Communications advice
20 May, 2010
A recent Economist story tells that Anna Wintour, the 61-year-old editor-in-chief of Vogue (widely believed to be the subject of the film The Devil Wears Prada), was not very pleased when Tavi Gevinson was given a better seat than her at a recent fashion show.
Who is Tavi Gevinson? Gevinson is the 14-year-old author of the StyleRookie blog. Gevinson started her blog at the age of 11 and has built a huge following in the blogosphere:
Guess who is going to be all fancy n stuff and talk at L2’s Generation Y conference this Friday? Me, that’s who! And I’m going to be talking about the Unpredictability of Gen Y …
And not surprisingly, as reported by the Economist, she stole the show that had been put together to focus on “tomorrow’s affluent consumer”. Representatives of luxury-goods businesses, hung on Gevinson’s every word.
The lesson for today’s businesses is that those of Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 2000) know more than us about how to make the most out of social-networking technologies.
Some of us are Baby Boomers (born after 1945 until about 1960) who didn’t own a computer until we were well into adulthood. We possibly had to program our computers to perform our calculations and may even remember having to feed paper cards into a mainframe. Computers were calculating machines.
Most of us are X Generation (born between 1961 and 1981) we experienced the growth of personal computers and witnessed the birth of the Internet. Internet 1.0 was about sharing information and we played space invaders by putting lots of coins in arcade machines.
But those of Generation Y have grown up with computers and treat them as an essential part of their everyday lives – technology is social and about entertainment. They have participated in the growth of Web 2.0 as a means of participating in online communities, for sharing gossip and for on-line collaboration. They are also known as the Net Generation!
Do you know how to use Web 2.0 to connect and engage with Generation Y? Madrigal Communications can help you put together a do-it-yourself social media marketing campaign for as little as $250! Our consultant will sit down with you and show you how you can use a combination of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and your website to connect your business with the Net Generation. Contact us to find out more!
13 May, 2010
People do business with people that they trust. When you put together your marketing material you should make sure you are building trust with your audience and your potential customers. Here are five quick strategies that I would advise you to use to build trust when marketing your business:
Be valuable
Don’t undersell your products or services. Emphasise value not price! Even if your customer is price-driven they still need to trust you to buy from you.
Be honest
Don’t say you are the best. Tell how you will provide the benefits that your customers want or need. That shows that you are the best at what they want.
Be authentic
Let your personality stand out. People don’t like superficiality. Don’t be just another business selling a product or service.
Be human
Your business is not an object – it is the quality, expertise, and experience of its people. It is what you do for your customers. It is not an “it” it is a “we”.
Be accountable
You are the most important thing in your business. Don’t be anonymous. If something goes wrong your customer knows who to talk to. Make sure you have a relationship with your customers.
Need help?
If your business needs ideas to build trust with its marketing give me a call, Tim Entwisle, at Madrigal Communications, valuable, honest, authentic, human and not anonymous.
25 Mar, 2010
Sometimes it appears that paying a professional copywriter to write your business communications (your brochures, newsletters, media releases, website, etcetera) is an unnecessary expense. So why pay for a professional copywriter?
- General knowledge – a good business and general knowledge is an absolute necessity for a copy-writer to avoid plagiarism, clichés and to ensure topicality. Making your material unique.
- Qualifications – specific knowledge is often not as important as academic training which provides researching and analyzing skills and the ability to formulate a convincing argument. Creating a response.
- Specialised communications knowledge – goes beyond spelling and grammar to the effectiveness of written communications in different media and in different channels. Helping your readers to engage.
- Delivery skills – nowadays a copywriter needs to understand and utilise a range of software products that save time and money in creating and presenting information, particularly on the web. Providing efficient service to the client.
- Commitment – professional copywriters are motivated towards delivering high quality work that is fit for the purpose and is delivered on time to agreed deadlines. Providing value for money.
- Ethics – a professional copy-writer always meets a standard of behaviour towards a client that includes confidentiality and reliability. Guaranteeing a good business relationship.
- Indemnity – if the result of work by professional copywriters results in legal proceedings or business problems the losses are covered by their professional indemnity insurance. Minimising customer risk.
- Efficiency – professional experience means that material is created quickly without the wasted time that inexperienced writers create as they learn on the job. No wasted time, effort or money.
- Management skills – copywriting projects involve other contributors so people-skills and industry knowledge are needed to manage contributors as well as designers, proof-readers, web-architects, printers and photographers. Smooth delivery.
- Creativity – copywriting is an art as well as a science and professional writers have to make their material interesting to engage their readers. Magic!
9 Dec, 2009
I was involved in an online discussion about the use of the word leverage in marketing. I was surprised that quite a few participants considered leverage to be a weasel word – that is a word that sounds good but really doesn’t mean anything.
In its original, physical sense, leverage is the advantage gained by converting a weak force over a long distance into a strong force over a short distance. A lever is a long pole that is used to lift an object using a fulcrum.
Lever comes from the Latin word levare meaning to raise (fulcrum also comes from Latin and originally meant the post of a couch or bedpost). This Latin root, levare, crops up in a wonderfully diverse set of words but all with a common sense of something being raised:
- A levee is a raised embankment that stops rivers overflowing.
- To levy is to raise funds; originally referring to the collection of taxes.
- Leaven is a substance, usually yeast, added to dough to make it rise.
- To levitate is to rise, or cause to rise and hover in the air.
- Elevate is to lift to a higher position or raise to a higher level or status.
- The Levant is the Mediterranean lands east of Italy, so called because it is in the direction from which the sun rose.
In the financial sense leverage refers to the amount of debt used to finance assets, for example, a company with significantly more debt than equity is considered to be highly leveraged.
In the marketing sense leverage is less well defined and used rather loosely. However it relates to the power or ability to influence people or their buying decisions. So leverage in marketing relates very closely with concepts like brand and reputation. The stronger your brand the more leverage you have in selling products.
It is apparent in major brands selling a wide range of products – it is not the quality of the individual product that sells it but the reputation of the brand. This is where leveraging is very tangible, when companies make the most of their brand to sell a range of products. It is also evident in the power of celebrity advertising – using well-known people to sell products is leveraging their reputation to the product brand.
The case for using leveraging in the marketing sense is legitimate and not really very weasel like.
22 Oct, 2009
The other morning my cat came and sat on me and started to purr. I started to think about the whole cat-owner relationship as if it were a business-customer relationship. In marketing terms why am I such a satisfied customer of the cat?
1. The cat delivers a unique service – it shows clear differentiation: it purrs – it doesn’t bark; it lounges – it doesn’t require walks.
2. The cat manages expectations – I get affection for providing food, accommodation, entertainment and free health cover!
3. It is consistent – I get the same product/service every day – a few purrs and a bit of affection.
4. The cat has clear communications – it purrs when it is happy and meows when it wants something – easy to understand.
5. It constantly reminds me that it’s there – persistent advertising ensures it gets fed and therefore survives.
6. But best of all if it makes a mess it covers it up (that’s not marketing, thats PR!).
1 Sep, 2009
- Tell everyone what you do
- Remind your customers about your products and services
- Tell your customers what special deals you have
- Tell everyone why they should buy from you
- Show everyone how great you are
- Introduce you to new customers
- Explain how to find out more about you
- Explain how to contact you
- Build your relationships
- Create customer loyalty
17 Jul, 2009
Do you recognise the twelve signs of bad copywriting? Let me help you discover how to identify bad writing:
1. Bad spelling
Bad spelling is less common than it used to be because of electronic spell-checkers. However, it still happens because the wrong form of the word is used, for example: he is dependant on his license? which should read, he is dependent on his licence! The spell-checker doesn’t know!
2. Bad grammar
Bad grammar, punctuation and syntax are still very common. Although perfect grammar evades us all, very poor grammar is a problem when the meaning of text is made unclear: for example the man carried a cat whistling blues tunes. (Cool cat!)
3. Poor structure
Poor structure is usually obvious when there are too many long sentences and too few paragraphs. Readers find it difficult to follow the flow of the writer’s ideas.
4. Discriminatory language
Discriminatory language that is racist or sexist still happens. Some of it is accidental and caused by the limitations of English in describing the singular person as either he or she but most is just insensitive.
5. Gobbledegook
Some work is so poorly written that it is meaningless and just not understandable.
6. Passive voice
The passive voice is when a writer makes what should be the object of a sentence the subject, for example: the business was successful compared to she created a successful business.
7. Wrong audience
If you don’t understand what you are reading it might not have been written for you. A lot of material by professional services contains jargon that the writer understands but is not clear to the reader.
8. No purpose
Writing must have a purpose. Writing seeks to persuade, inform or entertain. Advertising copy must have a call to action.
9. Weazel words
Beware of weazel words and clichés. Both seem to have strong meanings but really mean nothing, for example how often have you heard politicians say, “I have a commitment to infrastructure investment”.
10. Concatenations
This is my jargon, sorry, but concatenations are a strings of verbs, for example: she had commenced undertaking planning of the preliminary investigations for the project that try to make the simple sound more sophisticated, in this example, what should be said is: she had started the project.
11. Bland
Bland and boring language is recognised when you see the reader’s head hit the table. Bang!
12. Exaggerated or untruthful
There is no point in being the best in the business if no one knows what the best is. Many readers suspect this sort of superlative language and won’t believe it. Comparisons with familiar things are more honest and authentic.
13. Inconsistency
Much business writing contains inconsistencies in the text (did you notice this is the 13th point in the twelve signs of bad copy-writing). Also when facts and figures are used in a document they should be the same everywhere they are used.
If you don’t recognise these (13) signs of bad copy-writing when you see them you probably need to contact a good copywriter for your business writing.
14 Jun, 2009
This post is about the rule of three.
This is NOT the Wiccan rule of three: the belief that the energy you put out into the world will be magically returned threefold. That’s witchcraft!
This rule of three is the writing principle that suggests that grouping things into threes creates clear arguments, establishes patterns and makes things easier to remember.
Single objects are straightforward, pairs can be similar or contrasting, but threes create patterns that establish concepts. Groups of more than three become lists.
Important conceptual things are written in threes because three is the smallest number that can create a clear pattern. Some brilliant threes include:
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Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
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Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
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Rum, sodomy and the lash
But remember that in good writing the rule of three is not witchcraft its wordcraft!
14 May, 2009
It is a public relations technique to promote your product or organization using current events. The swine flu “pandemic” is no different. I started writing this blog a fortnight ago but didn’t post it. However, now the pandemic is quietening down I have revisited it.
Many businesses have used swine flu to promote their products and services. However they must be careful to be sensitive to the situation and not to be seen to capitalizing on people’s fears. Several organizations seemed to be doing just that:
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There was a Google adwords campaign for Prophecy News Watch connecting us to a bible prophecy site. Google will be there at the end of the world it seems.
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In the mainstream press the US Humane Society had used swine flu to scare American meat-eaters into vegetarianism by blaming American pork producers, quite wrongly, for the outbreak.
Other businesses were just opportunistic:
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Latex gloves and surgical masks were marketed as swine flu products
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Zazzle.com had created a line of marginally humorous T-shirts the best with flying pigs, that is, swine flew
Now with the worst fears of the disease disappearing there are still marketing opportunities for products:
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one telephone and computer disinfection service offers its product to reduce absenteeism
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an on-line news service will keep you up to date with the pandemic
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contingency crisis planning services are available for organizations to manage the impacts of swine flu
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watch out for anti-bacterial hand washes (swine flu is a virus not a bacteria) and air sterilizers will help you avoid deadly viruses
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the US Food and Drug Administration has warned one company for offering a “SilverCure Swine Flu Protection Pack” made-up of toiletries that deposit traces of silver (silver is being claimed as a cure)
The lesson is really about tapping into what is topical with your advertising and PR without being sleazy.
7 May, 2009
Fusion Marketing
Fusion marketing is about combining your marketing efforts with other businesses that share similar clients or have products or services that complement each other.
It is about forming strategic marketing alliances to share costs, resources or customers.
Guerilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing is the use of unconventional or unexpected marketing tactics to get your message across. It is about thinking outside the square.
It may include creating attention-grabbing events in public places, unusual street giveaways of products, stunts, or anything unconventional.
It is about getting maximum results from minimal resources.
Tissue-pack marketing
Tissue pack marketing is an example of guerilla marketing. Japanese companies put their messages and logos on tissues and hand them out on the street. The tissue does not get thrown away. It is used.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is about joining with or creating an on-line community to generate exposure and build relationships with potential customers of your business.
Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.
Try some of these methods. They rely on imagination and effort rather than a big budget.
23 Apr, 2009
I saw on someone’s blog the top ten things not to do in your marketing plan. It is not useful to focus on negatives so I didn’t pay too much attention to the advice. However, it did inspire me to think about my top ten tips for a successful marketing plan.
Here they are:
- Have a realistic budget!
- Be different to your competitors!
- Be adventurous – take risks to stand out!
- Focus on keeping existing customers!
- Have a simple selling proposition!
- Understand the needs and wants of your existing customers!
- Find the best ways of getting your message to your best prospects!
- Make real claims for your product or service – don’t exaggerate!
- Have a mix of tactics – don’t put your eggs in one basket!
- Make sure you capture and respond to customer feedback!
Good luck!
2 Apr, 2009
Niche (pronounced neesh or nitch) is a word used both in ecology and marketing.
Its original use is as a noun to describe a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament. It came into English from the French verb nicher to make a nest.
In ecology niche theory describes how an organism or group of organisms is always competing with others for the resources they need to survive. A strategy to reduce competition is to find a niche that other organisms aren’t using or not using very well. Here is a short explanation from Dr Seuss:
And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches,
Who live in small caves, known as Niches, for hutches.
These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is
The fact there are many more Nutches than Niches.
Each Nutch in a Nich knows that some other Nutch
Would like to move into his Nich very much.
So each Nutch in a Nich has to watch that small Nich
Or Nutches who haven’t got Niches will snitch.
It is similar in business. Your business is competing hard for customers and you have to work very hard to keep them or they will get snitched.
One way to decrease competition is to use a niche marketing strategy, which concentrates on a narrow sub-segment of customers. First you identify the customer needs or wants that are not being satisfied by existing businesses and then develop specialist goods or services that do satisfy them.
A very quick way of estimating whether your business can develop a niche marketing strategy is to look at your most loyal customers. First, determine if your best customers are price sensitive and second work out if they share particular characteristics.
If the core customers are not sensitive to price it means you can create a more specialist product or service that might cost more but will still be desirable.
If the customers share characteristics it means you can create more targeted sales and marketing tactics that will produce a higher return on your marketing budget.
There is a useful prediction from 1989 (Laurel Cutler, quoted in Phillip Kotler 1997 Marketing Management p251):
There will be no market for products that everybody likes a little, only for products that somebody likes a lot.
2 Apr, 2009
This article is a product of my professional interest in Twitter, which I am following with great curiosity (Twitter name is madcom, if you want to find me) as well as with some healthy scepticism. Friends, even those familiar with social networking sites, such as Facebook, ask me what is it all about. This is part of an answer for Twitter beginners.
Social network marketing
I have spent a lot of time on Twitter in the last few weeks. It is a fascinating world, as is the whole online social networking universe, but I am still trying to find out what the whole thing is truly about.
I won’t explain the workings of Twitter. It is simple and written about elsewhere, try Wikipedia, but what I will attempt to explain is how Twitter is operating in social network marketing and how it can be used to make money.
Twitter operates as part of the social media marketing machine so you need to understand social media marketing to understand Twitter’s uses.
Social network marketing or social media marketing are terms that are less understood and perhaps poorly defined. Social media marketing involves engaging with online communities to create brand awareness, to create opportunities through partnerships, to generate targeted traffic and, ultimately, to generate sales.
Back to marketing basics
To understand social network marketing lets start with the basics of marketing. Marketing is a process to match products or services to the needs or wants of the customers in a way that provides a profit for an organisation.
Marketing uses market testing methods to work out what the customers want, then develops a product or service to meet that want, and then promotes and advertises the product to attract the customers. Simple!
So how does Twitter help in these processes? Lets break the marketing process down to these three components: finding out what the customer wants, creating the perfect product, and then selling it. Looked at in these terms Twitter has a lot to offer.
Monitoring mindshare
Mindshare is a term that is being used in the online social networking world to explain what the recognition level of a product is in the population. By following keywords (identified by hashes) or other search terms on monitoring sites you can monitor the Twitterverse (all that is happening on Twitter) for every mention of your product or company. Twitter because of its immediacy is an important indicator of the online mindshare.
This is a metric for a brand’s share of the collective mind! There are lots of other and more sophisticated methods to measure keywords that are being used across the online world to include Google and other important search engines.
Developing the perfect product
Monitoring mindshare provides the intelligence or information to develop the product or promotional message that will make the product more saleable. This is the product monitoring and product development part.
Monetising Twitter
This is the Holy Grail for Twitter. How is Twitter going to make money out of the whole Twitter world. No-one really knows how Twitter will make money but everyone seems to know about how it can be used to make YOU money.
How to make money using Twitter
Twitter CAN make you money in quite a few ways. It is a medium for getting messages out there so can be used as a great promotional and advertising tool particularly for international brands. Therefore you should be using it if you work for an advertising agency.
Twitter is a good method for building international brand. It will not work so well if you are a local business or in a niche market unless, as in all things marketing, you are creative.
Direct selling on Twitter is not encouraged. This is not so much because it is rude but mostly because it is too hard sell and therefore ineffective. The Twitter tweet is a short message and therefore does not allow anything more than headline-style persuasion, it is soft sell. However, the tweet can be used to direct people to websites or blogs where a more persuasive, promotional message can be used to persuade people to buy products. This is, of course, all about creating and driving website traffic.
Affiliate marketing
Companies either use their own marketers to drive traffic or they use affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is where the originator of the traffic gets paid for each customer or visitor to the owner’s site. This is where many people seek to make money online.
Affiliate marketing on Twitter requires that the originating marketer has enough influence with the Twitter community that they can direct large traffic volumes. This is why developing large followings on Twitter is so important. (It is one of the contradictions in Twitter that there is an expectation of a mutual exchange of messages between users. Those that have thousands of followers are unlikely to read the tweets of their followers.)
Providing help and expertise
The other way to make money on Twitter is to provide help to others to make money out of Twitter. Expertise in social network marketing is a rare commodity and there are those offering to sell that expertise. There are social networking gurus who can help you get traffic to your site or your affiliate’s site (I am not pretending to be one of them).
Get Twittering for money
So what does this mean for you if you want to make money from Twitter? You have several options:
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you can use Twitter as part of a larger branding and advertising strategy within your agency or company,
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you can develop an affiliate marketing strategy by developing a large enough Twitter following that you can direct significant, qualified traffic to target sites, or
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you can make yourself into an expert and sell your services to those that need it.
Thanks for reading this blog – no money required.
27 Mar, 2009
The Government is injecting money into the economy to build infrastructure and improve existing assets. The money is to help the economy recover from the global financial crisis.
Who is going to get the Government money?
The answer is businesses that write the best tender submissions. The best tender submissions must be:
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compliant with the tender’s requirements
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comprehensive and address all the tender’s requirements
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competitive in terms of price, service and time
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convincing in making the decision easy for the panel
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extraordinary in making the bid stand out from all the others
How are businesses going to win Government money?
They are going to get help from someone who has:
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strong knowledge of business and Government
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analytical and marketing skills
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experience in the tendering process &
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exceptional copy-writing skills
So if you know of any businesses looking to win Government business send them to Madrigal Communications. We have extensive Government experience.
18 Mar, 2009
What is an annual report?
An annual report is a published document given to shareholders by public corporations as an official disclosure of their financial performance. It allows the shareholders to assess the success of the organization.
How is a Government annual report different?
Government Departments, agencies and other bodies, are also required to produce annual reports. These include the financials but also, more importantly, report on how well the organizations are achieving specific objectives as well as meeting the broader, whole-of-Government objectives such as energy saving, waste reduction, anti-discrimination, etcetera.
It allows the Minister (and the public) to assess a Department’s achievements using key performance indicators to determine whether it has met its objectives.
What are key performance indicators?
To make reporting open and transparent many organizations use key performance indicators – measurements developed specifically to measure organizations’ strategic performance.
These are very important in the Government sector because, lacking in profit measurements, there is a need for alternative measures of an organisation’s success.
How do you normally write a Government annual report?
In a Government department if you get nominated to do the annual report:
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you ask all the senior people in the organization to report on their divisional performance;
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you chase these people for weeks;
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you get their material;
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you edit it into a compliant format;
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write the Director General’s introduction;
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you give it back to the authors for corrections and amendments;
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you chase the same people for several more weeks;
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when you get their comments you edit it again;
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you submit it for approval;
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make even more corrections; and
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then send it off to be published with about a day to spare before it has to be presented to Parliament.
For this you make no friends, get no plaudits, and when you are finished you go back to your old job and try to catch up. The only hoped-for benefit is that since you have done your turn the following year someone else will get the job.
How do you want to do your annual report?
You outsource. With a decade of experience and half a dozen different organizations’ reports completed, Madrigal Communications can produce clear and accurate annual reports.
Madrigal Communication’s Director, Tim Entwisle, has many years of senior experience in the Government sector and understands the complexity of Government performance reporting. We will edit the most complicated and difficult prose into coherent and attractive plain English.
13 Mar, 2009
There is a commonly quoted passage from Shakespeare that reads:
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition: oft got without merit, and lost without deserving [Othello II 3 1420]
But it should be recognized that this was uttered by the arch-villain, Iago, bent on the destruction of Othello’s reputation and in response to the good man, Cassio’s, lament:
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. [Othello II 3 1416]
Between 1945 and 2000 the average voter turnout in the British elections (which are non-compulsory) was 76%. However in 2001 and 2005 the voter turnout plummeted to 59% and 61%.
Work by academics showed that the negative advertising by the parties about their opponents had not only discouraged young people from voting for the other parties but had discouraged them from voting for anybody at all. The negative advertising had ruined the reputation of all British politicians.
This is important to remember in business too. You have taken a long time to build your reputation and it will not be lost easily (unless, of course, you do something silly to damage it). Your branding, your customer service, and your integrity all build your reputation. But you also take some of your reputation from the industry you work in.
The message? Be as careful with the reputation of your industry as you are of your own reputation. If you criticise your competitors you damage yourself.
At Madrigal Communications we focus on reputation management not just marketing.
22 Mar, 2008
Well written, well-presented and targeted newsletters are very effective in connecting your business with its customers. They have a higher readership than paid advertisements. They are an effective way of promoting your business’ products or services. Internal newsletters will build and maintain staff morale. Madrigal Communications has experience in copywriting a range of newsletters for a range of organisations. Here are some tips on how to produce an effective newsletter.
Purpose
1. Make sure your newsletter has a purpose/objective. Know exactly what you want it to achieve. It should be aimed at giving your audience what they want to know about your industry and suggest that you are the best to help them.
2. Use your newsletter to engage your customers and establish a relationship. Use promotions (competitions, discounts and coupons) to encourage readers to become customers.
3. Good content should encourage your readers to pass the newsletter on to a broader audience and thus widen your potential market.
4. Newsletters have long lead times. The results of good newsletter campaigns take time to show; evidence suggests this is at least 6 or 12 months.
Style
5. Use plain English, good grammar and spelling. Make your newsletter clear. Respect your readers.
6. Don’t give away all your business secrets but give the audience something that they want or need to know. The more generous you are the more readers you will get.
7. Provide varied content to engage and excite your readers (promotional stories, Q&A, case studies, customer testimonials, puzzles, competitions, promotions etc).
8. Use active ‘voice’. Make sure you voice is consistent with your image: fun, businesslike, relaxed, adventurous etc
9. Use good copywriters and always use a separate proof-reader.
10. Be relevant: teach your readers something, show them that you can give them more than they can do themselves.
Content items
11. Use feature articles to demonstrate depth of knowledge. They should increase interest and direct customers to get more information either from your website or directly from you. Use short items to give different perspectives on the key messages.
12. Provide statistics to support your articles. It provides evidence and supports your messages. Your own statistics are most valuable because they show your readers your thoroughness.
13. Use newspaper-style headlines – they are catchy and effective.
14. Use a format that matches your message. A single-page, two-sided newsletter is attractive to a reader because it is short, sharp and not a time burden to read.
15. Direct readers to your website for more detailed information and provide contact information – phone, fax numbers and email addresses to help your readers find you.
Appearance
16. Make it look professional – it tells your readers you care about them. Make sure your layout is attractive and the design simple to attract and aid readers.
17. Never, never, never use clip art. It demonstrates that you are an amateur.
18. Use white space – don’t crowd the page with content. Space is important in the layout of any document. Avoid cluttered layouts they can be difficult to read.
19. Always use captions on images and diagrams. Provide meaningful and readable captions to help the reader understand what the images mean.
Production
20. Determine how often you should publish by your audience’s willingness to read, the effort needed and the cost. Monthly is best, bimonthly or quarterly are easiest when you start.
21. Know your organisation’s capabilities and resources. You need an experienced editor and designer with the time to do the job. Without time and ability you will get a poor quality product, waste your money and effort and damage your reputation with your clients and customers.
22. Make sure you meet your deadlines -deliver it when your readers expect it.
Distribution
23. Choose the most effective distribution method for your circumstances. Email is cheap but may be treated like spam by the customer. Print can be expensive and non-interactive but it can be more accepted.
24. Keep your distribution database secure, up-to-date and accurate. Be mindful of privacy legislation with the information on your distribution database.
Involvement
25. Seek to involve your readers in production of the newsletter content (ask for contributions or run competitions). Internal newsletters need to be ‘owned’ by the employees and should have as much input from them as possible.
13 Feb, 2008
Corporate communications is the discipline of managing an organisation’s image. Where marketing sells products or brands to customers, corporate communications enhances an organisation’s reputation with all stakeholders. To do it properly you need to make sure all communications channels are working together - or as we like to say, make sure everyone is singing from the same song-sheet.
Corporate communications includes:
- Advertising
- Image and branding
- Publications and online
- Marketing
- Public relations
- Public affairs
Some of the things we do in Corporate Communications:
- Annual reports
- Copy-writing, business writing and editing
- Communication planning
- Marketing
- Project management
- Publication management
- Stakeholder (customer, staff, shareholders etc) research
- Web assessment and writing
If you need to improve how you communicate with your stakeholders contact us for an assessment of your communications needs.
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