BUSINESS MONITOR
How do you communicate with your customers? Are all of your staff on message? Do you have a co-ordinated approach to your marketing mix?
In other words, what you can do to ensure that your marketing activity is joined up and consistent.
If your corporate communications are confused or random, it can create expectation gaps and disappoint clients – and you could miss sales opportunities. Marketing expert, PAUL CLAPHAM gives us a lesson in what he has termed “content marketing”.
C
circles. As a general rule, I tend to take a sniffy attitude to the businessʼs latest passion and with well-proven reason. Not this time. Much as I donʼt like the word
ʻcontentʼ, Iʼve failed to come up with a better way to describe ʻall the information you put in front of customersʼ. We want to be liked and not just in the Facebook sense. When we communicate with someone, we want them to think ʻOh good, he or she always has something interesting, entertaining or valuable to say.ʼ Thatʼs true in our private lives but the importance is doubled in spades in business communication. So how come much of what is mailed, emailed, uploaded onto websites or featured in blogs is dull, self-serving, repetitive drivel?
If you doubt me, spend ten minutes looking at a selection of the above. It is no wonder that there are now people with the title content manager, doing their best for employers or clients to turn that tide of drivel. Start with a piece of advice from the
ontent marketing has become something of a buzzword in marketing
recently deceased best-selling author Maeve Binchy: “write as if you were talking to someone…donʼt try to impress.” She might have added “do try to entertain”. In a business context, people fight shy of this – theyʼre scared of a conversational style making them look trivial. Donʼt be. Remember, there is such a thing as intelligent conversation and I predict that you aim to have such with your marketing clients. So aim to make your marketing
communications – all of them – part of an ongoing intelligent conversation.
Consistent
What you say about yourselves should be consistent wherever you do it and that seems increasingly complex. Given all those places where you place that message, it is difficult, but it certainly isnʼt impossible, nor is doing it right. As a case of how important this is, it has been said that a key reason why Mitt Romney and his Republican Party lost the recent US election was because they were telling a different story to each different group of voters they were targeting. You wonʼt suffer from the same attendant bad PR of a
mixed message, but you could easily have prospective clients seeing those mixed messages and being confused by them or turned off by them. In the same way, I regularly encounter businesses where a phone call or a face-to-face meeting is conducted in an entirely different tone of voice to their written communications. The former is both gown-up and comprehensible, whilst the latter is riddled with marketingese and jargon, or worse still the David Brent variety of management-speak, which doesnʼt make them look smart, it just creates barriers to understanding.
From personal experience, if I interview someone by phone for an article, the quality of input I get is far higher than if the same person replies to the same questions in an email. In the latter case they are too busy trying to make themselves and their employers look big and clever and often achieve the precise opposite.
Aim to be helpful. If your prospective customers find good advice and technical tips on your website and in your emails they are likelier to revisit the former and happily open the latter. Done well,
| 20 | January 2013
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
Singing from the same hymn sheet
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