Writers: 6 ways to manage the client approval process without seeing your content turned to mush

You’ve felt the pain…

• You come in for a client meeting to review copy and find yourself in a conference room with 20 eager junior “team members.” Each wants to make his or her mark — on your content.

• You’ve written the perfect headline that comes back “tweaked” and now is just a flat cliché — the metaphor is gone. So is its attention-grabbing power.

• Your strategic call to action has suddenly acquired a long addendum, ruining its directness and response potential — and you will be judged on the numbers it generates.

Copy by committee is the unfortunate rule rather than the exception. This has been a long-standing problem for agency copywriters, but today it’s even worse. Thanks to social media, everyone is a writer. So how do you defy the odds and maintain the integrity of your product? Here’s a listicle to get you started.

1. Ask the client to be your evangelist — Identify the review team and keep it manageable.
This conversation should happen at the start of any project, but – more importantly - should take place right up front when you negotiate the terms of your relationship. The client needs to understand and respect what you bring to the table. That’s on you. It’s demonstrated in your portfolio of work, your knowledge of their business and your professionalism. So ask how many people comprise the team and what their roles will be. It’s important to convey the idea that a review team be limited to those with a stake in the outcome.

2. Do your homework.
Show that you understand your client’s audience: their pain points, the trends impacting their industry, how your client’s product or service delivers an advantage. Bring back the old-school creative brief. This is a great tool for keeping everybody on the same page. When the eager beavers start to put their imprint on the content, you can pull out the brief and say…”just a minute...let’s stay on point.”

3. Do Stakeholder Listening to capture the voice of your audience.
Every client will say, “I’ll only give you 20 minutes on a call,” and they end up talking for an hour. Whether it’s internal sales or management, external customers or vendors, the true picture comes out of these conversations. For one medical device client, a prosthetic user once said, “If I saw the train coming, I’d let hit me again.” He referred to the client as “my team” and went on to describe how they helped him rebuild his life. No white board session could have elicited a more emotional picture. This is where storytelling begins.

4. Avoid shared work platforms like Basecamp for copy review.
Basecamp is a wonderful tool — great for sharing files. But if you write content into the shared platform, there is an automatic assumption that it’s an invitation to edit. The project becomes a free for all. You’ll have as many as 20 people tweaking and editing each other’s edits. There will be nothing left of your finely honed ideas.

5. Keep content reviews to team members only - never send out copy to the whole world.
One office products client would have copy reviews with the agency and invite people from teams all over the globe to sit in via Skype. For many, it was the first time they’d been involved in the project. They needed time-consuming input, which stopped the wheels of progress. The agency would find itself in the position of defending its strategy over and over again. Note: revisit number 1. Make sure you and your client are teammates.

6. Have weekly check-ins to move the project forward and do a post-launch recap. 
The health of your relationship either advances or regresses with each project. And you walk a fine line between maintaining control and losing it. Results never lie…you either have a compelling story that follows a clear logic or your have a mess. At the end of the day, it’s about how well you herd the cats.

Come back for more tips on content management from Jerome and Brooke. Visit us at jeromebrookestorytellers.com.