If this sounds like you AND you are an experienced, mid-level business copywriter, this could be the perfect position for you. You will be managing at least two client accounts, plus one junior staff member. The copywriting : project management split for this position is typically 60 : 40, but it will vary.

Required skills and experience

We’re interested in talking to you if you have 5+ years’ experience in the following:

Project management:

• Managing marketing projects from conception to debrief
• Managing budgets
• Briefing and managing teams
• Managing clients
• Experience setting up project plans (software platform not important).

Copywriting:

• Flawless English spelling and grammar
• 5+ years experience writing business (long) copy
• Able to turn complicated source material into content that’s succinct, well-structured, easy to follow and clear to understand.

General:

• Able to manage own time and tasks effectively
• Fully computer literate (MS Office suite, internet), fast typist
• Good knowledge of how social media can be applied to a  business’ marketing mix
• Experience in the technology industry will be a huge plus
• Previous experience managing a junior staffer is a plus but not a prerequisite.

Required personal attributes

• Outstanding communication skills are vital
• Driven to deliver excellent customer service
• Excellent attention to detail
• Highly conscientious, hard-working, focused and productive
• Intelligent, sharp, full of ideas
• Ambitious and keen to learn
• Reliable, punctual and honest
• Team player who is also happy to take a project and run with it on their own
• Enthusiastic and positive – we’re looking for people who really enjoy this sort of work
• Have your head screwed on straight: bucketloads of common sense
• Creative thinker – particularly when it comes to tackling problems or finding new, better ways of doing things

If you are looking for a job, please don’t apply. If you are looking for a career, and know that it takes more than just ‘doing your job’ to get ahead, keep reading.

Company info

Peppermint Source is an offshoot of Freelancentral, and offers outsourced marketing strategy, planning and implementation. Our clients typically don’t have the staff, time or expertise to run their marketing themselves – and don’t want to work with large agencies. Our service is somewhere between hiring an agency to handle their marketing, and briefing freelancers themselves.

We do all strategy and planning work in-house and then cherry-pick from the huge pool of talented creatives over at Freelancentral and manage them to deliver marketing projects for our clients. Often we handle the copywriting elements in-house too, as they are frequently very closely linked to the strategy work we do. We are increasingly taking on content strategy and content management work – generating ongoing marketing content for predominantly online channels.

Our clients are varied but we do seem to be attracting technology companies. We love working with these as we get to filter through complicated, jargon-packed source material for marketing gems – powerful messages that appeal to, intrigue and engage our clients’ customers.

Peppermint Source is expanding fast and is currently building a small, core team of super-organised, impressively on-the-ball project management team. Although this does sound corny, this really is an environment where your good ideas will not only be heard, but implemented – you can really make your mark. However, this is a small business environment, and while we don’t have fancy offices and perks and will expect you to pitch in on any sort of work when we’re up against a deadlines, we are cultivating a fun, flexible environment where you will learn loads.

Contract details and salary

• Contract term: Three month full-time contract initially, to be followed by a permanent contract if we all like each other.
• Salary: R11-15,000 gross, depending on your experience.
• Start date: As soon as possible.
• Location: Cape Town. We are currently based in Scarborough but will be relocating within weeks to Harfield Village.

How to apply

Please send the following to Jo Duxbury via email as soon as possible:

1. A covering letter explaining why you’re perfect for this position and what your salary expectations are
2. Your CV
3. Details of three work-related, recent references who we can contact
4. Two short before-and-after examples of your writing, where you simplified complicated source material. (PLEASE DO NOT SEND FILES LARGER THAN 1MB IN TOTAL)

Thanks!

I see it time and again. A mid-sized company, say 20-30 staff, decides they want to start doing some marketing, or they’d like to refresh their current activities. They get all excited about it and have a lot of fun doing the cool things, like rebranding, or launching a new website. They may even have put a great strategy and implementation plan in place. But after a few of months, it’s all fizzled out.

The biggest mistake these companies make is that they don’t stick to their marketing plan.

By doing this, companies effectively waste a great deal of their initial marketing investment. If that fantastic new website hasn’t been updated in months, your clients might wonder if you are still in business. That wonderful new branding is lovely but not particularly effective if correspondence is still going out with the old logo on it.

Effective marketing is consistent, regular and ongoing. Sporadic bursts of activity are likely to be a waste of time – and may end up doing your company more harm than good. It’s not a great impression when you don’t even follow up the first of your new ‘monthly’ email newsletters.

Why does this happen?

• Times get tough. You may have thought you had R50K/month for your marketing, but out of the blue, the economy tanks or the exchange rate plummets and you’re scrambling to pay salaries, let alone SEO bills.
• Times get good. Conversely, companies who are very busy tend to (naturally) prioritise servicing their clients, and updating their blog or issuing a press release takes a back seat to paid work.
• Companies lose interest. The glamorous part is the new brand identity, the funky website or the launch event. It’s harder to get excited about finding something to write regular press releases about, or content for the newsletter. It’s harder still when your company’s expertise is in tech, medicine or finance – where marketing is practically a different language.
• Nobody is assigned accountable ownership. The reality is that unless you have a dedicated staff member whose performance is judged on whether this gets done, it probably won’t happen.
• Resources weren’t properly allocated. The assigned staff member may not actually have the time or skills to devote to getting everything done. And if the work is outsourced, there’s usually not enough awareness that someone internally still needs to allocate time to sourcing rough materials or checking and signing off work.
• There are no instant results. Building a brand takes time and when sales don’t spike immediately, companies can be quick to dismiss their marketing efforts as ineffective.

How you can avoid marketing meltdown

• Budget for a ‘bare basics’ plan. Identify an absolute minimum, core level of marketing activity that has to be sustained and make its budget untouchable. Suspending this should never be an option as it’s essentially cutting off the pipeline. You might stop active SEO on your site, but continue adding two blog posts a week, properly tagged and titled for the search engines. On top of this core activity, overlay your second tier (‘nice to have’) and third tier (‘if we have a bumper year’) activities to enhance and complement the core projects.
• Plan ahead. A company buys a press office on IT Web and is good about using it for the first few months – then… tumbleweeds. All of a sudden their contract’s nearly up and they still have three press releases to use. Cramming them into a month means people might start recognising their name but this can be undone when the company decides not to renew because, well, it didn’t get them any results. If they’d been more disciplined about planning for a monthly press release, I suspect the results would have been a lot better. You get the idea.
• Slow and steady wins the race. Accept that while it’s not all glamorous, marketing must be consistent in order to work. One way of keeping motivated to do the grind work is to benchmark and measure as many indicators as you can. Even seeing a steady increase in your Twitter followers or Facebook page fans can be motivating and proof that people are reading your updates.
• Make someone accountable. While the marketing plan needs to be committed to from the very top, ensuring it all happens needs to be built into the KPAs of whoever owns it internally. Or pay a marketing coach a retainer to keep you in line. Whether your team handles the work themselves or outsources it, it needs to be someone’s focus. Outsourcing gives you the extra reassurance that if the work doesn’t get done, the agency or consultant doesn’t get paid.
• Allocate sufficient resources. Make sure that you fully understand what support your marketing point person needs, in terms of time, budget and headcount. You’ll soon see whether they have the capacity to handle it all in-house, or whether elements must be outsourced.

And finally: be patient

Results will come. Search engine optimisation usually takes 6 months to have an effect. And marketers generally agree that it takes seven exposures to your brand before a customer is likely to engage with it.

In particular, if you are a new entrant into a market saturated with big brands, remember that it’s taken them a long time (and a lot of money!) to get where they are. So give it time. And factor in quarterly or bi-annual marketing reviews to assess what’s working and what isn’t.

We’ve been sending a monthly email newsletter out from Freelancentral religiously for four years now. It’s only since we recently switched to MailChimp that we’ve been able to get some great data on opens, clicks, etc. Our open rate is around 15%, which according to MailChimp is average for our industry.

But to me that seems low for a list where people have asked for the newsletter – we’ve not just added them at random. Every month we wonder whether it’s worth sending out the newsletter (it takes about a day to pull it together) and we’re constantly trying new ways of boosting the read rate, with groovy subject lines, great content and special offers.

Do we see any positive results? Yes, a newsletter does seem to be useful for building our brand reputation and as a gentle reminder to our audience that we’re still around. And we do get a good response to our special offers. But with today’s information overload, a newsletter really has to stand out in order to be read.

Here are the main things we’ve learnt from four years of our own newsletters, and from doing them for clients too:

• Keep it short and sweet.People don’t have time to read reams of copy. Provide links to more detailed info on your site for people who are interested. And keep the number of articles down to three – max.
• Use engaging subject lines and headlines. You want the subject line to encourage them to open it. Combine ‘does what it says on the tin’ so they know what’s inside with a little intrigue to pique their curiosity.
• Break up the copy with imagery (but keep the images relatively small to keep the email size down). Make sure the font is legible and easy to read.
• Don’t spend too much time on putting it together. Rather spend time on putting great content on your site (where a wider audience, including search engines, will see it.
• Find a newsletter distribution system that is easy to use and offers easy-to-understand, useful analytics and reporting. And then actually READ the reports, learn from them, and improve your next issue.

What results have you seen from your newsletter? Do you do one, and is it worth it? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments section below.

But yes, we’re off to London next week to meet and run Marketing Healthchecks with a couple of British clients who have realised that outsource their marketing to us is a great idea

So, if you are reading this from your own UK office, and are interested in the services we offer, please get in touch so we can come and have a chat with you while we’re in your neck of the woods.

Table Mountain, Cape Town - copyright Peppermint Source

In the week or two since Peppermint Source launched, we’ve been thrilled to have been approached by two London-based companies to discuss how they can outsource their regular marketing communications to us here in South Africa.

With advances in internet and other communication technologies, it no longer matters where you are in the world. But does South Africa in particular appeal to UK and US clients as an outsourcing option? Here’s what we think:

• The exchange rate. Today, US$1 will buy you 7.59 South African Rands (ZAR) and a British pound is worth ZAR12.02. Simply, your money will go further. Check the latest exchange rates here.

• English. Many South Africans speak English as their first language, and many more speak it fluently as a second or third language (or even 11th… did you know we have 11 official language here?!). We use British English here, but are totally comfortable writing for North American audiences too.

• Cultural similarities. OK, so we call a barbecue a ‘braai’ and are very proud of being part of Africa and all its traditions, but in business, our culture is very similar to that of the UK or North America.

• Longitude. There’s only a one- or two-hour difference between the UK and South Africa, depending on the time of year. There’s a good eight-hour window where you and your outsourced team will be at work at the same time. And for our North American friends, you can brief us in the afternoon and know that the work will be in your inbox by the time you get to work the next morning

• World knowledge. Tons of South Africans (particularly in our pool over at Freelancentral) have worked abroad at some stage. Many in the UK; some in the US, Canada, and more… So while we may be locate down at the bottom of Africa, we’re quite world-wise and understand your country’s culture and marketing landscape.

• Online savvy. While a huge portion of our population still does not have access to the internet, a small but fast-growing segment does, and is doing some amazing things online. Cape Town in particular is focusing on this – check out the Silicon Cape initiative.

• Others are doing it already. We have a growing call centre industry and many IT or online companies outsource their development to South Africa. Marketing’s next

• It’s gorgeous here. South Africa’s such a beautiful country, so if you do decide that a face-to-face meeting is required, we don’t think you’ll need much persuading to hop on that plane…

Are you from a UK, US or other English-speaking country, interested in outsourcing your company’s marketing to South Africa? We can help you with strategy, marketing plans, regular communications like newsletters, blog posts, social media account maintenance, websites, brochures and much, much more.

Contact us today – we’d love to discuss how we can help you.

If you’re a marketer, the CONSULTING, STRATEGY and ACCOUNT HANDLING sections will probably be most applicable to you. Be sure to add some information in your profile (work history, etc.) so that we know what you’re all about.

You can then choose to pay for a public portfolio so that clients can find you too, or alternatively if you prefer to remain offline, the Pepperminters will still be able to pick you up in database searches.

Oh – Freelancentral is celebrating its 4th birthday until the end of February and offering 40% off all three-month portfolios, so now’s a really good time to sign up

We are always looking out for super marketing strategists and project managers, so you are welcome to send us a mail to introduce yourself too.

Although we’ve been providing a number of clients with outsourced marketing  management services for nearly a year now, it’s time we formalised this and launched it as a division of Freelancentral.

Peppermint Source came about in response to the clients who phone Freelancentral, knowing they needed to do some marketing, but not knowing where to start, who to choose, how to brief them or even what to  brief them on.

Through Peppermint Source, we now offer a whole range of outsourced marketing services to companies – marketing healthchecks and audits; strategy and planning; supplier sourcing, briefing and management; budget compilation and management; and overall marketing project implementation.

We handle all these as well as copywriting /editing in-house, and then tap into our vast network of freelance creatives over at Freelancentral for things like graphic and web design, web development, photography, event management, PR and more. We bring in creatives only when they’re needed on projects which is efficient and cost-effective.

Most importantly, if you outsource your marketing, it WILL get done. And it doesn’t need to cost the earth. So if you’ve been meaning for ages to do a monthly newsletter, redo your website, freshen up your branding or anything else marketing-esque, give us a call and let us sort it out for you. And then you can focus on what it is that you do well.

Find out more about our services, clients and background.

P.S.

Many thanks to Media Hussy for our beautiful branding and Lightspeed for the site development.

Here are our favourites – and they all relate to carrying your brand values through in all your interactions with clients:

• Smile when you answer the phone. Whether it’s a client or supplier on the other end, they’ll feel more special if it sounds like you’re happy to hear from them. This also works for calls from inland revenue or unhappy customers – it’s very hard for them to have a go at you if you’re sounding warm and friendly Disarm them all with niceness and make them feel valued.

• Create (and use) branded email stationery. This is an opportunity to get your brand out there each time you send an email. Keep the file size down and the design simple but impactful and you’ll be sure to get compliments. And it’s cheap and easy to do.

• Respond quickly. Acknowlege voicemails and emails as soon as you can, even if it’s just to say ‘Thanks for your message. I am a little snowed under at the moment so it might take me a few hours to respond properly, but I just wanted you to know that I have received it and am working on it.’ Nobody wants to feel that their messages disappeared into a black hole or that they’re being ignored.

• Pick your main brand value and live it! The word that we’d like to think epitomises us most is ‘enthusiasm’. This is printed out and stuck in strategic places in our office – next to phones, on noticeboards, etc. Every interaction we have both internally and externally needs to be infused with enthusiasm. It makes for a better workplace, plus it’s contagious – and makes us more memorable.

• Personal touches. One of our clients prides themselves in building strong, trusted and personal relationships with their customers. We suggested that they send each customer a handwritten birthday card each year. Not a corporate card with their logo and sales messages all over it, but a beautiful card in a colourful envelope with a genuinely personal message written inside it. Thoughtful, inexpensive and impactful.

• Cheap, on-brand gimmicks. Is there something inexpensive that you can source that’s tied in cleverly to your brand that can make it memorable? From stickers to magnets to confectionery – there are tons of merchandising ideas out there. At Joe Fish restaurant in Pinelands, Cape Town, the bill comes in a little tin ‘treasure chest’ filled with marshmallow fish (on brand!) instead of on a saucer with predictable mints. Read Jo’s BizCommunity article about how jellybeans and Tabasco helped two other businesses build customer loyalty.

What can you do to create an impact for your brand?

Interestingly, a lot of the ‘challenges’ the article brings up – particularly in questions 2, 3 and 4 – are the very things that we take off your hands at Peppermint Source.

Enjoy the read!

(P.S. FreelanceSwitch is an excellent blog and site for freelancers – we’ve been following it for years at Freelancentral and recommend it highly.)