I was asked to write a website for Paradigm, a company that provides military grade satellite communications, primarily to the UK armed forces.

Paradigm is the prime contractor for the Skynet 5 contract with the UK Ministry of Defence, valued at £3.6bn. The programme provides mobile voice, video, internet and broadcast communications for the UK armed forces, as well as a range of other Government departments and agencies.

The website has a wide range of audiences, all of which needed to be taken into account. These included the UK Ministry of Defence; potential overseas clients (such as the armed forces of other NATO members); potential UK clients (such as the police and similar agencies); as well as individual members of the armed forces and their relatives.

This last group was especially important, as Paradigm provides a range of services which are vital to service personnel who are posted overseas – including access to email and the internet.

The website copy needed to clear and succinct, but factually accurate at all times, as well as informative and compelling. It also needed to clearly explain technologies and funding arrangements that are, at times, highly complex and sophisticated.

You can see the results here.

A positioning statement defines how you wish to be perceived. Once you get it right, it gives you the basis for communicating who you are and what you do.

You can create one yourself by answering the following seven questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What business are you in?
3. Who do you serve?
4. What are the special needs of the people you serve?
5. Who are you competing with?
6. What makes you different to those competitors?
7. What unique benefit does a client derive from your service?

The questions may seem obvious – but it’s worth going through this process and making sure you all agree with the results. It then gives your copywriter a message to communicate.

Of course, you could also get your copywriter involved in producing this statement, possibly by interviewing a range of people in the company and asking them these questions.

But you could do it yourselves quite quickly. However, don’t spend just two minutes on it. It’s worth giving it some thought. You can also state these questions like this:

• Who?
• What?
• For whom?
• What do they need?
• Against whom?
• What’s different?
• So?

This is the positioning statement for my business:

• Who: Simon Townley
• What: writer
• For whom: businesses and public sector organisations
• What they need:  high-quality professional writing for their communications and marketing
• Against whom:  non-specialists
• What’s different: writes and thinks clearly, gets the work done on time and sets high, professional standards
• So: marketing and communications are more effective.

This becomes:

Simon Townley – a UK copywriter, journalist and editor providing specialist writing services to businesses and public sector organisations that need high-quality communications and marketing.

It’s not snappy. But it does define my business and it leads to the creative ideas, such as:

“Clear thinking – colourful writing”

And

“The writer who speaks your language.”

This website is being given a major overhaul (as of February 2014). It is moving from static html pages to dynamic content delivered from a database using the WordPress content management system. So far, so technical. What this means for you is that all the internal URLs will be different (if you’ve followed a link) and a lot of the content will be missing. In particular, my portfolio of copywriting projects will be recreated in time, and expanded significantly. But this will be a gradual process.

After almost twenty years as a freelance copywriter, editor and journalist I have hundreds if not thousands of case studies and examples to share. They will be coming – but of course I have to prioritise work for clients. In the meantime, if you want to know more about me and what I do, I recommend you get in touch.