32 Reasons to Hire My Friend Laura

Since the last update, 39 new visitors visted the site, 20 of them coming directly from In This Economy. That brings us up to 98 visitors who have made 158 visits since June 17 (when I installed Google Analytics). On Facebook, since June 1 we’ve had 254 visitors.

The vast majority of visitors come from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as you would expect. But we have also had visitors from Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, London, and Perth.

Only a handful of reasons left in our experiment to see if we can find Laura a job before I get through 32 reasons to hire her. Thanks spreading the word about Laura—don’t forget all the ways you can help.

There are any number of reasons that you may need to justify why your organization should hold onto business that you feel you’ve done a perfectly good job with. For example, your client may be consolidating the number of vendors it uses. Or someone may have heard about a flashy new competitor.

When a major client sent us an RFP for the kind of work we’d been doing for them for 10 years, Laura was the primary coordinator in putting together our response. In addition to writing more than a third of the 60,000-word proposal, she kept tabs on at least nine people who contributed to the three-week effort.

The resulting proposal not only demonstrated the full range of our capabilities to our client; Laura’s work also helped the agency articulate for itself the strength of our approach. That helped us in subsequent conversations with the client and with future prospects.

After the client reviewed all proposals from existing and new agencies, ours was one that made the list of approved vendors. Because fewer agencies were approved, we actually had a better opportunity to earn future business as a result of the process.

If you want to turn questions about your work into strong proof of your value, check out Laura’s LinkedIn profile, download her portfolio (PDF) and e-mail 32reasons@gmail.com.

(click image to play an online version of Mad Libs; if you come up with a funny one, e-mail it to me and I’ll share the best ones)

Sometimes one of your marketing efforts is missing a little something—a key insight, a creative spark, an organizing mind to pull the disparate parts and team members together. Laura’s great at filling in those blanks to help your organization achieve excellence.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I’m here to talk about a birthday card.

One of our clients sends out birthday cards to regular customers. Every year, they invite us to submit ideas for the card. One time, Laura and one of our art directors developed a wonderful concept that had a set of die-cut rectangles on the front. The card invites you to fill in the blanks with words from certain parts of speech. When you open the card, you can read a personalized, funny birthday greeting that you helped craft.

It’s one of my favorite pieces of Laura’s because it invites participation and gets the recipient even more engaged with the client’s brand. But it does it in a fairly low-tech way that is charming and straightforward. The card goes out to people of all ages, and this concept has broad appeal.

If you want to someone who can help you fill in the blanks—and help you have fun doing it—check out Laura’s LinkedIn profile, download her portfolio (PDF) and e-mail 32reasons@gmail.com.

No matter how sophisticated your marketing organization, you will necessarily work closely with some people who just don’t get marketing. It’s not what they do for a living and their brains think in ways that are better suited for their jobs.

And yet to be successful, you’ll need to draw information out of product experts. Walk a sales team through every step of creating a brochure when they only do it once every couple of years. Obtain the buy-in of business executives who don’t necessarily believe in the value of a highly creative concept.

Laura makes marketing easier for people who don’t understand marketing. She can explain the process in plain language and help people get involved. A few years ago, she came up with the idea of creating a series of “Things to Consider” documents to help subject-matter experts at a large IT company understand how to work with their collateral agency. Each document she wrote was a two-page, easy-to-read overview for a particular deliverable type (data sheet, solution brief, and white paper).

The documents help people who work on marketing projects infrequently understand how to prepare for the questions the writer will likely ask on the kickoff call. Distributing one of Laura’s documents before the kickoff call increased the consistency of the company’s marketing materials, made the kickoff calls more productive, and helped everyone involved in the project have clear expectations and understand their roles in the overall project.

If you want to make marketing easier for the people you work with who aren’t marketing experts, check out Laura’s LinkedIn profile, download her portfolio (PDF) and e-mail 32reasons@gmail.com.