| Ten Steps to Effective Communication. Knowing what to say using the right words can be challenging enough. Knowing how to say it is just as important and frequently overlooked. Consider that every communication that is read by your customers influences their perception of your company. Think of the broad range of ways that your customer may read something about your company: your web site, marketing literature, press releases, annual reports, customer service announcements, newsletters, support bulletins, and so on. Communicating in a consistent style and with consistent messages will have a significant long term impact on your customer relationships, and their propensity to buy more from your company. Your writing style and the messages embedded in the text your customers read should demonstrate customer- centric knowledge with a confident and passionate tone. Engage the reader by using an active voice that quickly communicates the product benefit to them. Use a conversational tone by employing short sentence fragments. Highlight actual settings that tell a story about the reader’s business environment. Eliminate long, descriptive passages, drawn-out sentences, and graduate-level vocabulary Here are ten ways to make your written communication more effective: 1. Start with the vision or brand promise for your company. What promise are you making to your customers in your vision statement? All written communications should include messages that emphasize your primary brand message. Your content should clearly articulate benefits that highlight how your company is working to achieve its mission. 2. Improve your sales performance. Check with sales representatives who have a solid reputation in your company for their input. If the language and messages used by sales people in the field matches, or complements, the primary messages from any customer communication your sales productivity should improve. 3. Concise copy works better. Resist the urge to say everything you can think of in high level customer communication. Make it a policy to cut the amount of copy in product and marketing. Focus on your three or four most important messages and anchor everything else to them. As US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Be sincere; be brief; be seated.” 4. Focus on benefits and solutions. Clearly identify the features and benefits that add real value and solve problems for customers. Separate those from features that simply describe your product or service. The value ones are the ones that sell for you and they should be the focus of your communication. Everything else can be placed on the back of your sales collateral. If you’re not sure, go back to those solid sales people and ask them. 5. Avoid writing a “how to” guide. High level business and marketing communication should not laboriously describe how a solution works or is used. Customers want to know quickly how you will benefit them or solve specific problems or challenges they face with your product or service. They are not interested to learn from you how they can solve the problem once they have bought your product. 6. Leave the jargon out. Clear and simple language helps you focus on clarifying real benefits and solutions to the customer. For example, ‘software’ is not a real benefit or solution. Accurate and timely access to financial data may be a real benefit. Words like ‘Web-enabled’ and ‘real-time’ should be replaced by more general language or real world examples to illustrate their meaning. 7. Match images to your message. Unless you are producing product manuals, screen shots and detailed technical products pictures serve almost no purpose in marketing. When you see an ad for gasoline, they don’t show you the pumps or the refinery. When car companies promote their vehicles, they don’t show you the inner-workings of the suspension or engine compartment. Focus your images on the key benefit of your product and find an interesting way to communicate that message as the selling point. 8. More heads are better than one. Share your work with others for review and feedback before finalizing it. These different perspectives help to assure clarity and broaden the common understanding of all those who may write material aimed at your customers. 9. Keep it simple for clarity. Sentence fragments are easy to read. Using sentence fragments also makes it easier engage the reader as they appear conversational. Correctly structured prose designed to impress your college professor is simply not needed in marketing communication. John Kotter said, “Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way.” 10. Stay true to your vision and mission. In every form of communication, and at every opportunity, maintain a consistent message so that the customer will be reminded again of the central promise of your vision and mission. This consistency allows you to build meaningful and sustaining brand equity with your customers. Furthermore, it builds relationship equity with everyone else. When the time comes for them to make a buying decision, they choose you. Whose job is it to develop all of this communication? Not just marketing, surely. This responsibility is shared by everyone in the company from top to bottom that may write anything that a customer might see. A standard set of guidelines and practices can help them to deliver the experience you promised. What perception do your customers have of your company today across all the communication channels? If you have no consistency there, then there will be no consistency in your customers’ experience with your company. What you say and how you say it makes all the difference. Patrick Smyth is a trusted business advisor and mentor. He improves business performance through effective advice on change management, leadership, management, and marketing. His focus on business outcomes, growth, strategic planning, objective setting, team building, and communications builds sustainable productivity and growth. www.innovationhabitude.com |
 |
Your True North Business Navigator
