5 Tips for Effective Marketing Communication
When building your business, having a great product or service is just the beginning. Communicating your company’s offerings, solutions, and advantages is crucial for turning a good product into a wildly successful one. But in the age of digital communication, traditional advertising is no longer the only way to tell people about what you offer. Connecting with your target audience through digital media can be an incredibly powerful asset to your brand and business – as long as you can optimize your message and create effective, ongoing communications with your customers.
Here are our top five tips to more effective marketing communication.
1. Articulate your marketing goal(s) and message
It’s difficult to be effective if you’re unsure what your goals are. Without defining a clear message and a way to measure the success of your communications, you’ll end up with a less cohesive and less engaging strategy that uses up time and resources without generating returns. Instead, practice making SMART goals that center around a clear, direct message.
2. Define and understand your audience
Knowing what you want to say is one thing, but knowing what your ideal customer wants to hear is another! Research your audience and identify what types of conversations or solutions are important to them. Learn where they go to find information that helps them make decisions. Craft your messages around your researched data to ensure you’re investing your marketing time and budget into communications that will get attention, rather than falling flat amid the rest of the market noise.
3. Tell a story
If the movie and television industry gives any indication, people love a great story – especially when they can identify with the characters and conflicts. Craft your messaging into relatable narratives that put your ideal customer at the center of the story. Creating recognizable situations and offering the best-fit solution to a known problem will help your brand establish a more intimate connection with your audience than traditional advertising.
4. Focus your message
Keep your eyes – and your communications – on the prize. Once you’ve identified a key concept and message, stick to it. Creating too many individual messages can become overwhelming to the consumer. If you have multiple messages that you’d like to work with, consider separating them into independent campaigns that build consistency around each message, rather than trying to work multiple discussions or points into the same campaign strategy.
5. Create a dialogue
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing over older methods of advertising is the ability to have a conversation with your audience. A billboard or TV commercial is a one-way communication, but social media platforms, email marketing, and other digital media forms allow the customers to engage with the material and messaging. Open your campaign to dialogue by asking your audience questions, encouraging them to share their experiences with your brand, or by creating an approachable persona on your accounts. When your customers feel connected to your brand on a personal level, they are more likely to not only listen to what you have to say, but to act on your offerings as long-term clients.
The Power of Empathic Storytelling: How to Make Your Customer the Hero of Your Story
Modern consumers have evolved beyond the scope of traditional “buy this product” advertising; these days, your customers and clients are as interested in the why and how of products and services as they are in the what. Creating purposeful narratives that connect with your target audiences on a deeper personal or emotional level will help you stand out amongst your competitors and build a lasting bond that keeps your clients coming back. Discover how to focus your storytelling content on your customer in this article from Entrepreneur.
Read the full article at: www.entrepreneur.com
5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Hire Non-Vetted Freelancers
Recruiting freelancers for your business can be a headache, especially when you’re trying to fill and manage positions you’re not always familiar with yourself. For Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing Solution, we routinely need to find and manage subcontractors (freelancers and other marketing agencies) as we assemble our client’s virtual marketing departments staff, and over the years we’ve gotten pretty good at vetting, verifying, and managing them. Here are some tips on how to carefully vet freelancers to prevent missed deadlines, communication issues, security breaches, and more.
Of course, we’d still be happy to help you not only build, but also manage, an outsourced marketing department that’s perfect for your business!
Read the full article at: www.smallbizdaily.com
Seize These Big Opportunities for Smaller Brands to Make More Money
In the past, high-powered marketing agencies have always come with high-powered price tags, creating expensive gatekeepers that have barred small businesses from gaining the marketing benefits of agencies that can truly move the needle.
This article explores the pros and cons of various informal approaches to assembling your own experienced marketing team. We’re certainly biased, but we think they left the best, most effective type off their list: a complete, outsourced marketing department including a CMO & VP of Marketing (learn more about the JointSourcing Solution).
Read the full article at: www.entrepreneur.com
Going green dramatically benefits businesses – it should be central to their coronavirus recovery strategy
While the overall benefits of “going green” are readily apparent, we found it interesting to see these added suggestions for furthering your business’ green initiatives as the world economy continues to cautiously reopen after the Coronavirus impact of 2020. Try these four “greening” methods as your company ramps back up in the post-pandemic world:
- Go after smaller markets that embrace green practices
- Motivate your employees to adopt green initiatives in their work and daily habits
- Investe and engage in sustainability programs
- Focus on energy efficiency with your equipment, buildings, and vehicles.
Read the full article at: theconversation.com
Green Marketing To Grow A Reseller Channel
“Going green” is an oft-used phrase, but many small businesses have difficulty working environmentally conscious practices into their operations – especially in the services industry. Determining how your customers can use your green services to meet their business goals, however, is a clever approach to eco-marketing (where you, your customers, and the environment all win) that we’d love to see more often!Metro Sign & Awning, a Sales Renewal client, wanted to increase referrals from architect and general contractor partners, so they created a content marketing campaign around white papers that explained the benefits of environmentally-friendly, energy-saving business signage to the customers of architects and general contractors. By helping their partners attract customers interested in green signage, Metro was able to grow its referrals from them and deliver many more environmentally beneficial signs.
Read the sample white paper at: www.metrosignandawning.com
SBA launches free online digital learning platform for female entrepreneurs
Starting your small business can be hard for anyone, but women especially struggle in the entrepreneurial field, which has traditionally been male-dominated. The SBA is working to level the playing field with a new platform that offers FREE educational resources to women
Read the full article at: www.kold.com
10 Strategies to Get More Reviews and Compete in SERPs
Reviews have been an important for online businesses since the beginning, but they're even more important now.
Consider:
- Consumers require an average 40 online reviews before believing a business’s star rating is accurate (up from 34 in 2017)
- 85% of consumers think that online reviews older than 3 months aren’t relevant
The authors propose mulitple strategies to use to get more reviews for your business, here are their best:
1. Deliver an Outstanding Customer Experience (if you're not, don't bother with getting reviews)
2. Ask Every Customer
3. Respond to Positive and Negative Reviews
4. People Have their Preferences, Select Sites Customers Use
5. Make Leaving A Review Simple
6. Time Your Request
7. Automate Requests
8. Play the Long GameAnd finally, when creating an online reputation management program, it's important to understand the important difference between 1st and 3rd party reviews
- 1st-Party Review: Feedback or testimonial given directly to your business by a customer. The business owns the content.
- 3rd-Party Review: Feedback given to a 3rd-party review site like Google or Trip Advisor. The site owns the content.
Read the full article at: gatherup.com
Meet the Woman Who Made Studying the Multicultural Consumer a Priority
Research is a cornerstone of any marketing plan – just ask one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, Cheryl Grace. Her commitment to using multicultural consumer segment data has helped propel her beauty brands forward with informed marketing strategies that speak to a much broader audience than her competitors. Find out what data types can be relevant to your business, and how to leverage that data in your own marketing strategy, in the full article.
Read the full article at: beautymatter.com
‘Thumb-Stopping,’ ‘Humaning,’ ‘B4H’: The Strange Language of Modern Marketing. – The New York Times
How up-to-date are you on marketing buzzwords? Check this collection out to see.
Our fav: Thumb-Stopping!
Read the full article at: www.nytimes.com