All Posts Tagged With: "message"

These days, an effective marketing plan can be the difference between a business surviving the economic crisis and going under. Properly developed and executed, a marketing plan can actually help you thrive in tough times, and be ready to capitalize when the inevitable recovery happens.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you put together your marketing plan:
Your message gets lost in the crowd. If you look and sound just like everyone else, no one is going to notice you. Be distinctive; stand out from the competition.

Your marketing targets an audience that is too broad. Remember, you can’t be everything to everybody. Be something to somebody.

You ad budget gets blown in a one-shot marketing gamble. It would be nice to blow $3 million on a 30-second Super Bowl ad, but if you don’t do anything the rest of the year, no one will remember.

Your marketing isn’t consistent. Some businesses panic when the phone don’t start ringing off the hook the minute an advertisement hits the street. Marketing is cumulative; it takes time to build some momentum.

Your marketing fails to tie different media together. There’s no excuse for not integrating print, with electronic, with social media, with video, with special events, with networking.

You ignore your target audience. Maybe the worst sin of all. You have to know your customer.

You try to do things on your own. If you’re not good at something, hire a pro. Plus, it allows you to spend more time running your business.
You change your image with each ad. Stick with a color scheme and font. People need to recognize you.

You fail to make a clear call to action. Tell you customer what do do: call, go one line, stop by. Make it clear and unmistakeable.
You fail to keep a marketing calendar. It helps to plan your campaigns in advance.

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Interesting story on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer today about bad business writing. Although I’m not sure exactly what made Stacey Burling’s piece worthy of such prime real estate (it wasn’t exactly a slow news day what with Russia invading George and the Olympics in full swing), it did bring a warm feeling to this writer’s heart.

What especially caught my attention was a quote from Rick Sherman, an Austin, Texas marketing consultant who defended his authorship of this description of his company: “[We’re] a market-leading provider of technology-enabled process-optimization tools to reduce and right-size inventory, improve forecast accuracy and service, optimize production resources, and reduce cycle time across the supply chain.”

Boiled down to its essence, the company makes money for its clients by making them more efficient. Of course, that’s not sexy enough for upper management, so Sherman penned his wordy, obtuse, self-important sounding passage. And, as Burling reported, he was more than happy to stand behind his work by arguing his target readers were supply-chain managers and trade-press writers, not reporters for daily newspapers. As if that audience is somehow genetically predisposed to prefer vague, unnecessarily complicated writing.

“It is not our strategic intent for you to understand,” he told Burling.

Sherman also defended the passage by saying it was purposely wordy to allow for as many key Internet search words as possible.

Kudos to Sherman for at least grasping the concept of writing for your audience and his rudimentary knowledge of Search Engine Optimization. But major jeers for thinking that you can sacrifice clarity in favor of keywords.

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(Third in a series of articles about improving your writing.)

As a newspaper editor, I used to remind my reporters that there was a finite amount of space for their stories. If they could save one or two words per paragraph in a 20-inc story, it might mean the difference between having their work run intact or having vital information clipped out by a ruthless copy editor under deadline pressure.

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