to choose from.

3. BE COHERENT. Make sure your online messaging matches the marketing collateral your sales reps show doctors. As easy as that sounds, it’s a common shortfall. The reason is that many companies produce web content separately from marketing materials (sometimes in different departments!) and those people may not talk to each other. Also make sure all of this matches your messages at scientific sessions and advertising.

4. INCLUDE TECH SERVICES. Docs talk to reps because reps have an annoying way of getting their foot int he door. But docs talk to your Tech Services team because they want information, have a problem, need advice, or just do not understand something. But Marketing is notorious for not talking with Tech Services. Tech Services should get launch kits, be aware in advance of marketing messages, and see every piece of marketing material and product labeling that a physician customer could conceivably see. This assures that a doctor who talks with Tech Services is going to get at least reasonably close to the same message from Tech Services as from the sales rep.

5. GET REP INPUT ON MARKETING MATERIALS. I have worked in Marketing long enough to know that many sales reps are difficult, opinionated, obnoxious individuals. While some reps do need anger-management training or charm school, companies are increasingly putting their foot down to tyrannical outbursts by sales reps (and hallelujah for that). Despite the occasional wild-eyed rogue of a sales rep, a good marketing person will also find reps with insight and ideas about marketing materials. Keep your mind open when reps propose these things. Every now and then you’ll get a winner.

6. WHEN IN DOUBT, COUNT. One of the best ways to see what marketing pieces work and what ones don’t, get a tally from your literature storehouse. Everybody may love your award-winning brochure, but if reps do not order them, it probably was not worth the money. On the other hand, if you can’t keep humble spec sheets in stock, that is clearly an effective selling piece.

7. MAKE IT EASY FOR THE DOCTOR TO GET MORE INFO. There was a time when reps liked to build a firewall around “their” doctor and keep the whole world, including the rest of the company, out. That does not benefit the company or the doctor,  who may need more information when the rep is not available. Put stuff online. Collect email addresses. A lot of companies do not allow doctors to order materials, but why not? Why not publish a small catalog of proof sources, brochures, DVDs, training materials, and other items that a doc can order directly from the company?

8. ENTER BEARING PATIENT MATERIALS. Most doctors do not do as good a job at patient education as they would like and–truth be told–this nags at many of them. A smart company will help fill in this gap by developing the kind of patient materials a doctor would be most likely to want to share with patients, whether by placing them in the waiting room (popular these days) or handing them out to specific patients. Reps who offer these materials usually have something the doctor genuinely wants. I would imagine that a great patient campaign supporting a new product launch would find some resonance among physician-customers.

9. PROOF SOURCES ROCK. This may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the strongest marketing pieces in your arsenal is not the slickest. Proof sources are very compelling to physicians and they do not even need to be slick or presented in some snazzy folder to be effective. Doctors do not expect you to show up with a peer-reviewed article that endorses your product. What they might enjoy is having you present them targeted, focused articles on the conditions your product treats or something related. It’s a kind of combination testimonial plus “soft sell.” You’re not marketing … you’re informing the doctor and the reason you’re informing the doctor is that you work in that same field, in that you represent a company that treats that very condition.

10. PAPER, PAPER, PAPER. The world is going paperless so every good contrarian is going to realize now is the time to start producing more words-on-paper. Traditional print is so out now that it’s trendy. Most docs are bleary-eyed from reading everything online. While I am one of the big advocates for having things online, I recognize that there is power in the unexpected and traditional brochures and leave-behind pieces are almost novelty items. The best printed pieces today are those that use print to do things that online stuff cannot: think die-cuts, embossing, metallic inks, glued-in items, perforated pull-outs, and so on. These make great leave-behind, particularly for fellows and other young guys who may have never seen an expensive glossy high-end medical brochure.

Help your reps in their few seconds of face time so that they can drive the sales that drive the company.

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Most companies hire lots and lots of people with fancy degrees and pay them big salaries and let them sit around far away from the battle. Meanwhile, they pay other people with far less education very little money to deal more or less non-stop with the company’s customers.

So how hard would it be to train the folks who answer your phone? Or pay them a little better so that you got the very best people for the job? Well, most marketing people never ask that question, but they should.

Training the phone folks need not be all that hard. When these people are first hired, there should be a training program aimed at introducing them to your company, your products, your markets, and the sort of inquiries they are most likely to get by phone. They should get an organizational chart and a thorough understanding of what departments exist, what they do, and what kinds of questions or calls are likely to come for which groups.

You have to assume that the person you just hired to spend all day with your customers does not know your industry. This introductory training should be very basic and ramp up to cover the nuances. In other words, if your company makes ablation catheters for atrial fibrillation, you may have to go over the very basics of atrial fibrillation, explain what a catheter is, talk about what ablations are, and then move on from there.

But introductory training is just that–the beginning. Your phone people should get regular training “booster shots” by getting information about new products, new services, new departments, new hires, and the momentary issues that your company is dealing with.

Include your phone staff in your launch memos–you can even give them launch kits or maybe abbreviated mini-launch kits to help introduce them to new products and services. (I know some marketing types are thinking this is a big waste of time but remember, most of the phone people spend more time in one day chatting with your customers than you do–so why should you deny them information on your latest launch?)

Your phone people are the ones who are the “voice” of the company. You may think that your executives are the voice of the company, but it’s the phone people that most of your customers interact with. You want them to be informed and high-energy and enthusiastic. So how do you drum up enthusiasm? I think one good way is to include them in certain marketing meetings (particularly ones about big changes and rah-rah ones) and to be sure that they regularly get marketing goodies like the new T-shirts or coffee mugs or logo pens. Again, I know marketing types who would say this is a waste of time, but shouldn’t your front line people be happy to be at work and excited about your latest product?

I once worked at a company that had just launched a major product. We were testing our phone service at that time and when one of my shills called the main number and asked about the new product, the person answering the phone had never heard of it.

That was not her fault. Her job kept her in a cubicle off the main floor, far away from the marketing and other departments and nobody ever thought to give her information or include her even on email distributions. Furthermore, I would imagine that it was embarrassing and disconcerting to her not to know what was being asked and that made her answer seem curt and even hostile.

If you have marketing guys in your company who resist including phone people in the information loop, you need to start asking yourself: are those the right guys to be in marketing? It costs so little to take your phone front-line people from mediocre to outstanding–and why would you want to keep anybody (especially the guys and gals who answer your phone) in the dark about your company’s products?

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However, most good medical marketing types need to know how to write passably well, so here is how. I cannot promise that I can make you an adept and agile writer, but I can probably fix a few things you are doing wrong.

So here are my top 10 tips to fix your writing without having to read a book, go back to school, or sign up for a home-study course.

1. WRITE LIKE YOU TALK. That sounds counter-intuitive but remember, if your English teacher knew how to teach you to write you wouldn’t be in this fix right now. Most of us are able to communicate our ideas passably well when we speak. So when in doubt, just write down what you want to say. (Some of us sit down “to write” and that sounds ponderous and scary. Instead, sit down and write down what you want to say when you actually do get around to “writing.” Nine times out of ten that draft is going to be close to good-enough.)

2. USE THE RIGHT WORDS. There is a laundry commercial on right now in which the company promotes a vehicle it uses to go into disaster areas and wash clothes for people living in the area. A woman beams at this service and says something to the effect that people have no idea how basic the essentials are until you don’t have them. Wonderful sentiment, wrong words. She probably meant to say that people have no idea how essential the basics are. Edit everything you write and ask yourself: “What am I actually saying here? What do these words really mean?”

3. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. Most people who write poorly really do not have anything to say. Make sure before you start that you have something worth sharing.

4. FORGET THE RULES. Some people say that you should write in the active voice only and avoid the passive. That isn’t true if you are writing scientific texts, academic texts, or how-to manuals. In those cases, the passive is much more useful (and better understood). Some people say you should use a lot of action verbs. That is great if you’re writing a novel but it won’t necessarily help a how-to text or a contract. Some writing-counselors suggest you use lots of adjectives. That is going to make your brochure seem overdone. The point is: forget the rules. Write like you talk and say what you mean.

5. THINK 1-2-3. A lot of bad writing occurs because the author is trying to describe a sequence of events or steps and omits one or puts them in the wrong order. I once read a manual that said things like, “Attach the barrel to the syringe, after having filled the barrel with sterile solution prepared according to directions in the refill manual.” This is a disaster. A person reading this has to backup too far … You’re telling him to attach the barrel to the syringe but then he has to go back and fill it with the sterile solution … and then back up from there to prepare the solution … and to do that he has to find another manual. Always go in order.

6. MAKE LIFE EASY ON YOUR READER. Here is another one of my favorite disaster manuals. This was a software manual. The company produced four different versions of a software product which were all quite similar to each other. Each software version had its own manual. Now assuming the software was named Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, the Gold Manual stated simply, “This product has all of the features of the Platinum Software Product with the exception of A, B, and C.” What the manual did not do was write about those features or provide the Platinum Manual. It assumed that if you had the Gold version of the software, you could get the Platinum manual (which you could not) and then you would read it and mark out the things that did not apply (which you could only figure out if you had the Gold manual). This was possibly the worst written thing I ever read although it was grammatically correct and contained no typos.  It made it almost impossible for the reader to know what the reader needed to know.

7. HAVE A PERSONALITY. Most medical companies are busy beating personality out of their brands, but isn’t personality what makes Nike and McDonald’s and Apple so special? I agree that a medical brochure about oncology drugs should not be a joke book, but emotions such as enthusiasm, passion, wit, and intelligence are very acceptable. Do not be afraid to let your personality (and your enthusiasm) shine through in your writing. Remember, at the end of the day, marketing is about one guy talking to another guy. Personality helps.

8. DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Medical companies often try to keep writers isolated and away from patients, sales reps, customers, and medical procedures. The best writing is done by people who know what they’re talking about. Don’t write about what an operation is like until you’ve seen one (or two or ten). Don’t explain how to program an infusion pump until you know how to do it yourself. The more you know, the better you’ll write.

9. HIRE HELP. Many people hesitate to hire writers and editors, but they are very useful and I say this even if you more or less write most of the article or brochure or content yourself. These folks can smooth out rough edges, give you great feedback, and check to be sure that your grammar is kosher and the footnotes are in the right format. Most professional writers work with editors; do you think you need less support?

10. READ WHAT YOU WROTE, ideally a day or two later, and try to put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Does the text make sense? Does it do what you want it to do (inform, persuade, convince, instruct)?

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And the most magnificent thing about marketing is that it really has not changed much over the centuries. True, the technologies have changed and so has the lingo and the vehicles, but the basic principles stay the same.

Marketing is the art of getting people to pick you. This means you have to offer something that they want. Furthermore, your offering has to have the right price tag and conditions. To find the right offering, you need to know who you’re trying to get to pick you. Then you should make your offering convenient, friendly, and appealing.

Nobody is going to know about your offering unless you tell them. Marketing involves a lot of tell-tell-tell. There are many lawyer types running around now who would have you believe that any representation of your product in a positive light is some kind of breach of ethics. Your medical company needs to let people know what you have and not be afraid to make it sound appealing.

Finally, marketing involves following up with your customers. Once a customer buys, he or she is a powerful force for your business. It’s much easier to make repeat sales than initial sales, so customers should be treated as VIPs. You should also follow up with service and support.

And that’s marketing old-school.

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Well, most people are not very good at email. Your email can appropriately represent what you want to say and instill in that person the emotions you wish to inspire … or it can instill some other emotions that you don’t wish to inspire, such as confusion or fear or anger or irritation or disbelief.

There is an old saying that etiquette exists so that ladies and gentlemen never insult another person accidentally. That should be your idea with email: if somebody gets offended by your email it should only be because you wanted to offend them.

Here are 10 tips you can put to use right now to help your emails say what you want them to say (and nothing more or less):

1. If you have to be clever, save it for the subject line. A catchy or clever subject line can help your email get opened. Even corporations will let you use a little levity here, but make sure you’re really witty if you try to be witty. Otherwise, be factual. When in doubt, clarity is a good policy.

2. Don’t use cute email names, even in your private accounts, if there is even a remote possibility that anybody from your serious business world will see those accounts. So SmokinHotBabe27 and BugaBoo and CrazyDave are out.

3. We all should know by now that all caps is the online equivalent of shouting. Don’t use all caps. But remember all that fancy stuff (fonts, underlines, colored text, images, sayings, etc.) makes your emails harder to read. Clarity is king in the corporate world. There is nothing wrong with plain text. (As a matter of fact, a lot of big-time marketers are shying away from fancy emails in favor of plain text since plain text gets taken more seriously!)

4. Try to be extra courteous. Say “hello” or “good morning.” Make appropriate wishes (“Happy New Year!” “Aren’t you glad it’s Friday?” or “Hope you survived the launch!”). Ask appropriate questions if they are relevant (“Did you get my report?” or “Have you seen the new logo?”) but only if they are neutral and won’t provoke a visceral or strong reaction. And then make sure you say please, thank you, and other kindnesses (“I appreciate your help!”). Remember, the email has no way to convey your tone of voice, body language, or other things in which we express our friendliness. You have to do it all in words.

5. If you are writing something complicated, make sure you write it in the right order. If a chain of events happened that you need to relate, say A happened, then B, then C. Keep everything brief (when in doubt, be briefer than you think you ought to be).

6. Most emails are written for a reason; keep that in the forefront of your mind as you write. Either you want to convey something (“This confirms that we sent your order today”) or you want to solicit an answer or response. If you are conveying something say it in the first sentence as clearly as you can. If you want a response, ask the question as clearly as you can as the very last thing in the email. And don’t ask more than one question. Most people who respond to an email respond to one question and that question is the very last thing. (Yes, that’s right. Two questions means two emails, at least for most people.)

7. Believe it or not, the simpler your language and tone, the better. Big words are only OK if you are emailing some snooty-cazooty academic type or if those words are part of your business jargon. For most emails, use the simple basic words since big words are more likely to have connotations to them that can twist your meaning and intention. For instance, if you need a response quickly, say, “Please let me know as soon as you can.” That sounds neutral. But if you said, “I would be most grateful for an expeditious reply” that sounds sort of confusing (promoting the dreaded “huh?” response). And if you say, “An immediate response is required” it sounds sort of pushy. The best words for just saying what you mean (no more, no less) are the simple ones.

8. Edit your email. That’s right, after you write it, re-read it and pretend you are the recipient. Is it clear? Does it make sense? In most cases, you will find it is way too long. You may introduce some tangential information, get things mixed up, or go into unnecessary detail. If you re-read your email and wind up discarding about 25% of what you wrote on the first pass, you’re about right.

9. Never ever put anything in email that you would not want read aloud in a court case. Never put anything in an email that you would not want all people involved (even if they’re not recipients) to read. This means that if you think Bob is a knucklehead, you should avoid putting that in your email. Emails have the possibility to pop up at the most inconvenient times so you don’t want to leave a written record behind. (If you must say troublesome things, pick up the phone or have a private closed-door meeting.)

10. Send the email to the right people. Check it at least twice. This has gotten more people into trouble than any other email problem. Ever written, “Bob is a knucklehead” and then sent it to Bob? This is an error you can easily avoid if you follow our tips 9 and 10. Furthermore, you should make sure you send your email to the right folks. If you’re sending it to a special committee or launch team, make sure all of the key members receive the notice. Being excluded on an email list can make people paranoid, crazy, irritated, or sad. If you are not sure who should receive an email, you can sometimes get by in sending to it one key person with the note, “You’re the only person receiving this email; please forward it as you see fit.”

These tips may sound obvious–and they are, perhaps–but how many mis-fired emails do you see in the business world? A few simple tips can help your emails be more effective.

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You have to know why you have writer’s block. You have it because somewhere in your past you took an English class and in that English class you had a scary sort of teacher who made you feel inadequate. This was a person who ranted and railed about inscrutable things like dangling participles and misplaced modifiers. She usually talked about things like syntax, and it was her life’s mission to speak and write perfect English.

You might think you left her back at your old high school, but you didn’t. It’s gotten a whole lot worse than that. Now she has become your inner English teacher.

Your inner English teacher will prevent you from ever writing well or effectively. The reason is that she is misguided enough to believe that it is better to not write at all than to write something that might be imperfect. And since the rules for perfection are inscrutable, unknowable, and usually revealed to you after you’ve violated them, you are naturally fearful.

She is the reason you have writer’s block. Here is what you must do. Kill her. Now I am talking about getting rid of the little imaginary person in your head. Shut her up once and for all.

Only after she is gone can you relax for a second. Now here is how you write when you have writer’s block:

1. Find something you like to write on–computer, legal pad, spiral notebook, even a whiteboard will do. Without worrying for one instant if you are using proper English and grammar, write down very roughly and briefly what you are trying to say. This can be in sentences, bullet points, as a list, or just in key words.
2. Review what you’ve written and make sure you have covered all of the points. If you’re writing about a new product and want to mention four specific features, make sure you’ve listed all four features.
3. Review what you’ve written for a second and decide what emotion or action you want to convey. Are you trying to be persuasive? Enthusiastic? Are you trying to warn somebody? Do you want to try to sound clinical? Humorous? See if you can’t get a little bit of that emotion into your rough draft.
4. Now without trying to write well, sit down to write your draft. Remember that drafts are rough. Mistakes are allowed. Do not allow yourself to get distracted by the dictionary or thesaurus. Using your outline or whatever it is you’ve created (your “notes” in the first three steps), write what you want to say as if you were saying it to your target audience. If you’re writing about a new medical product to physicians, just pretend you’re talking to a particularly friendly doctor and tell him your ideas. Use your notes to be sure you don’t forget any key points.  (By the way, if it’s easier, just speak your thoughts into a recorder and then get your recording transcribed: instant draft.)
5. Just to annoy the late inner English teacher, spell a few words wrong on purpose.
6. Read over your draft at least once to be sure that you covered your main points and that it makes sense. It does not have to read like you’re a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize but it should make sense.
7. Put your draft away for at least 24 hours, if this is possible. Then come back and re-read it.
8. Now it’s time to polish. This is the real work of writing. Now it’s time to fix the spelling. Get out the thesaurus if you’re unhappy with some word choices. Look up the grammar issues or ask somebody with good editorial skills to edit your manuscript. You may have to flesh out the text in a few places. More likely, you may have to trim down some other areas where you got carried away.

That’s it. That’s how writers write. It’s also why a lot of people hire their writing done.

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