Jessica Mehring of Horizon Peak Consulting focuses on marketing content and shares her wisdom and insight from working as a copywriter for small and medium businesses and enterprise. She explains that relationship building upfront is an integral part of the profession. She talks about how it helps create a message that’s aligned with the brand and their goal and connects emotionally with the audience.

Jessica Mehring CEO Horizon Peak Consulting, proprietary copywriting methodology helping IT, software and tech companies get measurable results from their marketing content.

We’re incredibly fortunate. We have Jessica Mehring. She’s the CEO and Senior Copywriter of Horizon Peak Consulting. Thanks so much for taking time. Jessica, thanks for coming on the show. Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

Marketing content for IT, software and tech companies. I work with small and medium businesses and enterprise, which might seem like they have totally different needs, but they have very similar needs when it comes to marketing content and expressing their expertise in a way that aligns with the brand and still connects with the audience.

For folks that are going like, “I’m lost,” in an IT company, what would be a prototypical client of yours, without disclosing necessarily who they are? Who would be that customer?

I work with a lot of IT services companies, so they’re helping businesses with their IT setups and I write a lot of whitepapers for those folks. Blog posts, some e-books, infographics, guides, everything that helps them explain what they do to their customers in a way that makes sense and connects emotionally and helps them make sales too.

I think about the commentary about some of the folks in the tech space. They’re good at what they do, but not necessarily that good communicating. For you, let’s say that I’m in the IT space. I have an app or software as a service and when I reach out to you, what’s the process that you go through to try to help understand and craft the message?

We talk. We have very in-depth conversations upfront to make sure we’re aligned on the goals for the company and their goals for the project. A lot of copywriters have set packages and they have spitball rates that they’ll throw at people. I try to have deeper conversations initially to make sure we’re 100% in alignment before a proposal even happens.

Why is that?

There’s this huge disconnect between these brilliant technicians, these brilliant engineers, developers, founders and their audience. I’m trying to help bridge that gap. There are too many copywriters out there who want to put words on a page and not bridge that gap while they’re at it. If you are not bridging that gap, you’re not helping the company. The company’s wasting money with a copywriter and the copywriters are wasting their time with a customer who’s probably not going to recommend them or be a good case study. I try to have a lot of that relationship building upfront to bridge that gap right away.

When you have a client show up and a lot of engineers are, “We have this great solution and we’re trying to take our solution to somebody’s pain point and create a sale.” For you, between the engineer, their product and their potential customer, what does that process look like to you as you’re trying to go through discovery?

In discovery, I’m discovering two things. I’m discovering the company and I’m discovering the customer. In discovering the company, I can become a better partner and I can help them meet their business goals because I understand what their business goals are, but most importantly I want to get to know their customers because that’s who we’re speaking to. That’s my main focus, and that’s why I have to build such a great relationship with a company upfront because every company does this. They want their messaging upfront. They want their voice upfront. I don’t want to say it’s an ego thing, but it is an ego thing. Whereas if you want to connect with your audience, you have to speak the audience’s language. I want to get to know the customer, I want to get to know who they are, what they need and what language they’re speaking, so when I’m writing for the company, I’m writing in the customer’s voice in a way that aligns with the company and gets them toward their goal.

Horizon Peak Consulting: If you want to connect with your audience, you have to speak the audience’s language.

For a case, let’s say I’m the ABC Software guy. I wrote a piece of software and I go, “I think it’s going to serve this particular customer base.” How do you talk to their potential customer base to hear their voice?

I talk to their customers. Often companies already have a lot of customer feedback. They’ve been interviewing happy customers, they’ve been surveying, they may be doing some user testing and so I’ll have that feedback to mind for insights and to mind for language. If they don’t have that, then I want to go get it. I’m going to interview their customers. I’m going to help the company craft surveys to gather customer insight, but I want to get real customer words for the project. That’s how we connect with the customer.

Why don’t you explain your journey to this point?

I fell into copywriting. I fell into it. I’m fresh out of college. I got a temp job at Compaq Computer Corporation. That’s how long I’ve been doing this. It was my second temp job at the company and I was supposed to be doing data entry for one of their new eCommerce stores. This is when eCommerce was still very new. It was their SMB eCommerce store. The team lead found out that I’m also a writer. I have been writing little articles and getting published in little magazines all through college and she said, “Would you consider writing the product copy for the products that we’re putting up on the website?” I said, “What’s copy?” I had to figure out what copy was and specifically what product copywriting was all about. I learned on the job and I found not only was it interesting to do, it is fascinating work. I loved it and there is a career path for it. I continued, I was always copywriting in some way or another through my initial years in the tech industry. Compaq got bought by Hewlett Packard so I was working for Hewlett Packard for a while. I was working as a consultant for Hewlett Packard for their creative agency, so I had various roles. I was a project manager, I was an account manager, I was a content manager, but I was always copywriting in one way or another. I was around a lot of techies. I was around a lot of developers and engineers and super smart people. Even though I’m not a technician myself, I’ve been around them my entire career. I picked up the language very quickly and I know how to converse with them. Technicians have a very certain personality sometimes and I find that it’s a fun personality for me to interact with, so it’s a natural progression.

You went from that world to starting your own firm. You’ve been doing this in your firm for how long?

I started the LLC in 2013, so it’s been five years that Horizon Peak has been in existence formally. I was freelancing. I’ve been freelancing since 2000, more and more over the years. We’re coming up on twenty years as me working on client projects, even on the side of my official tech employment.

I think about that timeframe and the decision to form your own company. What was that thought process like, “I want to take in and do this full time?”

It was such an easy decision. I loved doing what I did for Hewlett Packard, but enterprise technology has changed, the world has changed. I didn’t feel like I was the perfect fit for it anymore towards the end. I felt like I was naturally progressing out of the company to begin with. I was being presented with all these opportunities to work with other companies on various projects that excited me. I love these companies, I love these projects, but I could only do so much as a freelancer nights and weekends after my day job. The transition was a no-brainer for me. I had a lot of people that wanted to work with me and I was ready to work with them. I got laid off, and it worked out perfectly. My manager knew that I was interested in eventually leaving company, so it wasn’t a total surprise that I got laid off. It wasn’t like they packed up my box and sent me home. It was planned.

I think about the experience and mileage that you have now. If you could roll the clock back to where you could offer advice to you with all the experience you have now, when you first started your company, what advice would you offer to yourself?

I feel like the path that I took was the perfect path for me. I learned so much along the way and I built such amazing relationships along the way. I wouldn’t change anything that I did, but if I were to give myself advice earlier on, I’d say take my ego out of it earlier.

How does that manifest itself? What do you mean?

All writers suffer from a little bit of ego when it comes to the words that they put on the page. That’s natural in our industry, but we also have to be open to our client feedback. That can be a challenge, getting feedback on your words, but at the same time, to do our job properly, we need to be listening to the client. Most specifically though, we need to be listening to the customer. When I say take my ego out of it, I mean maybe be a little more aggressive about seeking feedback, not just from the client but from the customers. I measure everything now. You take a lot from the conversion copywriter world and how I measure the results of the content that I write for my clients, but I wasn’t always that way. Up until the last several years, if the client’s happy with the words, I’m happy with the words, but I wasn’t necessarily tracking the results of them. Maybe I was a little bit afraid of my words not working as well as I thought they did because I had that ego in there.

To do our job properly, we need to be listening to the client.

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I was looking at your website and there are a couple of testimonials on your website where some people say, “We hired you, you did the following and our revenue was directly attributable to what you did.”

Because I measure it now; I took the ego out, I measure it, I adjust and I iterate.

From a frustrated person that advise advertising periodically, you say, “I’ve got a budget, I’m going to spend X, and I would expect a return on my investment.” For you, that seems to be a focal point for your website. What drove you to be that specific about return on investment?

I started hanging out with a lot of conversion copywriters and I got converted. Conversion copywriting is a very specific discipline. It started with Joanna Wiebe at Copy Hackers. She’s the inventor of this discipline, and it all starts with data. It’s a very data-driven way of writing copy. While I do write copy, and when I say copy, I mainly mean website copy and sales page copy, my main focus is marketing content. Those are the blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, infographics, guides and the workbooks that are the relationship-building assets. That’s my main focus. There’s not a lot of talk about data and numbers and ROI in the content world. I got to know a lot of conversion copywriters, I got certified in conversion copywriting because it was such a fascinating discipline to me. I saw the benefits of measuring. I saw the benefits of using data to write copy, and I thought, “Why isn’t anybody doing this in content?” Businesses are spending money on content the same way they’re spending money on website copy, but very few people are measuring that or using data to create it in the first place. I brought that discipline into the content writing world, and that’s how I started this whole thing that I do.

These people aren’t stupid but they’re ignorant. There’s a difference. Ignorant, they don’t know that they don’t know. When you’re working with a potential client and they’re used to content versus copy, what you do to try to educate them about the difference between one and the other?

I ask them how their existing content is performing, and normally that stops them in their tracks because they haven’t been measuring it. They realized that they’ve either been spending their personal time writing it or they’ve been spending their budget on a writer who’s been doing the job, but they have no idea if it made sales for them. They have no idea what their customers think of it, how their customers are reacting to it or connecting with it. As soon as I start talking about measuring, the conversation shifts.

The reason I brought it up is I’ve had a number of conversations with people about that and for a lot of the senior leadership, they don’t know that they don’t know. I don’t know if they even make the distinction between the two, because if you say, “I have an advertising budget,” and you go, “How’s that in relation to most sales?” I forget what company it was, they looked at some big advertising deal that they had out and it basically wasn’t converting at all. You think about that as a business owner. Business owners, how much touchy feely do you need before you make a sale? I applaud you for that. When you went through and got educated, when you completed that education, what was the first a-ha moment? How did you know that it was effective for you?

I started seeing amazing results for my clients. If you go to the testimonials page on my website, you’ll see those results for yourself; real numbers and real dollars associated with what I was putting on the page for them.

For folks that are going, “That’s what I’m looking for. How do I find you?” How do they find you on social media?

They can find me at HorizonPeakConsulting.com. That’s got all the links to everything on there. On social media, you can find me on Twitter @HorizonPeak. You can find me on LinkedIn, Jessica Mehring.

I’m a fan of what you do because it’s so fascinating. I think about whether it’s music, whether it’s a well-written book, there’s that certain something that makes you want to listen to the rest of the song or something that gets you enthralled with the book or something that makes you want to read the rest, and that’s a gift in my opinion to be able to do that well. We’re going to go through the part of the podcast where I get to quiz you to death. What’s the most recent book or the most influential book that has altered your perception on being a CEO and how you run your business and why?

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

A recent book that I loved that influenced me was Never Split the Difference. It was recommended to me by one of my clients. He loved it and we used what we learned from the book together for some of his blog posts and it spun up a lot of ideas for us. On the surface, it’s a book about negotiation, but when you read it, you realize it’s a book about empathy and connection. It has changed how I talk to my clients. It has changed how I have sales conversations because so much of the traditional sales negotiation training is about control and power dynamics and getting the upper hand, and this book flipped that on its head. It comes at the negotiation process and the sales conversation process from a point of empathy. You should read it, it will get your mind going and the stories in the book are amazing.

For you, maybe what would be helpful? You read the book, you were moved by the book, then you talk to either an existing client or a new client. What’s the chief thing that you did differently in your presentation to that client?

I feel like my listening skills have improved. I’ve always tried to listen while on phone calls with clients or prospects. I’ve tried to hone my listening skills, but I feel like I listen from a different place now. I listen from a more empathetic place. I try harder to put myself in my clients’ shoes.

Has that changed your copywriting?

I’m sure it has.

That’s the first time I’ve heard that book, so that’s a cool resource. What failure or at the time apparent failure has served you or your company best or set you up for future achievement and why?

I started a training company a couple years ago called The Content Lab. I get a lot of questions from copywriters and from business owners asking specifically how I do what I do. When I created this company, it was me trying to consolidate my resources, answer a lot of the questions that I commonly get, have a place to put new material that I’m writing about these topics all in one place. In the world of online marketing, if you’re in online marketing especially information marketing of any kind, there’s this idea of the product launch. It’s this whole process that we’re told to go through, from testing the market and beta testing the product. Even with an e-book, you’re beta testing. You’re getting feedback, you’re launching in increments and from that, you do the bigger launch and you have the sales sequence. You have the blog posts leading up to the opening of the cart. You have the webinars to get people intrigued. You do this whole big launch process and at the end, you open the cart and you sell the product and you make a million bucks. That’s what we’re told is how this whole thing is supposed to work.

The first product that I sold on The Content Lab website was a program called Content Chemistry. It has iterated a few times since I initially launched it, but I went through the whole big process. It took immense amounts of resources...