I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
Read, subscribe to my newsletter, enjoy!Tash
Who are you communicating about?
Are your website, your emails, your flyers and your conversations about you (and your business) or about your (prospective) client and their business?
Robert Middleton has written a blog post on turning your marketing around to be more effective. That is, stop talking about your business services and features and find out about your client’s business and how you could help them.
By listening to people you become more personable and interesting to them and you get more insight to help their business succeed.
Think about it – do you care that I run a writing and communications business? Or do you care that I can save you time and worry by managing your communications project?
You want to know how you will be impacted by my services – and your clients want to know how you can help them reach their goals.
What is your blog communicating?
Are you communicating welcome and friendliness?
Have you ever analysed your blog posts for their content?
How many posts are about what you do or your products? And how many are giving information or tips that would help your client?
Are case studies or client stories about what you did? Or are they about your client’s problem and the results of solving their problem? The difference may seem subtle but one is me-centric and the other will be more effective at engaging your readers.
What is your website communicating?
Robert asked the question ‘how often do you see a website that’s “you-centered” instead?’ and it’s worth thinking about.
Do you prefer a homepage that rambles on about awards won, pride in service, years in business and pompous language, or one that addresses your issues and questions?
Have you looked at your own website and thought about its appeal to others? If you can’t see it objectively, ask others (friends, clients and professionals) what they think, what your site is communicating to them.
Even a few tweaks to your homepage could make it more appealing and therefore more effective.
One simple improvement you can make is to remove we/I and rewrite those sentences to include you instead.
Twitter for relationships
When twittering, it is about conversations and building trust so why not be personal?
Tonight, I got multiple tweets within half an hour from someone I don’t know or follow. She was using a company name as user name but talking about the business as ‘they do the hottest websites’ etc. Here’s my response to her tweets…
- It’s not very personal to say they when she could have chatted to me about how she could help me – and it looked stupid for XYZ to say “see xyz.com – they do the hottest websites”. No credibility and she lost the opportunity to get to know someone (someone who had just posted about businesses needing good designers, too)
- She obviously hadn’t read my reply which said ‘ no thanks, I’m not looking for a designer’ as she kept telling me to look at this design company. She didn’t build my trust or respect at all.
- She made no attempt to have a real conversation with me. I twittered about not just using anyone to help with setting up a new website which would have been a perfect opening for her to agree, ask questions about why I tweeted that and perhaps give some tips on choosing a good designer. But she preferred to tweet me repeatedly with a sales pitch – and even a newbie to Twitter like me knows that rule #1 is don’t do a sales pitch!
- If you are going to take the time to respond to a stranger’s tweets, and send them a number of tweets, surely you could take a few minutes to look at their profile and get some idea of who they are or what they do? One of her tweets listed various industries ‘they’ have designed for – none were my industry so she missed another opportunity there by not targeting her spiel.
Sending multiple emails telling me to ‘hit their website’ annoyed me (both in the repetition and in the terminology!) so I blocked her. Frankly, I considered her tweets to be spam and I don’t like being spammed.
In other words, she actively lost a client by her actions so totally wasted her time. It would have been so easy to have written ‘we’ instead of ‘they’, and have a conversation with me.
Do you follow anyone who talks in the third person about their business?
I don’t know that she’ll had learnt anything by being blocked, but maybe someone reading this post will learn from her mistakes instead!
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