Face plant or twaddle?

Businesses that market to other businesses have to varying degrees jumped on the Facebook and Twitter bandwagon. But is it for you and will you waste precious energy and resources pursuing something that’s really just not suited to your business?

The operative word in social media is ‘social.’ It isn’t commerce and it isn’t transaction based. Just ask anyone who bought into the Facebook IPO and is now watching their shares trade a half the list price within months of trading. Facebook and Twitter have become the favoured vehicles of movie stars, rocks stars, politicians, sportspeople and other celebrities intent on promoting their celebrity. Facebook and - to a lesser extent - Twitter are also very widely used around the world by ‘normal people’ - because our friends really need to know what we had for lunch, don’t they?

OK, so I’m not a big fan of either. But I am not averse to using them for situations where they clearly work. In fact I’m working on an awareness campaign for the Institute of Architects now where I’m recommending a Facebook component because of the social or community nature of the campaign. It’s just that when it comes to business to business marketing, the effort often does not seem worth the reward, unless you’re prepared to put in a big effort (which may be disproportional to the return).

The exception would be businesses which have a very large, social pool of followers and customers. Think a football club, for example. The Brisbane Broncos have a quarter of million ‘likes’ on their Facebook page. (The Brisbane Lions by contrast have only 54,000). These are big numbers, and not surprising when you have such large followings, especially when your teams are doing well (which maybe explains the Lions’ figures?).

Contrast this though with www.news.com.au – a very large online news site run by the Murdoch empire. You’d think given the traffic volumes on this site and the broad reach of its media interests, there’d be some reflection in Facebook support? News.com has just 37,000 ‘likes’.  Brisbane Times – a news site owned by Fairfax – doesn’t seem to much bother and has just over 8,000 ‘likes.’

Some large retail businesses are actively targeting the social online space.  Mega electrical and home wares retailer Harvey Norman has 140,000 ‘likes’. David Jones has 168,000 and Myer, 137,000. These are significant numbers but given the national nature of these businesses and their prominence, not exactly huge. On the other side of the coin, fashion label Lorna Jane has a massive 450,000 likes on FB. This could reflect a younger and heavily female demographic, it could reflect a more popular brand image with a strong  and loyal following, or it could mean they’ve put more effort into it than, say, Myer.

But when it comes to businesses that market to other businesses, particularly in the professional services space, the numbers become entirely unimpressive. In fact, you’d wonder why they bother. One large, international architecture practice has 446 likes on its Facebook page. A highly prominent national advocacy group has 42. A quick scan through my own networks of businesses with Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts shows, generally, pretty miserable support via these mediums.

But there are no shortages of marketing experts selling a message to business, irrespective of the nature of that business, that ‘you must be in the social media’ space.  Google “should my business be on facebook” and you’ll find a host of articles and experts telling you why you should. Sure, your customers are there, and sure, it’s a big network. Huge in fact. But it’s a social network, used by people for social reasons and not generally by a business promoting itself to another business. More to the point, because these are social in nature, attempts by business to convert social networks into commercial opportunities can flop. Consumers are smart enough to see what’s going on.

I know this will find a lot of disagreement, and yes there are times when bad business practices can have a much bigger collateral impact through social media (because people tend to share things they don’t like, as opposed to things they do), but even with this in mind, my suggestion is to first consider who your customers are, and whether social media is really for you.  

To do it properly, you’ll need to invest considerable time in maintaining the presence, and the rewards may simply not be there. Putting that energy into more traditional ‘outreach’ marketing activities might pay a bigger dividend if your target audience involves people using business accounts to pay for what you’re offering.

So be careful of falling for the hype: think carefully about how well social media might work for your business (or not) and if it’s marginal at best, don’t bother if you’re only going to be half hearted.

Boring?

Are you guilty of boring your clients with communication that simply doesn’t cut it? It’s a common problem but there are a few things to look for which might tell you if you’re guilty.

There are many reasons people in business can be guilty of joining the throngs of the world’s worst communicators.  It’s not always a problem with not communicating at all (which is pretty widespread) but also one of communicating poorly when you do so.  The trick is to make sure you engage your intended audience in the ways that work for them – not you. You need to deliver your message in a way that responds to the recipients’ preferences if it’s to be absorbed at all. There’s little point in creating a regular communication vehicle designed to support your business development ambitions if at the other end, no one much wants to read it.

Be relevant

First, make sure you’re communicating something that’s relevant to their interests. If you don’t know what their interests are, you ought to ask them. A simple online survey is one way of doing this (but you might be disappointed with low response rates). Alternatively, a trusted network of clients might offer you some honest advice about the sorts of things they’re most interested in. However you do it, you need to ensure you always ask the question “what’s in it for them.”

Avoid jargon

The bane of much professional communication is jargon. You and your professional colleagues might be familiar with the secret code phrases and acronyms of your profession, but your target audience may not. Keep your jargon for your professional society meetings but when talking to clients and potential clients, use a common language. In this country, English is pretty handy.

Speak like a person

Have you ever read an opening line which sounds like it was written by a committee, a bureaucrat or a lawyer? It might start like ‘XYZ Services is pleased to announce that…’  but readers may not get much further than the opening sentence before the boredom factor kicks in. Would you ever pick up the phone and talk to someone is such a tortured, formal language? If you’re a lawyer, you might but for the rest of the world it’s not the way we communicate. So why is it that when we work on something written, we instinctively adopt an overly formal or clinical turn of phrase? If you actually want to communicate with your audience, my recommendation is that you read it aloud to someone first and see how long they stay interested.  When their eyes start to dart around the room, or start to close, you know you’ve got a problem.

Be visual

Humans are highly visual beings but too little is made of visual devices in business communication. I’ve seen so many newsletters, corporate brochures or e-zines which are packed with lengthy narratives which few people will ever read. But they will look at pictures, they will think about charts and graphs, or flow diagrams, or highlight boxes.  And when using visuals, don’t shrink them down in order to fit your text onto a page. Start with big visuals and captions. Any space left over is where you can put your narrative.

Keep it short

We’re all time poor. Keep your messages brief, and once you think you’ve done that, make them briefer still. Long narratives might look impressive or give you some sense of comfort, but bullet points and short paragraphs are better. If they want to know more, they can contact you (isn’t that the point anyway?)

Fear of being different

The herd instinct in corporate communication and business development is alive and well. Too often, the basis of your communication which talks about how your business is ‘unique’ or specialised and why you are unlike your competitors, makes you look and sound as if you are exactly the same as your competitors.  Don’t believe me? Try this: copy a selection of competitor business marketing collateral and remove all reference to individuals or company names or logos. Could you simply insert your company name into a rival’s material and no one would really know the difference? All too often, that’s exactly what happens. The herd instinct might provide you with a sense of safety (“but this is how everyone does it”) but it won’t do anything to set you apart.

Ask a third party

Yes this is a plug but you are likely to be the worst judge of your own material. To you, it’s familiar and to you, every word has been preciously crafted to represent your business in the best possible light. But you are unlikely to have the sort of perspective that a third party can bring. If you’re at risk of boring your clients to death, you might need someone else to point it out to you. In the nicest possible way, of course.

Put it in print!

If you’ve interpreted media reports about the problems faced by daily newspapers as a sign that print is dead as a communication vehicle, you’d be making a big mistake. Far from being dead, in some areas print is still very effective in business to business communication and deserves a rightful place in your business media mix.  

The demise of print media was predicted over 20 years ago, when then futurists saw computing and the internet replacing all forms of print communication. What happened subsequently is that publishing exploded, because magazines and specialist print media became much easier to produce. New, niche magazines and journals appeared on newsagent stands, dissipating the media spend across a much wider cross section of titles. In business, the new ease of production saw a barrage of paper based material appear in letterboxes and in-trays around the country.

More recently though the tide has definitely turned. It’s now our email inboxes that are cluttered, while our in-trays receive only infrequent material.

A glum Rupert Murdoch, pondering the fate of print fortunes, even recently gave newspapers only a ten year lifespan.  Well cheer up Rupert, at least you won’t live long enough to see your prediction either proved right or wrong.  

The real problem for newspapers and magazines hasn’t so much been competition for readers from digital media (which has undoubtedly had an impact) but the demise of advertising, especially classifieds. For newspaper proprietors and magazine owners, this is going to be an ongoing problem and you’ll continue to read a great deal more about it.

But businesses that need to communicate with their clients shouldn’t be distracted by the headlines and shouldn’t interpret those headlines to mean that print communication to your clients is also dead.

Here’s a little test for you. Imagine in the week just gone you received several hundred emails, many of them marketing emails. You may also have received a couple of magazines and a small number of newsletters, one of which came personally addressed and included a hand signed covering letter.  

My guess is that the percentage of you who would have opened and read the hand signed letter and then browsed the newsletter would be close to 100%. The percentage of you who opened and read the marketing emails would typically be less than 5% - especially if from firms you don’t know.  

The point simply is that digital communication can do some things very well. It can reach a very large number of people and do so very quickly and at very low costs. But there are downfalls. You should never confuse activity with outcomes. The whole point of your business communication and marketing strategy should be to communicate effectively with your target audience. The mere fact that you regularly send an email or e-zine to thousands of people on your database doesn’t mean you are communicating if they aren’t reading it. The fact that you have a lovely looking website isn’t communication if few people are visiting it. And if you aren’t measuring and tracking the open rates of your electronic communication, you might be deluded into thinking that your message is being widely heard when it isn’t.

Print media collateral, by contrast, takes a little longer to prepare. It takes longer to send and typically costs more to produce. Hand signing letters can be laborious. But it has a much higher chance of actually being noticed and read – which means it’s actually doing its job.

I don’t for one minute dismiss the valid role played by electronic communication but I will argue very strongly that, for most businesses, a total reliance on electronic communication for whatever reason, can be a mistake. Print, well designed and properly executed, has an important part to play in your media mix. (And like any form of communication, poor design and lack luster execution means it has no chance).

You only need to ask yourself the question: would you prefer to scan through a classy magazine or a lively, well illustrated newsletter in print form, or would you rather spend your time reading more emails? If a personally addressed letter arrived on your desk, would you be more likely to read this first or would you put it aside and scan your email inbox? What is more likely to be discussed with colleagues or kept for reference or internal distribution – digital or paper? And if you needed to review a document, do you typically print it to read, or do so on-screen?

Even if you have developed an iPad addiction and love nothing more than reading news or journals on screen, I’d argue strongly that digital’s big advantage for news is immediacy, but print’s big advantage for business marketing is longevity, effectiveness and penetration.

Digital and print are quite different things and you need to understand how to work them to your business advantage. You also need to think rationally about your mix of business communication, and understand the rightful place for print, and for digital. And you need to avoid being too influenced by the advertising worries of the Fairfax or Murdoch empires and by the prophets predicting that this all means the end of print communication. If you’ve made that mistake, I think should think again.

Next: Slow death by boredom. What NOT to do.

The clairvoyant client

Why is it that some businesses seem to think their clients or customers are clairvoyant?

One of the ongoing essentials of good business communication is to keep in regular contact with your client base. Existing clients, past clients and potential clients all deserve to know what’s going on in your business - where that is of potential interest to them.

But often, many businesses seem to keep what they’re doing a secret. Or at least, they seem to expect that their clients and potential clients will somehow intuitively know what they’re doing, and get in touch to find out more.  But they don’t have crystal balls. Unless you tell them and keep them informed, how do you expect them to know about how your business is growing and what it can offer them?

It’s almost like a form of corporate shyness has infected the business world – particularly those in professional services which market to other businesses. But the failure to communicate regularly can mean that you risk slipping from their attention and that can be fatal when there are limited opportunities for work in a difficult market. Think Richard Branson: would you call him shy, or reticent? Hardly. He’s made an art-form of exploiting publicity for his own benefit.  And while we can’t all be like a Branson, the business of regular communication is something you shouldn’t shy away from.

News about new projects, new clients who have come on board, new challenges, staff changes, and other initiatives are all worthy news items. You ought to have a fair idea about the sorts of things clients want to know about you when engaging you for work – so news that touches on any of these ‘selling points’ is valid because it reinforces your business reputation and skill set. When you’ve been pitching for work against competitors, what is it that clients have wanted to know most about your firm? What makes it different? Where are your competitive strengths? Weaknesses? Understanding these and then focussing on various angles that relate to these competitive strengths should provide plenty of content for regular communication.

How often is often enough?

There’s no magic answer here. If it’s significant news (the recruitment of a high profile new executive for example) you can get that out immediately. Otherwise more routine news can wait for your regular newsletter or e-zine (providing you have one). My view, for what it’s worth, is that you need to be reaching out to your market at least once every quarter. Any less than this and you risk being forgotten. Too much more than this can risk making you a nuisance. (Weekly emails, for example, can be an overkill).

But I’ve got nothing to say!

I’ve often found that professional firms regard what they do as very unexciting, and not worthy of communicating to their clients. But if you bring in a fresh set of eyes (someone external to the business) you might be surprised at just how much happens in your business which your clients and potential clients might be interested in.

Mix and match.

Good communication should also aim for a mix of content, which has slightly different aspects of appeal to differing groups of clients. Some may be more interested in personnel changes, others might be more interested in technical advice. Mix your content also in length – keep some items very brief, others can expand a bit more.

What to avoid.

Definitely I suggest avoiding the social aspects of your business. Your in-house touch footy team’s season success or news about babies within the business family is all terrific stuff for the staff newsletter, but to be honest, I doubt your clients are really interested.  Just ask yourself the question – do you have an ongoing interest in how their work social activities for the year are going, and would you like to receive regular updates about them? Probably not.

The other thing you should try avoid in speaking in the language of your profession. Jargon, acronyms and abbreviations might be understood within your own professional circles but when communicating with clients, plain English has a lot going for it. I’d also suggest you do your best to make your communication engaging. Avoid the polished ‘corporate speak’ that sounds like it came from a corporate brochure written by a committee of lawyers. Be honest and write much in the manner you’d speak to your clients, for a more effective message.

Next: the message and the medium: why I am still a fan of paper.