We’ve all seen it. That brochure. That Web site. That annual report. The one that incorporates powerful design, compelling images, a fantastic layout… and a slew of nonsensical marketing copy that doesn’t bother to explain what the company is all about.
One of the most important steps any organization must take is to clearly define its identity. Who are we? What products and services do we offer? How are we different from our competitors? The answers to these questions are often straightforward. Yet, the predominant corporate culture calls for dressing up these answers with slick, flashy language – i.e. marketing-speak – to the point that they become virtually unrecognizable.
The ability to clearly explain to customers who you are, what you do and why they should want to be involved with you is essential to business success. In our increasingly global world, we all are relying more and more on our marketing materials – particularly our online content – to clearly convey our identity and messages to key audiences.
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One of the easiest ways to prevent your messages from getting lost in translation is to banish marketing-speak. This week, as we make our resolutions for 2010, here are a few tips and tactics to make marketing-speak “so last year.”
Know Thy Enemy: Identify Marketing-Speak
The Twitter account @FakeAPStylebook recently spoofed marketing-speak with this tweet:
“Only use the word ‘proactive’ if it will dynamically impact your synergistic throughput paradigm.”
Of course, this is exaggerated – but not by much. Think about the number of times you have seen a description like this on a company Web site:
“Our high-performance, integrated, cross-functional professional solutions help clients align business goals with dynamic strategies to achieve desired outcomes.”
This generic, buzzword-heavy description doesn’t do anything to advance a potential customer’s knowledge of the company’s culture, offerings or qualifications. By identifying and eliminating these forgettable phrases, a company can increase its chances of holding a customer’s interest and differentiating itself from the pack.
Think Elevator – Not Elevated.
In marketing, particularly in the business-to-business world, the elevator speech is among the most powerful tools we have. This brief, face-to-face interaction helps people understand who we are and what our companies are about in 20 seconds or less, which can be less time than it takes to read through the “About Us” section on a Web site. Elevator speeches are brief, straightforward and won’t leave your audience groping for their dictionary when you’re finished.
What would happen if we began testing all of our marketing materials with this goal in mind? For starters, that “About Us” description on the Web site – the one that includes four or more words you would never use in conversation at a networking event or a dinner party – would be in for an overhaul. Customers aren’t going to be impressed by your high-minded prose or the breadth of your vocabulary, they’re going to be impressed by your ability to connect with them and communicate effectively.
“Speak, not so that you may be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood.”
The sound communications advice above comes from my grandmother, a grammar maven and lover of language. Her quote hangs on the wall in my office as a reminder of the responsibility we have as professional communicators to be creative, clear conduits between our companies and our customers.
We all take pride in our ability to move people, to urge them to action and to inspire them to purchase our products through the strength of our messaging. Nuance, inflection and word choice are important parts of these messages; however, when it comes to explaining to your customers who you are and why they want to purchase your goods or services, clarity is king.
Veronica Brown is a vice president at TheWadeGroup, a public affairs firm headquartered in Washington, DC. Contact her at veronica.brown@yahoo.com or follow her on Twitter @veebrown.
It took a recession, but resumes finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs.
Certain professions have it easier than others. If you’re a lobbyist, you cite legislation passed or defeated. If you’re a fundraiser, you count dollars raised. If you’re a political operative, you record a win-loss record.
Alas, if you’re a social media consultant, you probably shun such metrics. Sure, you’ve helped clients tweet and blog, but who among us hasn’t? Sure, you have 10 years of experience, but what have you achieved?
With the ever-growing pool of amateurs marketing themselves as authorities, the need to distinguish the talkers from the doers is urgent. And what better way to draw this distinction than through the crucible of numbers.
For instance, does your resume refer to “viral videos”? Sounds impressive, right? Well, how many views have these sensations attracted? Have you supported a Web site redesign? How much did that bolster traffic, and how many unique monthly visitors did that result in?
Did you manage an e-mail list? How many people subscribed to it, and how many joined under your watch? Did you conduct blogger outreach? Name five bloggers you’ve successfully pitched.
Did you execute search engine optimization? By what percentages did that drive up organic traffic and referral traffic, and how many negative and positive stories did you navigate in and out of the top 10 search results?
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To be sure, numbers don’t paint a perfect picture. They omit client satisfaction, can elevate quantity to the detriment of quality, and can be massaged.
Moreover, numbers are only a means to an end. So, you doubled the audience for your podcast? Nice! Now tell us how this affected the bottom line. Did it engender a 30% bump in donations? A 50% jump in e-commerce sales? A 100% spike in membership?
Taking these extra steps requires extra work. Yet those confident in their CVs should embrace this charge. After all, there’s nothing like cold hard data to reveal that the common claim, “increased significantly,” in fact was a trivial 8% uptick.
Indeed, like the SAT, numbers serve a crucial purpose: They constitute a uniform, relatively transparent credential. As such, they help to address perhaps the biggest complaint about social media: How to measure its return on investment.
Jonathan Rick is a Senior Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. Follow him on twitter @jrick
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by Julie Weishaar
We have all heard the hoopla around the value of writing a blog for our business. Blogs create a focal point in a community of potential customers, provide a hub for social networking, invite participation and interaction, build relationships, help increase SEO, boost traffic to your blog site (and web site) and help establish you and your company as an industry expert.
So you decide you will jump on the bandwagon and start writing a blog. You take great pains in creating interesting and valuable content but you can’t understand why no one is visiting your blog. Why? The answer is simple. In order for someone to visit your blog, they first have to know it is there.
Do you know how large the internet is? I read somewhere that it would take 57,000 years to read the entire internet. Certainly more time than I have. Now picture your blog in such an immense arena. How can you expect someone to find you? Well, that is where social media marketing comes into play.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog but the first and foremost step is to visit and comment on others’ blogs. If you play in their sandbox first and make relevant and constructive comments, eventually they will come and play in your sandbox.
The “eventually” part is the stickler here. Society today doesn’t like that word. The concept of delayed gratification is not universally accepted or held in high regard by most. We don’t like to wait. We want things now!
- Gone are the days of going to the music store, sifting through the various music selections on whatever media was relevant at the time. Why should anyone have to wait? They can download any music they want immediately from various different Internet music sites – some even for free.
- Cell phones are no longer just for talking. You can play games, surf the net, take pictures, record videos, etc. and most cell phones have literally become an extension of our bodies. Teenagers have become incredibly adept at carrying on a conversation with many people at the same time and have become extremely proficient typists as they text faster than I can even see the letters on my cell phone.
- There are gadgets that can record your favorite TV program from anywhere when you forget to set up the recording before you leave the house.
- How about those “smart houses” that have highly advanced automatic systems for lighting, temperature control, multi-media, security, window and door operations, and many other functions?
- A New Digital Storefront Partnership was recently announced as a consortium of publishers including Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, Meredith, and News Corp. The group is being overseen by Time Inc. executive vice president John Squires who said “The lesson that we’ve taken from smartphones—the iPhones in particular—is users want to read in digital form.”
It is amazing what society can do these days at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch. So why does social media marketing, including blogging, take so long to see results? First of all, it doesn’t have to take as long as one might think if carried out correctly. If you focus your energies in your industry niche, are proactive as well as reactive, and if you are consistent with your efforts, it will take you less time than someone who doesn’t apply the aforementioned tactics.
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But, even if you do everything right, seeing results will still take more time than it takes to flick a switch. Why? Because blogging and other social marketing techniques are about relationships and building relationships takes time no matter how you slice it. Would you agree to marry someone you met for the first time? I doubt it. You would want to get to know them through many interactions, learn about who they are, what they do, see if you share the same values, decide if you trust them or not, see if you have anything in common with them, determine if your needs match theirs, etc. The same principle applies to blogging. You have to earn your reputation, play in others’ sandboxes, provide helpful, relevant content and develop relationships in order to see a return on the investment of your time. For more on blogging, click here.
Julie Weishaar is a Marketing Consultant at New Horizons 123 You can contact her at beaky88@aol.com
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by Amy Howell
People ask me daily about social media and it has been fun as well as challenging to try and figure it out, but that’s the whole point— nobody has it all figured out although there are a lot of smart people out there blogging and discussing issues. The thing I personally like about social media is that nobody “owns” it and there’s something there for everyone.
You cannot control the tides of social media, but you can control your corporate message and your strategy to tell your story—good or bad. You don’t have to look very far to find daily examples of how Twitter or You-Tube can impact a business in minutes. Recent stats report most businesses don’t use social media but plan to in 2010 (I have posted a lot of these articles on my Twitter page).
Here are some of the leading “Trends” of Social Media for this year (and I predict they will grow):
* Traditional Media and marketing has been revamped, replaced. Much of what we did to market and tell our stories within the last year has been crushed.
* Social Media corporate marketing budgets are on the rise.
* Retailers need to be savvy online; Customers researching and buying online. One word exemplifies this: Zappos (435 Zappos employees use Twitter!)
* The Recession is helping Social Media as a cost control alternative.
* News is 24/7 now, and customers won’t buy week old news.
* Well known bloggers and influencers on Twitter are getting every media message out.
* Lots of good applications and increasing technology tools like the iPhone will advance the Social Media cause.
In closing, I will tell you that if you feel overwhelmed or intimidated by social media, internet communications and all the applications that are out there, you should! Even for some of us practicing it daily, it is like nothing since the Industrial revolution.
Use of the internet will continue to grow and smart companies are looking now at how they can plug into the dynamic—and fascinating tools out there to turn the tides of social media to their benefit.
Amy Howell is the CEO at Howell Marketing Strategies, LLC. Follow Amy on twitter and read more blog articles by her here.
The GBA Blog provides insight for Marketing Decision Makers and other fun people
Learn more about GBA and our video production prowess!
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by Deborah Brody
Ralph Waldo Emerson is often quoted as saying: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Note that Emerson refers to foolish consistency. Smart consistency, on the other hand, should be adored by smart marketers and businesspeople everywhere. Smart consistency strengthens your brand and improves your marketing efforts.
With so many marketing platforms available, it’s easy for marketers to lose track of the message and image in their communications efforts. But consistency really is the key to effective marketing, making it a priority to be able control the message.
The most famous brands (think Coca-Cola) always are consistent. Their logo always looks the same, the tag line is the same and the general look and feel always follows the brand’s rules. Great brands enforce consistency.
Less established brands, especially struggling businesses, tend to do the exact opposite. They change up the logo, don’t respect or even have set colors or tag lines or fonts. One ad tells you one thing about the company and makes that a “brand attribute” while another touts something completely different.
Some businesses are experimenting with their marketing or simply don’t have the budget to hire a professional to caretake their branding efforts. A busy business-owner is probably too caught up in his/her other responsibilities to pay close attention to the marketing communications.
Marketing communications aim to shape perception. As a marketer, you want the public to come to accept and believe the image that you want to project. And what does an inconsistent message/look communicate? If it succeeds in communicating at all, inconsistent marketing shows a lack of direction, and in some cases, carelessness. Inconsistency can also communicate confusion and that muddles your branding.
How do you create and enforce consistency?
1) Make consistency a priority!
2) Name a point person to be the final authority on all communications. That person would ensure style and message are in sync with all other marketing efforts.
3) Create an organizational marketing style guide, and refer to it every single time you are putting out a message.
4) Train your people on your message. This is doubly important if several people handle your message, and especially on social media platforms like Twitter.
Yes, consistency will take enforcement and effort, but the result will be a stronger brand.
Deborah Brody established Deborah Brody Marketing Communications (www.deborahbrody.com) in 2002 to provide writing, blogging and strategic communications consulting services to small and medium sized businesses and nonprofits. After moving to Washington, DC from Miami nearly five years ago, she still misses Cuban coffee and random conversations in Spanish. Follow Deborah on twitter @DBMC
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