Communication Annihilation during Demonstration

The G20 protestors in London today have got it wrong. And I don’t mean because of their political biases.

They’ve got it wrong because no-one’s quite sure what it’s really all about. They’re protesting about too much; climate change, capitalism, recession, world debt, third-world debt, war, banks, bonuses, redundancies, low interest rates, food shortages. The list goes on. I saw the early marches around parliament on Saturday myself and it’s just baffling.

Too much to say just becomes noise, the message gets lost, and the danger from the protestors’ point of view is that their demonstration becomes interpreted as just a bunch of angry people.

The thing to take away is that when you say too much it’s too close to saying nothing at all.

Zero to Hero – It’s All in the Headline

Celebrated by journalists, advertisers, marketers and astute business people for hundreds of years, great headlines are zero-or-hero, loved-or-lonely, make-it-or-break-it important. And it becomes more so every day. We live in a world where the headline is everything – whether we take notice, what we’re going to think about what comes next, how much time and credibility we’re going to allow something. It’s like this because we no longer always have time to try to work out whether stuff is relevant or interesting to us or not. There’s too much choice, too much information, too much to take our attention.

Give me the headline! I can then work out:

• Do I read this email?
• What’s this document trying to tell me?
• Is this magazine worth buying this week?
• Is this brochure worth picking up?
• Does this website help me?
  

It’s the difference between engaging people or being ignored. No one gets to the opening paragraph or looks for the subheadings if the headline hasn’t interested them first.

And headlines don’t just come in text.

• What’s the headline that your suit shouts in a first meeting with a client?
• How do I trust you’re going to solve my problems? Easily? Courteously?
• When you answer the phone like you don’t care what have you told me in BIG CAPS up front

Everything we do communicates something. And people will understand you more easily when you communicate – with everything you do – like a classic newspaper article; winning headline first, then bold opening paragraph giving an overview, followed by paragraphs broken up with subheadings.


How would your communication look in print? What (and where) are your winning headlines?

A Different Perspective on Your Clients' Attention

Imagine that the people you wanted to present to; the buyers, decision makers or budget holders that you want to be in front of to make sales, sold you their time. So rather than making appointments in the ways that you currently do – through whichever sales & marketing approaches you’re currently using – you just had to book and pay for their undivided attention whenever you wanted it. Kind of like an ‘Attention Credit’.

You’d have to think about whose time you wanted to buy the most and at which price points, so you’d pick your target audience very accurately to suit your proposition and your likely lifetime profitability. You certainly wouldn’t go and make dozens of poorly researched appointments or pay over the top to sit in front of people who wouldn’t be interested in what you do.

These Attention Credits would not be cheap to buy either, so you’d be forced to think about how well you’re going to communicate when you get there. Why would you pay for an hour and a half’s worth of blabber when you could communicate everything so much better in 45 minutes?

If buyers sold you Attention Credits it would pay you to properly target your marketing, to research your clients properly before you met them, to communicate in the most effective manner possible, and to continually test and measure what you’re doing. You’d create an outstanding process to ensure you were getting the very best return on your investment.

Not so different to what’s happening in the real world then. Shame that we just don’t feel the pain of the marketing cost & the poor communication in the same immediate way that we do the pain of a ticking meter.

Sometimes You Get More than You Bargained For

I recently worked with a plumbing company – a very straight forward husband & wife team. (Marketing to many plumbers is an ad in the Yellow Pages and a name on the side of their van, so they had approached me with some trepidation). We worked on a localised mail campaign which addressed the real concerns of people looking for plumbers and I advised them to spend a little time and boot leather delivering the letters around their local area.

Yesterday was wet. Very wet. Yet undeterred, and armed with a couple of hundred envelopes, Mrs Smith (not a changed name, she really is Mrs Smith!) posted letters on four roads in the pouring rain before deciding that enough was enough and going home. When she got back she was astonished. She had four calls from customers waiting for her and through her letterbox she found a handwritten note which read:


'Many thanks for your circular. As a retired commercial director I must congratulate you on your efficient presentation of this excellent letter. I have put your sticker on the inside of my kitchen units and will most definitely be using you when the need arises.'


What do we learn here? That;

1, Getting marketing done professionally pays
2, The fundamental principles of profitable marketing are universal and recognisable
3, Adding something that engages the ‘might use you in the future’ group is a sure-fire winner
4, Don’t put things off because it’s raining (use that as a metaphor for recession if you will too)
5, Hand written notes have the power to touch people even more than four new customers

A Word About Your Words

The greatest single thing that stands between you and your potential customers is words. You might need other influencers along the way, but the single biggest influence will always be words. You can't get people to see, experience, or imagine your product or service without them.

The power of words is often unrecognised by small and medium sized businesses. Their adverts, brochures, websites, conversation, even their business cards are full of poorly written words that are literally costing them hundreds or thousands of pounds or dollars in lost profits.

This of course is good news for you!

Choosing your words well - in all situations - can have an unbelievable effect on your revenues - often boosting a small or medium-sized business' profits by as much as 50-100%. And it costs no more than choosing bad words, which is likely what your competitors are doing.

Writing copy that works is a skill. But it is a skill that can be very easily learnt - even if you've found it difficult in the past. These are the golden rules with words:

Purpose - What is the point of the words you are about to write or say? For example, if you are writing a small web advert, the job of the advert is simply to get a click. Not to sell the product. Don't feel you have to cram everything you do into everything you say or write.

Perspective - Always write from the customer's perspective. Don't talk about what your product is, as much as what it will do for the customer. If you're selling something technical, put the spec at the back, or as an appendix. Get the customer message across first. Theodore Levitt, the American economist and Harvard professor (who chose these words brilliantly) said: 'People don't buy quarter-inch drills, they buy quarter-inch holes'.

The Magic Word - You. Use it and reap the rewards. As a customer 'you' want to hear what is important to 'you' and what 'you' will get if we work together. By using 'you' in copy, you will also find that it is easier to write the rest of the copy - it will feel more natural, as if you're speaking to a customer or having a conversation with them.

Simplicity - Keep it easy to read. Some people will skim detail, others want more. Try and make it easy for both kinds but avoid waffle at all times - you'll put your readers off. Only address one issue at a time in each paragraph.

Adjectives - Adjectives (describing words) will bring your copy or conversation to life. Describing your product as fast, beautiful, or neat helps to get your message across. However there is a big rule to this: use powerful adjectives, but use them sparingly. Copy or speech that is littered with adjectives becomes hard to follow. It becomes waffly and will force your reader or listener away.

Assumptive Words - Obviously you need to make sure your customers are on side straight away. Naturally they will agree with what you say if you start your sentence assumptively. Words that end '-ly' are good here (these words are your adverbs). How many successful campaigns for big companies start with 'worryingly, obviously, happily...'?

Choosing your words carefully can massively boost your business. Here's something that happened to me recently. I changed one word - one word! - in an advert with only ten words in it, and improved the response rate by over 45%!

Don't just use words, choose them. It can make a big difference.