Say it well. Your brand deserves it.

Versatile Words is a copywriting and content strategy practice. We clarify ideas and shape messages so they better connect with your audience. Our goal is to develop copy that doesn’t just fill a page, but gets read. And motivates your readers to act. We can play different roles on your project team, depending on your needs.

Writing

Services

Web content
Corporate literature
Article marketing
Video scriptwriting
Product and service naming
Advertising and campaign copywriting
Case studies and business profiles
Magazine and newsletter editorial

Add a writer to your team, instantly. And put more ideas into the world.

Whether we start with a blank sheet of paper or a loose assembly of notes, testimonials, or spec sheets, we can quickly bring your message to life.

Our goal is to speak with your brand voice, not our own. If your voice is serious and straightforward, so are we. If you prefer a lighter tone, we’re happy to loosen up. If you’re exploring a new voice, we give you choices that take steps, or leaps, in a new direction. And we provide many opportunities to review our work in progress and make sure it’s just right.

We’re happy joining a full-service marketing team or working more independently. We love to talk to customers, executives, and subject matter experts to understand the details, context, and purpose of the assignment.

Review and approval of corporate content can be difficult and time consuming — for the writer as well as the stakeholders. Versatile Words uses a proven template system that simplifies and speeds up the review/revision/approval process.

Our writing services include Web and interactive content, corporate literature and information systems, letters and other forms of communication (to customers or internal audiences), magazine editorial, video scriptwriting, advertising copywriting, and (a personal favorite) case studies and business profiles.

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Editing and Content Management

Services

Site-wide web content harvesting and review
Fresh-eye and final-polish editing
Editorial guideline development
Editorial effectiveness review
Content coaching

Help for those big, difficult projects. Especially when the clock is ticking.

Whether you have short-form content that needs punching up, or thousands of words that need to be sorted, organized, and improved, we can scale up or down to meet the need.

Sometimes, you don’t need a writer on your team – but you do need someone to help organize and evaluate your content. Or review and punch it up. Or look for mistakes or what’s missing.

The challenge may be the voice and tone – is it clear, on brand, and useful to the audience? Or it could be the way ideas are organized or labeled. We will provide you with not just criticism, but recommendations that you can put to use immediately. If you need our help applying these recommendations, we will quickly adopt your corporate voice and improve your messages.

We also provide editorial effectiveness review of existing print and online content, which may help you decide next steps in your marketing communication plans. We call this activity “discuss and adjust,” and it is often an eye-opening, worthwhile effort.

If requested, we will share feedback in the form of guidelines and content coaching for existing editorial staff. Having worked with and managed dozens of writers for agencies, corporations, and magazines, we’ve learned how to help writers and editors do their jobs more effectively. In fact, it’s a role we really enjoy.

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Brand Collaboration

Services

User narratives
Brand expressions
Name generation

A boost when you’re building a brand.

A brand is more than look and feel. It’s defined by a customer’s experience with it, and brand experiences are usually framed and explained with words. We love to add creative thinking and writing to brand teams.

Marketing campaigns happen all the time. Brand building, however, is less common. Those who create or reinvent brands know that well-defined brand values, attributes, and promises are established not just in images and graphic identities, but in words as well.

Versatile Words can add a meaningful editorial element to your next brand exercise, whether you’re brainstorming, defining, or naming a new product or service. We work with your branding team to provide user narratives, brand expressions, and other forms of creative brand brainstorming.

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Information Design

Services

Product information systems
Language, labels, and user paths
Navigation and usability review

Conceptual review of language, labels, and user paths. For new or existing content.

Versatile Words can provide feedback that improves the user experience, so your content makes more sense to your audience. In print or online.

For a long-form content experience to be successful, it needs to be usable, useful, and desirable. Usefulness often comes out of strategy – is a website, for example, something people really want or need? Desirability comes from the right images and words, whether online or off.

Usability is often the hardest factor to get right, the somewhat intangible combination of layout, scale, labeling, and sequence that results in user success – or frustration.

We have helped public and private Web sites streamline navigation and improve where, and how, user assistance is provided. And we’ve helped reduce complex print projects to a more manageable size and length.

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