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

How User Reviews Can Drive Your Business

In 2013, we covered a The New York Times article looking at how online reviews and social connections are causing a shift in the balance of power from marketers to consumers. The article concludes that no longer do marketers have the ability to fully control their sales messages, as consumers are using online reviews and ratings to inform their purchase decisions.

The article, “There’s Power in All Those User Reviews, ” compared a study from pre-Internet days to a similar one just recently conducted.

The first study compared purchasing decisions by consumers presented with two priced options and by those presented with three.

(The study) “showed how marketers could manipulate consumers. Just by presenting three differently priced options, they could get consumers to gravitate to a midprice one from a less expensive one. This finding further led Dr. Simonson and other scholars to describe widespread “irrational” behavior by consumers who made decisions not based on a product’s actual value but on how the item was presented relative to other products.”

In the more recent study, conducted as part of an ongoing research project at Stanford Graduate School of Business:

“participants were asked which of three Canon cameras they’d like to buy. Before deciding, they were allowed to spend a few minutes reading user reviews and other information about these and other cameras on Amazon.com… That made a huge difference. When given three camera options, consumers didn’t gravitate en masse to the midprice version. Rather, the least expensive one kept its share and the middle one lost more to the most expensive one.”

The article summarizes the conclusions of Itamar Simonson, a Stanford marketing professor and the lead researcher of the study:

“The results suggest that companies should spend less money trying to shape consumer opinions in traditional ads… and more on understanding what and who are shaping those opinions.”

User Reviews, Quality Content and Being Social

Can we use these insights to shape our sales and marketing programs today? Do they change the way we do things? The conclusions drawn in the article reinforce our approach to the work we do on behalf of our clients in two ways:

1. A commitment to producing quality online content, from a well-planned, well-written website that speaks to the needs and concerns of customers and prospects to a robust blogging program that demonstrates the company’s expertise and adds value for the readers; and
2. A commitment to real online “engagement”, which means using your social media networks to find, understand and interact with your customers and prospects where they are online. It’s not sufficient to auto-post a sporadic blog post; rather, genuine interaction is necessary in order to advance your business; and
3. A commitment to reviews management, to actively manage reviews, ratings and comments made about your business wherever they are made across the Web. The goal is to widely leverage positive comments (whether initially made on your site or third party sites, like Yelp) while increasing the satisfaction of customers making negative ones.

We’ve written before about the blurring of the line between SEO and other forms of marketing, and our emphasis on quality in our marketing programs. This article is further proof that today’s marketing requires an understanding of the power of the Internet and continual assessment of how to best use it to support your business message.

Originally published 12/3013; updated 6/2017

Best of Growth Spurts – Focus on Metrics

Actionable Marketing Advice
From Our Growth Spurts Blog

We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business.

In this month’s content roundup, we’re focusing on goals, measurement and metrics. Any integrated marketing plan will define strategic goals that boil down to:

• Awareness: Build an audience for your product or service.
• Engagement: Drive engagement with your product or service.
• Conversion: Drive sales and leads.

No matter which channels your use as part of an integrated marketing program, measurement and metrics are key to making sure you’re meeting your goals. Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at measurement and analytics.

On Content Marketing

Why It’s Essential to Track Your Content
Online marketing is about serving messages and media to your audience at the right times in the right places with one single goal: to move them through the customer journey and drive conversion.

What makes social different from other channels is the personal referrals by sharing, liking, and commenting. Learning what types of content resonate most with your audience at each point in the customer journey will help you use content to increase conversions. Read the article here.

Content Marketing Metrics: How to Transform Data into Action
It’s the age of big data, so marketers need to make data-driven decisions about when, how, and why you produce content. Content marketing metrics tend to fall into one of two distinct categories: engagement metrics and growth. Chances are, you’ll need to track both. Continue reading…

On SEO

KPIs for SEO: Measuring SEO Success
There are many variables at play in an SEO campaign, and key performance indicators (KPIs) allow you to identify what is working – and often, more importantly, provide an early warning system if something is not moving the needle as expected. Learn some of the most useful KPIs in terms of connecting SEO outcomes to business objectives here.

On Social Media

How to Draw Meaningful Conclusions from Social Media Metrics – Put Fans and Followers in Context
Don’t be fooled – a high number of followers does not equal social media success. Although “likes” and follows are where prospective customers begin their journey, these numbers aren’t meaningful as standalone snapshots. Companies typically track “likes” and retweets, but they can also track qualified leads coming from social, a company’s share of a conversation, and even the amount of revenue generated from an individual social marketing initiative. Continue reading…

On Customer Rentention

How to Measure and Improve Retention Marketing Metrics
The key to retention marketing – the efforts your store takes to get customers who have bought from you in the past to buy more from you more often – is understanding the metrics. Metrics give you a deeper understanding of your customers and their behaviors, allowing you to build experiences that turn one purchase into multiple purchases. This article looks at three of the most impactful retention metrics and how other companies have used them to build thriving brand loyalty: repeat customer rate, purchase frequency, and average order value. Continue reading…

Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from April

We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information.Just case you’ve missed these updates, we offer a regular summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts. where we extract the most useful information, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.

Here, then, are our 5 favorite posts from the past month:

Email Marketing

What Consumers Want from Brand Emails. Read this article if you’ve been rethinking the content and focus of your company emails. It seems pretty clear that offers – 20% off, BOGO, free shipping – are what consumers are looking for. Read more

Content Marketing

50 Terrible Work Phrases You Need to Stop Using. Guilty as charged? It can be hard to avoid buzz words, but you can lose credibility in the workplace by using too many. Did they miss any?

Social Media Marketing

How Homebuilders Can Leverage Houzz, Pinterest and Instagram. A picture is worth a thousand words – and may bring you some customers, too! – especially if you are a “visual” business that takes advantage of image-based sites like Houzz, Pinterest and Instagram. Read more

Social Media and the CEO. Does your company CEO have a voice on social media? If so, are they sharing information the public wants to hear? Read about a recent survey that shows how company news, goals, aspirations are much more important to share than those leaders’ personal stories.

How to Maximize Your Content Exposure on LinkedIn. If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably realized that it’s not always as clear cut as to the best way to use it for your business. That’s because at its core, it’s a peer-to-peer network, designed primarily for individuals to connect. There are some things you can do, though, to bring visibility to your business. Read more

Stay up-to-date with marketing news and advice for your business. Subscribe to our Best of Monthly Digest here.

Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from March

Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a regular summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.

Here, then, are our 5 favorite posts from the past month:

Advertising and SEO

Goodbye, Google Sidebar Ads – What You Need to Know – If you’ve done a Google search on a laptop or desktop in the last few weeks, you’re sure to have noticed a big change. There’s a lot of white space on the right – gone are the sidebar ads and the maps and local listings. What impact will this have on local marketing, SEO and search advertising? While the changes are so new the verdict is still out, we’ve gathered insights from a number of experts in order to get an early read.

Content Marketing

5 Ways to Make Your Blog Post Interactive on the Cheap – Is it time to breathe some life into your blog posts? This article features five tools you can use to draw your readers in and keep them engaged.

How to Grow Your Blog Audience: Here Are 5 Tips – So you have a great blog. You write great content with lots of important information worth sharing. You publish frequently and promote your own content. But still, you aren’t getting many hits. Does it mean your content needs reworking? Not necessarily. Breathe new life into your existing posts by following these 5 steps, and you can transform your low-traffic blog with a high bounce rate into a blog many new people will actually read and come back to.

Social Media Marketing

60 Facebook Advertising Mistakes that Make You Look like a Rookie – Facebook advertising can be deceptively simple and straightforward. This article provides concrete examples of what not to do.

How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media to Grow Their Online Presence – for Free! – After conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free. Learn how here.

Stay up-to-date with marketing news and advice for your business – Subscribe to our Best of Monthly Digest here.