“Good salesmanship will always be a combination of artistry and common sense, hard work and easy answers, smart thinking and dumb luck. Most of all, it comes from thinking about the person you need to persuade.”
– Bruce Bendinger, Advertising Copywriter
When I’m not lecturing a batch of college students or tinkering at my workbench, I find myself doing a fair bit of consulting. Our small-but-mighty marketing agency helps a pretty broad collection of clients: a roofing company, a coffee machine manufacturer, several web hosting services, a salsa brand, a leathercraft eLearning platform and several others.
It wouldn’t take long for us to get easily overwhelmed trying to keep everything straight, particularly with a number of people on each project. Fortunately, our team works with each of these businesses, big and small, on developing guidelines that help us all be consistent.
Similarly, when running your own business, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and energy (and maybe money) by thinking through your game plan.
In February, we discussed the necessity for you to know what your business is about by outlining your mission. In March, we looked at the need for measurable goals to track your success. This month, we will focus on the value for developing a strategy to guide your efforts.
What you need is a statement that helps you figure out who your customer is, what they want and what kind of messaging will catch their attention. Although this is a column about “marketing,” I want you to think of this as your “communication strategy.”
Most of us are fairly familiar with communication strategies…particularly if you’re married. Or have kids. Or have co-workers, etc. We all (hopefully) have developed methods of communicating a message in the way we think it will be best received and, many times, be the most persuasive.
Developing a communication strategy doesn’t have to be complicated, but it is something that can really help you to be consistent in how you communicate with your customers. Often this applies to advertising, but also how you do customer service, the words on your website, what you say if you get interviewed or the tone of the posts you put out on social media. It helps refine your mission statement into something a bit more tangible.
One of my favorite ways to help clients think this through is to use a “fill-in-the-blank” format that Procter & Gamble used for a long time. The formula typically goes something like this:
[Communication] will [Verb] [Target Customer] that [Product/Brand] is/will/provides [Benefit].
Support will be [Support Ideas/Reasons Why].
Tone will be [“Selling Attitude” Adjectives].
Example: Advertising will convince local western wear aficionados that Johnny’s Boot Shop provides a high-end pair of boots made right here in Fort Worth. Support will be the decades of experience our team has, the high-quality materials we use and that customers can come right in for the custom fitting. Tone will be high-end yet approachable, rustic yet modern, while focusing on local pride.
Reading through that, can you start to envision what that advertisement might look like? Or what you might tell a customer who calls and wants to know why your product costs more?
With some thoughtful answers, your communication can start to be a bit more intentional and consistent. Nothing will make your business lose credibility faster than being inconsistent, which can be a challenge if you have different people talking to different customers at different times.
Using the above template, think through what your strategy would be. Again, think of it as an easy-to-follow communication guide to help meet your goals and fulfill your business’ mission. If you have a team or a partner, bring them into a brainstorm with you. It can actually be pretty fun!
Here are a few general tips to think about when outlining your strategy:
- Does your strategy help you fulfill your mission, vision and values that you have outlined for your business? If not, figure out why and think through what needs to be adjusted. Typically, you’ll want your mission to drive your strategy, not the other way around; but give yourself some grace as you figure things out for your business.
- Does your strategy help you meet your goals and objectives? It can be the cleverest plan in the world, however if it doesn’t help you accomplish what is most important for the success of your business, perhaps it’s not the right choice…at least not right now.
- Do you know who your target audience is? Generally speaking, it’s not everyone. Often, you’ll find success (and loyalty) more quickly if you initially offer amazing services, products and resources focused to a specific group, rather than offering mediocre services to everyone. Once you have your core customer base developed, you can often expand from there.
- What makes your business different from the competition? How can you communicate that simply in your strategy, even if it’s in just a few words?
Pro Tip: I talk to a number of clients who think they don’t have any competition; their product is so unique and innovative, that there’s nothing else like it on the market. Even if that is true (often it’s not), you’re always competing for people’s time, attention and dollars. What are you competing against, even if not a specific business?
- Your strategy can (and maybe should) evolve. That doesn’t mean that it should be constantly changing to fit whatever new idea you have; that kind of defeats the purpose. But as you learn more about your business, your customer and your competition, you’ll continue to refine how you approach your messaging.
But I’m getting ahead of myself; those are all topics to explore more in depth another day. Hopefully the above suggestions can help you be more thoughtful and consistent in how you communicate what is most important about your business, which can help gain new customers.
Make sure to check out the May issue of ShopTalk! Magazine where we’ll dive into Tactics, which is perhaps the most fun letter of our M.O.S.T. acronym in this four-part series.
Until then,
Michael Magnus
