Welcome to Episode 52. Today we’re taking a deep dive into the power of words with linguist Eloise Leeson.
Eloise works as a freelance communications consultant and copywriter for both agencies and brands and I think you’ll find this interesting whether you’re thinking about copy in the context of your client’s business or your agency’s business.
She shares with me:
1. How to recognise inherent bias in the copy you read
2. Some common mistakes businesses make with their copy and some practical tips to help you avoid them
3. What holds us back from asking our clients for honest feedback about our business proposition and messaging
4. Insights about what it’s like to work as a freelancer
And loads more nuggets of copywriting usefulness. I really enjoyed this chat, I learned a lot and felt I needed to completely overhaul my website copy afterwards!
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Transcript:
Jenny 00:03
Today I’m delighted to be joined by Eloise Leeson. Eloise is a communications consultant and a trained linguist. Her consultancy is called Olim and she helps businesses close the gap between what they think they’re saying and what’s actually being received by their customers. So I’m really excited about diving into this. Her unique approach to verbal and written communication helps her clients achieve much greater engagement with their customers. And I’ve been reading amongst many other impressive results, she’s achieved for her clients, things like a 344% increase in campaign reach in eight weeks, using completely new messaging. Media engagement increased by 337% in two weeks, call to action responses increased by 288% in two weeks, so many, many more results for her clients. So I’m super excited about diving into this Eloise and I’m really excited about having you on. So welcome.
Eloise 01:01
Thank you so much for having me today. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.
Jenny 01:05
So would you mind starting out Eloise just telling us a bit about you, your background, and who you help, and how you do it? Is that four questions in there?
Eloise 01:17
No, I love it. So in terms of my background, I hesitate to use the words chequered past, because it makes me sound like I’ve possibly been in and out of prison which mum, I swear, I haven’t! But really, I think what’s been really helpful in leading up to the point where Olim was able to kind of create the results it does for its clients, is that I’ve had lots of different experience, but all joined by the same thread of comms. So I did linguistics at the University of Aberdeen, and then wound up teaching co-curricular courses there for a couple of years afterwards. And that was amazing in terms of workshop engagement, and far more focused on the soft skills and a lot of the real hard academia that obviously, elbows deepen for however many years you are at uni for. And after that, did a kind of a career 90 degree turn and wound up working with a team that launched Deliveroo into Scotland. And that went from university beam of massive kind of public facing institution to very agile, really massive growth startup. And that was just an enormous learning curve. Then I did a bit of a wobble with the media advertising sales, which I was rubbish at. So all credit to the people that kept me on for as long as they did, because honestly, I was shocking, I can’t ask for money over the phone! And then I was headhunted through a contact that I had met during my time at Deliveroo, and actually wound up working agency side for a phenomenal brand agency called Lux. And they were very focused on food and drinks sector so my kind of hospitality, restaurant, food and drink experience lent itself to that. But in all those roles, the focus was on leveraging comms, engaging people, making people feel good, making them feel valued. And that was across a whole different span of relationships, whether it was buyer seller relationships, whether it was looking after kind of accounts or things like that. And then in September 2019, I founded Olim. I was on sabbatical in Canada and initially, a very failed attempt to be a food and drink journalist. I thought that’d be great. I’ll do that. Again, much like asking for money over the phone, infinitely better than other things. And there’s the kind of the food and drink writing is best left to the ex. But Olim has been running since then, so a couple of years. But it’s been an absolutely incredible journey, pandemic notwithstanding. And in terms of the approach that we take, or that I take, I think looking at language as a tool, rather than as, I think it often gets seen as being, Oh, you’re just good with words. It’s just kind of something that happens naturally. You either have it or you don’t. You’re lucky that that’s happening and you’ve had great success, but we’re not really sure why. And in actual fact, when it comes to the principles of linguistics and things like critical discourse analysis, able to take the kind of academic rigour and apply it to the, whatever campaign work we’re doing, whatever messaging that we need to get out there, and really see some massive results on the back of that, and I think a lot of it is just making it conscious, because so often, we don’t think before we speak and that is as true for business as it is for our everyday interactions.
Jenny 04:23
Wow, I love I mean, critical discourse analysis. Can you just tell me what that is?
Eloise 04:30
So, critical discourse analysis was a discipline that was, and I’m going to mangle University of Lancaster if memory serves and crumbs now, Norman Fairclough was the academic who coined the term and really critical discourse analysis or CDA is a principle where you’re looking for inherent bias in texts, typically in journalistic texts, articles, thought pieces, things like that and just kind of really reading between the lines to say, what’s actually being presented here? So Daily Mail, really great example of that, they might use the term, Melanie Sykes 48, on beach, having it all hang out. And what we’re reading in there is like how dare a woman of 48 reveal her body on a beach or, we see bias in headlines like, wife of Olympic medalist receives honour at award, you could have just said, Woman honoured for hardcore work that she’s done. So it has a lot to say about what’s the relationship that we see people have here. And obviously, this is a very top line, basic level. You can get really into the sort of the biases, into the inferences that we don’t realise are present in the text, but they’re very subtly either radicalising people potentially, or they are influencing the way you think about things because what we absorb subconsciously does take root. So we tend to you know, you are what you eat, we often think what we read. And a lot of the times we don’t realise. So a classic example here is looking at the use of ‘alien’, when it comes to the US immigration office. So referring to any non American citizen as ‘an alien’, is really good because well, it’s not really good at all. What it does is it strips people of humanity. It is easier to do things to ‘aliens’ than it is do them to humans because you’re denying someone’s inherent humanity. When you look at the repeated instances of the word ‘alien’ and attacks around even just taxation, for example, the density of that word, showing up time and time again reinforces this idea that someone who is not an American citizen with a green card and a right to live in the States, is somehow less or less worthy, or even to be feared. And that can set up a very dangerous precedent that we see when we have border guards with whips. And obviously, that’s more than inherent racism in a white supremacist society, then also moving into things like, how do we treat people who are applying for a visa? And it’s a very interesting what inferences are we receiving that we’re not consciously filtering out for ourselves. And who would have the time to filter it all out consciously? So that’s really where a lot of that comes from, it’s very, very interesting. Really worth doing a deeper dive or having a look at if anyone’s curious for themselves.
Jenny 07:29
You’ve made me more curious, you’ve just opened this Pandora’s box. I’m thinking, wow, you must have a field day reading texts or reading magazines and newspapers.
Eloise 07:40
It definitely makes you more conscious of what’s being said. So, and again, it also forces us in a good way to read between the lines, and stuff that comes across as being sensationalist, is it actually? Or is it just driving a sort of a sale, or a driving a story? And conversely, whilst critical discourse analysis can identify a lot of negativity, you can use it as a power for good. And if you want to help someone get more of what they want, or if you want to promote a message, it’s really clear and honest, you can do that if you’re conscious around the words that you’re using, and how you put them together. And what’s interesting is, I remember being warned at university, that linguists need to be very careful of manipulation, because there are lots of social cues involved in language and how we use it. So if you and I were in the same room, for example, Jenny, and I said, Oh, gosh, it’s a bit cold in here isn’t it? And the window was open, you might to all intents and purposes, jump up and close the window. Now, I haven’t said, Jenny, would you please go and close the window. But the fact that I’m conscious of what I’m saying, and I know it’s going to trigger some kind of response in you, I’ve got to be very careful about how I do that. So what I do is I find myself often just standing up and closing windows now because I didn’t want to feel guilty about having said to someone, Gosh it’s cold, go and close the window. And there’s really interesting about the things that we say. And they’re also known as bids for attention in terms of sort of more relationship theory and John Gottman side of things. So when it comes to one of us, or say you’re with a partner, or a romantic cobbler, and you say things like, Oh, gosh, look at the birds, aren’t they gorgeous? You’re not actually saying, I want you to get up, come over here and look at the birds. You’re saying, I want you to interact with me and respond to me. And apparently, couples or relationships that have a higher percentage of responses to bids for connection are more likely to be successful in the long run than those that completely ignore them. And I think that is as true in business as it is for anything else. Your customers want to talk to you. But you need to listen to what they’re asking you to respond to in the first place.
Jenny 09:46
Amazing. This has just become so much more fascinating than I ever thought. And you’re right, I mean because you’re in the business and you’re living and breathing this stuff you probably, maybe overthink at certain times? Don’t overthink because you’re over analysing yourself, how is this going to come across? So talking about customers, your clients, what are some of the most common mistakes you see when it comes to their own customer communications? And also, what are the ones that you find really unforgiveable?
Eloise 10:18
Love, love, love these questions. So
I think when it comes to the kind of common errors that I see are, thinking that you know, that what you’ve said has been received in the way you intended it to be received. So we’ve all had this, where we’ve said something and we’ve had to explain ourselves afterwards. And I think that’s true in emails, particularly, we will say something it’ll come across as being brusque and we have HR departments and interventions for things like this because so often, in the digital world, tone is not construed as well in text as it is face to face. And I think that what’s very interesting is that a lot of people will assume that writing an email in the same way, the idea that this makes the same sense in your head as it does in mine. So not checking understanding is a very common mistake.
Assuming that we know what the customer wants is another really common mistake. And then once you’ve had that realisation, Oh, actually, maybe I’m not sure what my customer is looking for, the unforgiveable sin is not going and asking them and confirming that bias that you have. So when customers and clients come and say, Well, we know that our customers want X and Y, I’m like, Fantastic, where did you get that data? Oh, well, we know that they want that, because we’ve told them, that’s what they want. And I’m going, timeout, you’re not necessarily Steve Jobs, and even so, Apple went through a lot of tweaks to get to the product that they got the end. But we are not all of us so brilliant at what we do that we can assume to have totally altered the market and people’s desires just by being there and assuming that you don’t know what your customers want, or why your customers do business with you, is one of the quickest ways to turn them off. Because you’re speaking a different language, they’re not listening to you. And rather than changing or translating what it is that you’re saying, you’re shouting at them more loudly in a language they don’t understand or have any interest in learning, which is going to annoy them because they’re not deaf, they’re not hard of hearing in that sense. And what they are, is people who are speaking something else entirely, and you haven’t taken the time to find out what that is, and yet you’ve had every opportunity. And even just something as simple as going to your sales team, identifying someone who speaks to the customers, every single day. If you’re a large business and you have a call centre, you have a goldmine of information at your fingertips. And when people call up and frustrated about the Wi Fi, it’s probably not that their bandwidth has shrunk, it’s probably that like there’s a child screaming in the background, they can’t get on Zooms, do their homework, they’re aware they’ve got a deadline coming up. And it’s all of the human interaction that goes on at the same time. And I think that thinking about either not going in and doing the research and finding out what your customers do actually want and how you can help them get it, or thinking of them singularly as pieces of data. Both are gross. And please don’t if we can avoid them. That would make this one linguist very happy in the process.
Jenny 13:08
What other sources of research can they do? Like the call centre one is a fantastic one, because it’s actually real life customer voices, you can hear the tone, the type of language they use. If you went to work with a client, let’s say didn’t have that type of resource or research? What other methodologies, is that a starting point for you to encourage them to do that?
Eloise 13:32
Definitely. Having a conversation with someone. So whether or not that takes the form of, I mean you can outsource third party research if that’s something that your company is happy to invest in. Or just picking up the phone and asking some of your best customers, Why is it that you are still doing business with us? What attracted you here in the first place? But I think one of the keys to that work being successful, is thinking of three really important questions. And Marcus Cauchi is amazing at this from a sales front, where he talks about, Did today meet your expectations in terms of the meeting we’ve just had? And I hope I’m not butchering him here, but did today meet your expectations? And have you seen better when it comes to sales pitches, obviously very specific to sales pitches? And
I think that one of the reasons that we don’t always want to go out there and engage with our clients is because it makes us vulnerable. And we’re terrified of negative feedback. We’re terrified of being found out that we’re doing it wrong. But I promise everybody that the only thing worse than finding out you’ve been doing something wrong, is persisting and doing it wrong and doing the ostrich and sticking your head in the sand and not doing anything to correct it. So picking up the phone and calling your customer and saying, Look, this might sound a bit mad, but I’m really trying to drill down into the language around why it is that people would do business with us. So could I, just for five minutes understand what was it that attracted you to this business? How have we helped you to meet your needs? Did we solve the problem you thought you had or was it something else that we actually wound up correcting for you that you didn’t think of? And so often we have a perception of our business and its usefulness to other people but their perception of what’s actually useful is totally different.
And a lot of the time we develop this subconscious story around, Oh, well, I’m an accountant, and therefore, I help people with numbers, because I’m good at numbers. And that’s what I do, and I’m trustworthy and I’ll get stuff done on time. Whereas in actual fact, as an accountant, as an accountancy firm, or as a freelance accountant, what you might offer your clients, in fact instead, is financial serenity. They expect you to be good with numbers, they expect you to be trustworthy, because if you’re handling my sensitive financial data, that’s kind of the bar and if you’re not meeting that we really shouldn’t be in business together. So when it comes to looking then at why someone doesn’t come with you, it’s far more emotive than I think we ever give ourselves credit for. And lots of businesses don’t necessarily like that, because it’s not easy to measure. But what you can do is go out and see, well, which words show up time and time again? Or which words are we using about our business that we’re not even thinking about because we’re so used to hearing them? So often,
I will have clients that say, we know the language on the website isn’t working, because we’re not seeing the conversion rate that we want to? Can you help? Absolutely. And I’ll say talk to me about your business and tell me where it is that you want it to be going? And what does that look like? And they’ll say, Okay, so we want to be very much a luxury brand, aspirational, it’s a gorgeous product, they’re really well made, they’re thoughtful, we want people to come and buy these products at a premium price. Fantastic. With that understanding in mind, if that’s your story, I will then look at the website copy and see something like 28% of the adjectives that you’re using indicate mass market affordability. We don’t even realise that because there might be this fundamental space difference between what I think consciously about what I’m doing, and subconsciously, what I really believe. And we don’t often marry those two up. Linguistics is about taking all of that subconscious language, that subconscious language toolkit, and making it conscious so that we can use it for good, ideally.
Jenny 17:13
Absolutely fascinating. And I think from what you said, it just seems like a really obvious investment in the business from the outset doesn’t it, that you would want to invest in for it to then work for you, especially given some of the results that I shared at the beginning? So tell me, can you share some perhaps specific examples? Because I’m sure people listening to this are thinking, wow, they’re thinking about their emails, tonality. What you said before, I always say to account managers, if it’s slightly sensitive the conversation, don’t do it on email, pick the phone up so that they can hear your tone, they can hear your intention. So you’ve already shared, and I’m sure business owners listening are thinking, I need to look at that website copy again. Did we just stuff it full of keywords, because it was, for SEO purposes. Perhaps you could share some examples of your clients Elosie, where you’ve applied the skills of linguistics and your understanding of behaviours and inference and just tell us about what results that you’ve achieved?
Eloise 18:24
Okay, so in terms of, probably one of the best examples that I have is, I work pro bono as a board member for a charity called What, Why, Children in Hospital. And What, Why, Children in Hospital, WWCH, both are a bit of a mouthful. Amazing charity that makes videos for children and their families about hospital procedures and what you’re going to experience when you go in there. So you probably don’t play MRI with Teddy all the time, and that’s fine. So when you’re six years old, and you’re going to go in for an MRI scan, or an ECG, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, it can be so scary and so daunting. So what we do is we make videos that help children see exactly what happens. What does the gritty paste feel like? And can we ask lots of questions? And is it going to hurt? And what that does is it helps to reduce anxiety by a huge amount. And it helps parents feel much more in control and increases the success rate of procedures being done, well, first time around. So that charity, phenomenal work, had been the five year anniversary back in 2020 so it’s been running for six years now. And I wanted to support that work by reaching out to MSPs, Members of Scottish Parliament, and saying, Could we have a parliamentary motion passed for the recognition of the work of this charity? So I cold emailed something like 55/65 MSPs, just to say, and the way that I wrote that email was very, very quick. And I think this is where a lot of us lose it with email, is we think I’ve got to put in as much information as possible because that’s what you need, and the more information that you have the more you’re going to trust me that I’m an authority and that doesn’t work. People don’t want to know. What you want to do is you want to couch it in, Here’s what I’m asking, This is why it’s beneficial, And here are the kind of proof points as to why this is worth your time. Thank you. And off you go. And I think the way that I wrote that email, and it was literally a bit of a copy and paste exercise, don’t tell anyone but she’s saying it on the podcast, brilliant, but the email was, Hi, so and so, my name is Eloise Leeson, I work with a charity that does this, this and this. Would it be possible to have this phenomenal work done? These are the results we’ve achieved? Here’s a bit of a statement about what we do. Would that be of interest to you? Absolutely no worries if not. Thank you so much for your time, either way, sincerely. And I have something like, I had a response from almost every single MSP. And I don’t know if it’s because it was a piece of positive news that landed in their inbox. But we had a parliamentary motion passed within a week. And it was ludicrous to me that from a cold email from absolutely no introduction, I sent them whilst I was in Canada, to people that hadn’t possibly heard of charity before and something like six or seven people, once the Parliament motion had been passed, said, Can we support you further? Is there an exposition? Do you have a poster? Is there a stand? What else could we do to further the work? And I think that one of the things when it comes to that technique, and that response is, when you make an email focused on the individual you’re asking something of, rather than bashing people with information, you’re going to get a much better response when you make it easy for people to respond to you. Either by using things like bullet points, keeping things really short or really sweet. And then also not making it a burden on someone to do. I’ve also found people love to help. And I think that’s maybe a bit of a misnomer. It’s not so much technique. But I think we often find ourselves predisposed to thinking that people don’t want to help. And actually, I really do believe that we do, broadly speaking. On a more granular note, looking at the language that your current prospects are using, you will see a massive increase in messaging uptick when you’re using a language that’s familiar to them. So obviously talking about my sort of lost in translation piece earlier, but when it comes to the key message campaign or messaging campaign, totally new messaging that being used, that was actually for another charity client, but really focused on what has the feedback been from the people that we serve there? And what is that community looking for? And rather than assuming that it was sort of very top lofty, Oh, well, our values are X and Y, it was actually no, this just makes me feel better about going home at the end of the day, or I don’t have to worry about always having food in the pantry, because I know I can go somewhere and get that. So messages of reassurance rather than, We’re committed to food equality. Those don’t match up. It’s what’s the actual sentiment that we want to produce at the end of the day. And sometimes I think we get so lost in, here’s our messaging and here’s our values and here’s our mission and this is our brand proposition. I think all that’s really valuable. It’s all really worthy. But unless you’re thinking about what does that sound like to the person that’s going to receive that at the end of the day? And that’s where we saw that, it was a 337.5% increase in engagement, came from literally just changing the messaging from being something that didn’t resonate with people whatsoever to, Oh, that sounds like me, that’s an experience I’ve had before,I get that. And I think a lot of the time, one of my real frustrations is actually around language accessibility. And looking at things like second person pronoun usage on your website. So
here’s a technique that everybody can adopt sooner rather than later, ideally, on your websites, or your sales aids or wherever. Gather the word count. So take the piece of text that you want to look at, the word count, figure out what that is. And then do a quick search for you and your. Make sure it doesn’t come up with words like young or youthful, for example. But look at the words you and your and then run that percentage against your word count. A lot of B2B websites or technical websites or sort of more cyber focused sites can be as low as 0.02, 0.01, 0.1%. You want to aim with an average between roughly 3 and 6%. So that the person you’re speaking to is like, They mean me, or they’re telling you, possibly me? Oh, that’s great. Okay. And rather than saying we or our which is inherently self referential, look instead at you, your, what problem do you have that we solve? And when you break it down to this very basic blocks, you will see a much, much better rate of engagement and a much more positive sentiment, which again, slightly harder to measure, but so important in terms of the buyer journey and team people up for that potential eventual sales interaction.
I hope that answers the question. Maybe got into slight ramble territory?
Jenny 24:52
No. Again, I think this is really useful for people to listen to. And when you say it, it’s kind of obvious, but I feel many people, I don’t mean this is obvious, I just mean, I’ve committed it, on I don’t even want you to look at my website! But we’re very good at talking about ourselves. We do this, we are this and we, we, we, we. And I think what’s coming through for me is, was there are a huge part of psychology or behavioural science that you studied, that’s wrapped around in linguistics?
Eloise 25:25
I think because linguistics is, it’s inherently human, isn’t it, the language is how we make sense of one another. Language is how we make sense of the world. I think that linguistics and psychology will always interweave. I didn’t overtly study psychology, I think what I’ve learned in my career to date is and I also have to credit my dad for this one, is that focusing on the other person will always get you better results than if you focus on yourself. And I think that we have forgotten that, ultimately. We live in a culture where we highlight ourselves on Instagram, we show off our content on LinkedIn, and Facebook. And I think sometimes it’s easy for businesses to forget that we’re here to solve problems, and we are here to serve. And when people say, so what’s your five year plan? And what kind of success do you want? I want to do the best work for the right people for as long as I can. And that’s not changing really. That’s something that I, it’s a privilege to be here to be doing this work. But I’m not doing it for myself. I think, sometimes I expect someone to come to me and say Eloise, you have to go back to real work now. Like you need to stop playing, you need to go back and do the real work. And I think that when it comes to psychology, I don’t know if it is psychology. I think it’s just a principle of trying to serve the people that you can. And helping people that you can. And if you can solve their problem and if they’re going to, if they value the solution that you offer, and you have that human to human interaction, if it results in a transaction, that’s fantastic. But if all you’re chasing is the money in and around that, you will make your relationships transactional. I think, rather than psychology, per se, I think relational theory and relationship theory is a really great space for salespeople to look at because you’re selling to a human being. And maybe the psychology and that is really interesting too but looking at how do we relate to each other? How can we become more empathetic? How can we pause and listen? And then rather than listen with the intent of replying, how can we listen to respond? And I think that will stand everyone in great stead, not just in the sales round, but in any relationship that you have, whether it’s in business or personally. And that surely can only be a good thing.
Jenny 26:18
I’m hearing that. Yes, because I mean, we’ve been talking a large part about website copy and emailing. But it’s actually, certainly for the audience listening account managers who are responsible for nurturing those existing client relationships, for developing existing client relationships, for getting referrals to other parts of the business, and it’s a communication skill. It comes down to the communication and it’s equally as relevant, isn’t it, in how we develop those relationships?
Eloise 28:20
And I think that, when it comes to and if anyone’s curious, I’m not gonna talk about linguistics until me and several other people were blue in the face, but I think that if you’re curious about it, it’s really worth having a look at, what are some of the things that I can do just to raise my awareness about how I come across- recording your own conversations, whilst it’s horrifying, really, really valuable and reflecting on what was the language that I used in that last interaction with my account, or over communicating is another really good one. So again, not to kind of to make yourself feel good about it, but I’m also quite bad at this actually, is remembering to communicate everything. I’m really good at replying in my head, read about actually writing that email and sending it to someone. But looking at, that was a really positive interaction, what were some of the words I used or I heard someone use or looking at any feedback or testimonials that you receive from the work that you do, picking out some of the words that you are seeing time and time again. So there will be themes of how people love the way that you work with them. And that might be, Oh, I thought that they, always on time, did what they said they were going to do when they said they were going to do it, made me feel really, really welcomed. So you can then translate that into future potential interviews. If you’re looking for a new role and you can say, I know that I’ve got a knack for making people feel like they’re welcome. I know I’ve got a knack for helping people to feel comfortable with the work that we’re going to do in terms of setting expectation and let them know that I’m going to do this and forge that trust and that rapport. And suddenly you have a much better understanding of yourself, which means you can sort of sell yourself, market yourself with much more integrity. And people will trust you because when you’re saying that, you know it’s not a lie. And I think a lot of the time, we have very, very high standards for ourselves, and far gentler standards of other people. And I saw on a quote, actually, from someone I really admire in the Twittersphere the other day, that actually, our self image is often a couple of years behind where it actually is. So our perception of ourselves, is often a couple of years behind where it is right now. And I think that’s very true. I still feel like a fledgling and I’m definitely still a fledgling business owner. But what I’m so grateful for, and I’m very surprised by now, as I find people come to me and say, Could you give me some advice on pricing? And I’ll go, Yes, absolutely. Here’s how I would approach this conversation. That’s what I do. This is the outcome. And I go, Gosh, I’ve hopefully helped someone and someone’s come back to me to say amazing, a much higher rate than I thought I was going to get. Thanks so much for all that help. And it’s amazing to be able to offer that advice now. But again, in my head, I still feel like a very, very green, very new, and I am, very much so. But it’s funny how we do perceive ourselves in that sphere.
Jenny 31:06
Interesting, very interesting. I didn’t know that was a fact that we think we’re, our self concept of two years behind, fascinating. Just out of interest, I don’t want to let that point go, but without asking you about your pricing advice. Can you tell us a little bit? Can you give us a flavour of what actually you said, because obviously, for account managers, we are always coming up with cost estimates and talking about price with our clients. And it’s actually a bit of a sore point sometimes. It’s often the source of client friction. So just give us your pointers if you have some.
Eloise 31:40
Sure. So one of the things is, we hate to talk about money, because we’ve made it a taboo in society. When money is a taboo in society, I think it tends to only serve people that have a lot of it. So to be empowered, and to be encouraged to say, actually, let’s just have a very open conversation about pricing, and about what’s valuable. And I think what’s really helpful, and I come at this from a freelancers and a freelance business perspective is, and again, credit to Marcus Cauchi, is let’s look at the outcome and the value of the work and the service that I will be providing for you. So as an account manager, looking at the service that we’re going to provide, what is that worth to you? What is that going to save you in terms of your time, stress, bandwidth, all of that good stuff at the end of the day? And what is that going to be? What are you prepared to do there? So I think asking people to be really honest with you. And also you have to have a certain stand where you’re like, let’s not be ridiculous with the pricing, let’s not either be greedy, that’s not a great space to people, let’s not undervalue ourselves either. And also, when it comes to freelancers, I think it’s really important to talk about money, because if we don’t, it’s that whole rising tide lifts all boats, is that I think that in particularly in the language too, and I spoke on this before the language professionals networking events, that if we don’t value our own work, who on earth is going to value it for us? And I think sometimes as account managers, it can feel that you are imposing on someone by asking to be properly remunerated for the work that you’re doing, or that the work you’re doing is valuable. So I think if you are concerned around having those conversations, ask more questions of your client, and ask them, So a solution like this, what would it look like when it starts to roll out in your business. What does that look like for you? What does that mean for your diary? Does that mean you get more time back at home with the kids, because you’re using X amount of software that suddenly reduced the amount of admin that you have to do? Does that improve consistency for your clients, especially if you’re business to business? Think about it in terms of well, what’s the ultimate result for your client? So it’s B2B2C in that sense. So more questions around the actual core of the issue. And then reassurance and that kind of biosafety aspect of, look, completely understand you might be ultimately, a little bit nervous about signing on for this, but what can we do to make you feel safer? And it might sound a bit twee, but genuinely being curious about that, and not judging people or not pressuring a sale? That’s no fun either. So yes, again, so it was lots of different bits of advice, but I hope that kind of wrapped itself up together and made some sense?
Jenny 34:18
Absolutely, some great tips there. And you mentioned you were talking to an audience of freelancers and I think this aspect of your journey is actually quite useful for account managers, because some account managers want to go out on their own, either to go freelancing or start a business or in fact, there might be freelancers listening. So I would love for you to share your learnings, because I know you’ve been running the business for two years, but maybe what would you say to someone who’s actually thinking about going out on their own? I think this could be quite useful?
Eloise 34:52
First of all, good for you. Because what a wonderful thing for you to decide what you want to do. And second of all, it’s not for you, that’s totally fine. It still boggles me again, as I said before, that I this is something that I get to do. But what I’ve learned about being a freelancer, is community is everything. Community is everything. And I think it can be very lonely. Let’s be brutally honest about that. It can be an enormously lonely lifestyle if you don’t go out and reach out to your community. Where I work in the language and the marketing, the comm space, but also in copywriting, there is a truly phenomenal community of copywriters here in the UK. And I think that one of the things that I would do, and one of the things that the reason that my business took off the way that it did in the first year, is that I went out and asked people for their advice. And again, people love to help and you don’t have to be pushy with it. And I’m genuinely floored by the generosity of people in terms of their offering of their time and their wisdom, and realise that it’s a gift, it’s a gift to be able to have those conversations with people. But if you don’t know how to do something, or you’re curious about what someone does, just go and ask them. I think that asking is such an underrated superpower. If we can go out there and respectfully ask someone for their guidance, their advice, their insight. I didn’t cold sell my business ever. But what I learned was made by sliding into people’s DMS on LinkedIn, and saying, Hi, my name is Eloise, and I’m a fledgling freelancer, I’m just getting going my business, you do X, Y, and Z and that looks amazing. If you have 25 minutes for a virtual coffee on Zoom, could I hear more about how you got started? Because I would really love to know what that was like for you. Absolutely no worries, if this fills you with cold horror, thank you so much for your time either way. The amount of people, I think something like 80% conversion rate from from that initial contact of people saying, I’d love to tell you about myself, because we love to talk about ourselves, but I’d love to share what it is I’ve learned. So for any account manager going freelance, identify the skills and stuff that you learn, why you want to go freelance? Is it because you need more autonomy? Amazing. Build in processes and systems that protect that autonomy, because what you will find as you go into the workplace, and you want to be autonomous, but suddenly, you now have 12 different clients, you’re going to be pulled in 12 different directions unless you manage that in a really strategic way. So if autonomy is the name of the game, focus on protecting that. If it’s that you want to try new things and do things that are different, amazing. Make sure you sense check that with your community, because there might be a reason that someone doesn’t do something a certain way. And then try and fail. And I think that failing fast was a piece of advice, I received at Deliveroo. And it’s always stuck with me because I hate to fail. I am a recovering perfectionist and the idea of behaviour just makes the whole skin crawl. But one of the things that was helpful was fail fast and fail small. So try lots of different things, release things as you go, don’t wait for anything to be perfect. There will never be a right time for you to go freelance, ever, ever, ever, ever. My business kicked off in the start of the pandemic, in the wake of an awful breakup and a transatlantic move, living in my parents house. And now it’s a business that’s enabled me to buy my first home and be completely financially independent. And the the other thing I would say to freelancers of any kind, give yourself the grace of time. It is really easy to compare our baby steps to someone else’s 100 metre sprint. And we don’t see the time that they spent because we live in an image and an optics focused culture. But give yourself the grace of time. So a month feels like a long time. And a year feels like longer. But when you look back on it, or if you’re saying, Oh, I actually haven’t achieved that much, I’ve only been doing this for two months. Timeout. What does that two months look like repeated six times in a year? What kind of growth does that look like? And I think small and often, and then reflect back on what you’ve achieved. It takes a lot of the pressure off. If you’re going to go freelance give yourself at least a year to see the fruit of what you’re doing come to life. Absolutely.
Jenny 39:09
Would you ever go full time again?
Eloise 39:11
I think it would have to be a very special role to go full time again. It’s a great question. I do miss having colleagues. I do miss having team members and I loved bouncing ideas off one another and as you can tell I’m something of an extrovert. And the camaraderie is wonderful. But at the same time, I think I probably, and hand on heart, would really struggle to take direction. Isn’t that awful? But I would, I think I would struggle to and I think what I also thrive on is, bizarrely the accountability piece, which is someone who has a bit of a cowardly lion in lives past and the accountability piece makes me want to do better work. And I think that’s a really great place to be as well. So yeah.
Jenny 39:52
Just out of interest, another question really, because of the people who are listening, are you open to working with both agencies and kind of clients directl? Do you work via agencies sometimes?
Eloise 40:04
I would love to, I really would. So I think there are some really brilliant agencies out there. And what I love about agencies is the kind of the creative space. And I think it is. It can be a really fertile ground for creative ideas. I also thrive on very direct client contact. So as long as I can get face time with a client, mainly to avoid repetitions of understanding. So if I’m doing a scoping call or a workshop with a client, if I were to get that second hand from a third party, I’d be really worried about wanting to go in and sense check with the client directly. So it varies. I would love to. I think agencies are churning out some phenomenal work at the moment. But at the same time,still to get face to face sense checking. Can I pass that back to you? Am I correct? Yeah, just double checking all the things.
Jenny 40:50
Amazing. It just feels like your skill set is something additional that maybe, because in the creative space at the moment, the work is booming. There’s a bit of a shortage of people. So I’m sure someone listening to this, somewhere has got a shortage and they’re thinking, Oh, my goodness, maybe Eloise will come and work with us. Talking about your clients again, where do you see that your clients, people who you work with, get in their own way?
Eloise 41:16
Oh, oh, sorry. Sorry.
Jenny 41:21
Do you have someone in mind?
Eloise 41:23
No, not particularly. I mean, if I’m being candid, I think we’re all really good at getting in our own way Jenny, and I think what I love about the work that I do is that what I do is very niche. So who I can do it for really varies. So I will work in cybersecurity and biosciences, I will work in law and fintech, I will work in vegan startups, I will work in, leadership coaching and personal development. And it really spans, oh I did the Royal Scottish Academy for example, like it will really span an incredible spectrum of different spaces. And I think where we get in our own way, is when we get stuck into what I have to say is most important. And what we have to say is important as long as it’s in response to our customers needs. And I think that that is where we all trip up. It’s we think we know, and we don’t take the time to sense check it and we don’t take the time to ask. And I think that they’re particularly technical industries, or what I would label more cerebral businesses. So businesses that work in tech, businesses that work in sciences, businesses that work in finance, often. And then sometimes in terms of the arts and culture, we can get very guilty of inaccessible language. The average reading age, or the average reading level in the UK, particularly if you want to convert people on websites, is something like a grade six reading level. It’s really low. And that is not necessarily a commentary on people being able to read, but that is about in order for you to get your message across as clearly and as concisely as you can, aim for grade six reading level. Now grade six is the American denomination in terms of the the reading scale. But you can look at things like the Gunning Fog index, the Flesch-Kincaid index. Coleman Liau is another really good one. You can find lots of free reading accessibility trackers. If you’re worried that the language on your website is students, run it through a readability checker and have a look at the density of keywords. Read it aloud, does it sound like a conversation? If it doesn’t, and you’re not asking questions, it’s going to sound like a monotone. And I did a bit of a ranty video about this at the start of last week. And I think a lot of people, it resonated with them. Because we’ve all felt we’ve been talked at by websites. You’ve gone in to try and find, or government websites, although actually I will say the government is particularly good at the plain language, focus at the moment. But really breaking things down to be as accessible as possible. It’s not just for government and global understanding, but in business. Respecting your customers time by making it as simple and as easy and as quick for them to digest as possible will always stand you in good stead.
Jenny 44:09
Absolutely. Great tips there, thank you. Talking of tips, I mean, you’ve shared tonnes actually and I’ve been taking notes as I’ve been going along. Again, I’m like cringing at my website, just thinking, Oh my god, I’ve got to sort that out. But can you share any other tips that you think that might be relevant, to kind of help people up their game? Anything that you haven’t covered?
Eloise 44:35
So I think a quick recap, it depends on what you’re using it for, websites. First of all, why do you have a website? That’s always a good one is, is my website set up to educate people about what I do? Am I looking to convert someone? Is it a sales focus website? Is it an information site? What is it there for? And when it comes to that overarching purpose, then make it really clear on every single page, how to get what someone might be there for. So how can I make it as easy for you to convert yourself as possible. Sometimes that looks like really big call to action buttons. Sometimes we leave a call to action button to the bottom of the page. And then we expect someone to scroll all the way down and see it rather than be able to take action at the very top. And I think that not looking at a website through your customers eyes, is often a really great way of tripping ourselves up. So always seek feedback, always seek feedback. And the other thing is to remember is that website copy should not necessarily be static. It should evolve as your business evolves, it should change as your offering changes. It should reflect the changing needs of your customers as well. So accessibility in that language, once you’ve figured out the purpose of your site, look at the language itself, can it be read? Can it be understood? Is it addressing needs that your customers actually have? Are you using your second person pronoun regularly on that? Is it a wall of text? Does it need to be broken down? Has it got one single theme per page? Are you doing a single about page rather than about? And then potentially also, here’s the biography of what we do as a company. So trying not, in the purity sense, but trying to keep things really clear and really, clarity is a big one. And then also consider other people who might not read a website in the same way that you would? For people who are visually impaired, for people who are dyslexic, do you have options for that accessibility? Do you have a translation option for you? I’m not saying that a Google Translate kicks in, but not always perfectly? Depending on your target market, have you made things accessible for people who might want to have an audio reader instead? What are you doing to just, rather than the very ablest able bodied mindset of, Ah, we’ll just read the site that’ll be fine. Can we make things more accessible? So I think that widening the access to languages is so important. And then consistently check in with your customers. And that’s not really a tip, that’s really more of a practice, that it is consistently checking in with the people that you’re serving. Because not only will it help you to serve them better, it will also probably help you identify future trends in terms of where their needs are developing. And often the quickest way to move backwards in today’s world is to standstill. So don’t expect that you know it all, all the time. And don’t worry about failing, like it’s not a big deal. You can always just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and crack on again. Honestly, I think that, just give it a go, give it a try. And you know, I promise you the sky will not be a wily coyote style anvil that will clank, drop on you. Just give it a go.
Jenny 47:36
Amazing. I’m going to record the introduction after this. And I’m going to make sure that people have their pens and papers ready because no, I’m serious, I’ve been taking loads of notes. And this has been so valuable. You mentioned the future and future trends. What do you see as the future of how businesses and brands communicate with their customers?
Eloise 47:57
I think businesses and brands need to meet their customer where the customer is. And I think that we’ve seen that a lot of the time as people say, look, there’s a massive trend towards engaging with customer service through Facebook, for example. And I think what we are seeing now is more of a willingness to engage the customer in lots of different touch points. One of the things on the trends that I see is that marketers and well, email will be an interesting one, but marketers especially are going to need to really fine tune and individualise their language based on that single customer. We have obviously seen the rise and continued rise of experiential marketing of making things experiential for the customer. It’s got to be immersive, it can’t just be a single sense we focus on, it’s got to be the kind of multi sensory experience where we can. And I think what’s interesting is that there is a greater demand wow, I think consumers and certainly GenZ are the most cynical consumers out of any generation that we’ve had previously. And I think that the consumer demand and the consumer standard has increased enormously. And as you know, Millennials and Gen Z, we are no longer prepared to accept businesses that don’t do business, epically. And there’s a much higher standard, and also a far higher level of, I don’t want to say intolerance, but cancel culture is a real thing. And businesses need to be very careful of the impact of that with their language. So making sure that you’re addressing things like bias, making sure you’re addressing things like representation. If we’re looking to appeal to a global audience are we representing a global audience? Do we have every range of human being present in what we’re offering? Are we considering every facet of human beings in terms of how we project our marketing? So making your language tailored to the individual where you can, and a lot of that will look at that data algorithms and the granularity of messaging, which is a big ask, I’m not going to lie. But also that constant check in with your customers will help you identify what those trends are. And then being present on the right channels for your target market is a big one. And that may shift and change. So I think, staying here and again, a real helpful umbrella, summing up of everything, that being curious about a customer and how their needs are going to change, you won’t go too far wrong, if you’re always focused on meeting them where they are, rather than where you’re telling them they should be. So I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. I think it’s gonna be fascinating.
Jenny 50:36
Amazing, honestly, Eloise, this has been so useful and so fascinating. And I’ve taken tons of notes. And anyone that’s listening to this thinking either, Wow, I’d love to chat to Eloise about how she could work with us, or with my agency, or perhaps, I’d like to pick her brain a bit more on the freelance aspect, can you tell me who would you like to be contacted by ideally, and what’s the best way they can do that?
Eloise 51:01
Okay, so anyone who has a real genuine burning curiosity about language, linguistics, please come and talk to me because this is the stuff that I I love. If you are a new freelancer, I have got to pay forward all the generosity that I’ve experienced in my first years of business. So if you have questions about freelance life, please get in touch. And any business who is prepared to make some really good changes to their marketing and stick with it for the long run, please get in touch because again, I would love to work with businesses where we can really change how people feel when you are engaging with them, and for the better. And I would love to hear from you but if you’d like to contact me, you can find me on olimcomms.com. And my contact details are all on there or LinkedIn, Eloise Leeson. It’ll say something like communications consultant, linguist, and then also snaffler of biscuits because all these things are true!
Jenny 51:58
Fantastic. We’ll make sure that we put those links in the show notes Eloise. So thank you so much, your passion absolutely shines through and your knowledge shines through. So I’ve really enjoyed this chat and I just want to say big thank you for joining me.
Eloise 52:10
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so, so much for having me. It’s been an absolute joy.
