Your brand is much more than a logo or tagline. It’s everything your company stands for. It’s the quality of your products and services, the attitude of your employees, the altruism in the community and so much more. When your customers and the public at large see your logo or hear the name of your company, they get an image in their minds based on their personal experiences with your company. Good or bad, that image is your REAL brand, regardless of what your logo or tagline says.
Readers can relate better to a personal story than to a statistic. Stories show. Statistics tell. It’s always better to show than to tell when trying to communicate a point. Showing helps readers imagine themselves in the story – especially if the point you’re trying to make is a positive one, like buying your product. So consider using case studies and testimonials instead of statistics.
That’s not to say you should never use statistics. Just use them responsibly. Here are a few guidelines for when you do feel statistics are necessary:
Active sentences specify who does what. Passive sentences only say that something must be done. Passive tends to sound apologetic and wishy washy. Worse, it can leave the reader wondering if he’s the one who must perform the action. For employee communications, this confusion can wreak havoc on performance. In customer letters, the uncertainty can stifle the reading process, or flood your customer service center with unwanted phone calls.
Here’s how you can make your communications easy to understand.
If the purpose of your writing is, “to impress readers with my amazing vocabulary skills,” then by all means, break out the fancy prose and five syllable words. But, if you want your readers to act on your message, buy your product, or simply to “get it,” then check your thesaurus at the door.
Write conversationally as if you’re talking to your mother over coffee. For example:
Here are some techniques that can put you face-to-face, sipping coffee over a cozy table with your reader, instead of you being high up in a cold corporate tower looking down at your nameless subjects.
Start by reviewing your marketing materials, form letters and other communications (both internal and external) to see if you refer to your company in the third person. For example, “XYZ Company thanks you for your business.” “XYZ Company is pleased to introduce a new product…”
In last month’s articles, Win Over More Readers with Better Headlines, we talked about grabbing your readers’ attention in about one second. Now let’s keep their attention with scanable subheads.
Subheads are just as important as your main headline
Even though they make up a small percent of your overall communication, headlines and subheads are the most important real estate on the page. That’s because 8 out of 10 people merely scan the largest print. If the few pieces of big copy don’t draw them in, there’s no chance they’ll read the little copy.
Remember, we’re smack in the middle of the age of over-information. You get about one second to grab a reader’s attention and draw him in before he tosses the communication aside. Get the headlines right and you’ve won 80% of the game.
In today’s age of information-overload, reader preferences have shifted to quick and helpful, rather than bureaucratic and stiff. Do your business communications measure up? Here’s a checklist you can use to spot-check the effectiveness of your company’s internal and external materials. “Effective” means readers can follow the content with speed and ease, it’s meaningful to them, and they can act on the information presented without confusion.
Know your audience
• Did you prepare your communication with your audience in mind?
You can lead a horse to water… but sometimes you have to make it easier to drink.
We’re smack in the middle of the Information Age. Everywhere you turn, you see words ― in books, magazines, television, junk mail, not-so-junk mail, computers, tablets, smart phones, billboards ― even the tag on your child’s bedtime bear. We’re so surrounded with words that we have conditioned ourselves to ignore most of it. It’s all white noise until something grabs our attention.
It’s no secret that healthy employees can mean a healthier benefits budget. Study after study shows that employers who create and sustain a culture of wellness in the workplace really can spend less on health benefits. They also see less absenteeism and fewer disability claims. And let’s not forget their employees are more productive on the job. If you’ve ever been to an HR convention, you already know this. If not, go ahead and Google it. We’ll wait.
When people talk about investing, they immediately think of investing money somewhere. Maybe in real estate, in the stock market or possibly bonds or maybe something relatively safe like CDs. They may strategize and make sure their portfolio is “diversified.” However, when I talk about investing I like to think about how you can invest in yourself. After all YOU are one of the greatest assets you can invest in.
If you have read enough articles and books or listened to the many self-help experts out there you will find consistent factors as to why people fail. We could be talking about many different kinds of failures. Certainly business failures but also failures in many other endeavors such as weight lose, improved health, relationships and so on. The two common denominators that I have observed with any failure seems to be the lack of planning and the lack of taking correct actions to achieve that plan.
When selling your services or products I’m sure most of you get objections much like I do. “I would like to think about this,” or “I don’t have time to do any of this,” or “I’m not ready yet,” or “That seems expensive,” or “Call me back in a couple of months.” What does all this mean? Most likely they are afraid of making a bad decision. If they spend the money and it’s the wrong product or service they will look foolish. And no one wants to look foolish. How do you overcome these fears?
We all have them. Some of them good, some of them bad. Habits are those things we do without too much thought. We kind of go through our day and they just happen.
We’ve all experienced it. Sales have been down and for some reason you can’t get out of the hole. Cash is tight. You start to get nervous. You start to blame everything around you. The economy is in the tank, your prospects won’t return your calls, your proposal didn’t get mailed on time, your car broke down going to an appointment . . . on and on and on. Ok, many of these things could be a cause for a slip in sales. But then these are all things out of your control. So what can you control? The answer to that is . . . yourself and the actions you take!
I have recommended to many of my clients the book titled “FISH”. It’s a book about how to improve moral in any organization and thereby improve results. There are actually four principles in the book but, I think, the most important one of them is called “Choose Your Attitude.” The philosophy goes something like this. When you go to work, or run your business, or do just about anything in life the attitude you bring to that event is your choice. And depending on the type of attitude you bring will primarily determine the type of experience you will have.
In a previous post, I talked about planning and managing the financial aspects of your business. Included in that was the importance of managing cash flow. I’d like expand on that principle and specifically talk about the concept called “The Cash Gap.” What is the cash gap? Well, it’s simply the number of days between when you have to pay for things in your business and when your customers end up paying you. For example, you might have to buy materials to produce a product or buy inventory to stock your shelves.
As a former Director of Corporate Financial Planning for a large corporation and with a degree in accounting I have heard my share of bean counter jokes. Like this one: “what does an accountant use for birth control . . . his personality.” Jokes aside, for the past six years, as a business coach, I have found that my financial background has helped me teach business owners how to run their business more effectively.
It’s an annual ritual . . . setting resolutions and looking at the goals we want to achieve in the New Year. How did it go last year? Did the goals and resolutions you made start to fade after just a few months? Did you start out gang busters only to look back at the end of the year not even getting close to the goals you set for yourself and your business? If so, either you did not commit fully or face it; you don't have the resolve to make the changes on your own.
When was the last time you really took a close look at how you are doing things and asked yourself “how can I do this faster, cheaper, simpler and easier while maintaining quality and customer satisfaction?” In the “old days” this might be something you look at once every couple of years. However, in today’s highly competitive and rapidly changing environment I would suggest you need to ask yourself this on a daily basis. Otherwise you might find yourself left in the proverbial dust.
