4 Communications Tips for Business Growth

Having a strong communications strategy is the way to truly thrive in business. You have to know how to effectively communicate to the public to see results. This post will discuss four simple things you can do with communications for business growth.

Convey a Message through Design

You don’t always need words to get a message across. Working with a professional graphic designer is a wise investment as they are able to beautifully craft the design of your website and other marketing materials to say what you want your brand to say. If you want the company’s message to say that the image is daring, adventurous, and confident, then aim for bold colors and sharp designs. Have the image reflect your brand’s stance.

Be Personal

Through it all, cater to the needs and desires of each individual customer. Treat them the way a person and not just a customer deserves to be treated. Giving your company a personal side also helps establish a greater trust and likeability. Don’t be afraid to give your company the face of a person.

Make it Stick

When you communicate with the public, you don’t just want to advertise your products or services. Say things in between that. Use social media to post insightful quotes that are reflective of your company’s interests and share heart-felt stories of human kindness. Appeal to the emotional side of people. When you do this, they will be more likely to share it across their social media platforms.

Keep it Consistent

Everything from your graphic designs to your tagline needs to be consistent. Consistency helps people remember things better. It also makes it easier to create brand awareness. 

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Creating a Winning Presentation Design

No one wants to sit through a boring presentation. End of story. A presentation that loses its audience by including wordy slides, lengthy lists, or too many statistics can easily miss the mark. The key to creating a winning presentation design is to get the audience excited about the topic or product, share your passion, and be involved. The way you do that isn’t hard, it just requires you to remember some important points when designing it. By keeping these points in mind, you can design a presentation that knocks their socks off.

Start on paper - While your first impulse may be to jump right in and start creating the presentation in PowerPoint or other presentation program, stop yourself. This can lock you into their design and their templates. Instead, get out your sticky notes and start there. Create a sticky note for each point you want to make and stick them onto a sheet of paper in the order you want. It’s common to reorder, add, or throw away ideas in this phase. But getting it right before you start can help you visualize the presentation and create a good flow.

One idea per slide - You may want to share every statistic you know about an item, or try to cram several thoughts in at once. But the key to a good presentation is having your audience remember what they hear and see. Pick a fact or statistic that is dramatic, big, or important and focus on that. Nail each slide with something important and the audience will remember it.

Use awesome graphics - Too flashy, too plain, too small, too big. Much like Goldilocks, you have to find the right graphic for each slide. Simple, uncluttered images work best. But don’t be afraid to use humor either. A simple comic that makes a point can be a winning point. One effective tool when choosing graphics that ties a good presentation together is to select a theme and stick to it for the whole presentation.

Tell a story - The same lessons you learned about writing a story in English class can apply to creating a great presentation. Make sure that the slides, the speech, the flow, all come together to tell a clear story. Including elements such as conflict and humor can add to audience engagement and involvement.

Provide a payoff - People are generally egocentric. They care about themselves and their lives. One of the biggest ways a presentation succeeds is by showing the audience how the product will help them make their lives better. People who can see themselves using the product will buy it. If they don’t see that payoff or benefit, the presentation will not have done its job.

Having a product you believe in and sharing it in the presentation isn’t enough. It is essential to create a presentation that engages and helps the audience feel the same way about the product. Following these key points can help you achieve that goal. A well designed presentation will have people asking question, talking about your product, and sharing it with others. For more information on how you can create winning presentation designs, as well as other marketing tools, contact us. We specialize in help you with all your marketing needs.

"Dear %_FirstName..." or How Not to Address a Customer Email

In recent years, we’ve heard so much talk about how marketing is no longer about pushing our messages onto people. Now it’s all about building a relationship with them using dialog on social media and in our blogs. We’re told it's a new world where customers seek us out, so we have to provide valuable content, establish credentials as an authority in our chosen domain, and connect like we’ve never connected before. It’s a world where interaction and conversation reigns supreme over the old ways of bombarding potential customers with one-way messages that scream, “BUY MY PRODUCT,” from the rooftops.

And it works. Sort of. It works provided we all play our part in a mutually agreed upon illusion. Customers and prospective customers pretend that they have a relationship with a brand or corporate entity. And the brands act like their prospective customers are their pals. 

The problem is that everyone involved knows that it’s a bit of a ruse. A contrived relationship at best. So the shared illusion can come crashing down on itself with the slightest provocation.

Take today for example. 

What Did You Just Call Me?

I’ve been a member of a professional association for many years now. I’ve attended their conferences, read their content, and watched their videos enough to start believing these people are my friends. See, social marketing works! But they managed to disabuse me of that notion with the stroke of a key. I just received a message in which my friends addressed me as Dear %_FirstName. 

*Sniff*

They got everything else right. The casual, friendly tone of the copy. The respectful close to the message. But none of that works when the message starts out saying, in effect, “To whom it may concern.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I know we’re not really friends. I know I’m just one of tens of thousands of entries in their CRM who received the exact same message today. So it’s not that I’m shocked or hurt to discover that we aren’t really buddies. Not at all. My point is how such a simple mistake (and yes, I’ve made the exact same mistake myself) can undo many years of relationship building by stripping away the illusion of relationship — even if just for a moment. After all, a real friend would never say, "Hey....ummmm, what's your name again?" would they?

Lessons Learned? 

Not so much a lesson, as a reminder not to let all the effort you’ve put into building a connection with customer through social media and content marketing slip away because of a simple mistake. Make sure to check, double-check, triple-check those mailings before clicking that SEND button. It’s worth the extra time.

Tell me what you think. Have you received a “Dear <firstname>” email from a company you deal with? How did it make you feel?

photo credit: Esellee via photopin cc