What Voices Do You Hear?
By Andrew Shedden
Bafflegab, corporate speak, drivel, whatever you want to call it, the fact is most companies do a lousy job of communicating. More often than not it’s because their marketing communications are being internally created.
One of the fundamental principles of effective communication is the creation and usage of an attractive voice. This can be defined as not what you say but how you say it. Voice is the way you express your ides. Voice can be funny, serious, instructional, distant, personal or any other number of combinations.
Most companies either err by utilizing a voice consisting of stilted technobabble or make a mess of personalization.
The following are examples of two of the most common uses of voice guaranteed to drive prospects away.
Five dollar words
I’m sure you’ve read something along the lines of the following: “At Monolithic Engineering our single biggest asset is our people. We pride ourselves on offering interdisciplinary synergistic cutting edge solutions. We have the largest staff of engineers west of the Humber River all productively ensconced in our environmentally controlled hermetically sealed biosphere."
The above information really is great news but doesn’t tell me how Monolithic Engineering will help me with my challenges.
Down home done wrong
Many companies attempt a creditable but ultimately disastrous attempt at injecting a down home tone into their communications. If you’re not very careful down home has a way of quickly becoming dumb down.
Using a personal voice doesn’t grant meaning to banalities. The other day I was on a web site in which the corporate communications proudly informed me that its buildings were “…fairly new.” This piece of information made me want to buy from them as soon as I possibly could.
Shouting in the wrong voice produces silence
The best voice you can use in your marketing communications is your own. By using the wrong voice in your marketing communications your company will pay a whole host of costs. Some of these are:
The cost of producing the marketing communications material
The long term cost of not building your brand
The cost of the lost opportunity
So what?
There are many ways to interpret the purpose of marketing communications within a business. Whether your want your marketing communications to build your brand (nice if you’ve got money to burn), or generate quantifiable sales leads (that’s better) you need to know the following:
Truly effective marketing communications voice presents products and services strictly from the standpoint of the receiver.
What do I need to do?
Before contemplating any form of marketing communications you need to accept the fact that people are concerned about how you can solve their problems. For the most part your audience doesn’t really care about how old your building is or how many computers you have. They do care about how you can help them.
Get inside their heads
Rule number one is to write from the perspective of your target market and their concerns. In fact you can break nearly every other rule-follow this rule and you’re bound to improve your results. What are their fears, aspirations, and goals? What keeps your target market up at night? How can you help them understand that your company is the best choice?
Be personal
There are some marketing communications purists aghast at the possibility of injecting personality into any form of communications. I don’t agree. I believe people desperately want you to enter the dialogue already going on in their heads.
To do this you must highly personalize your communications as if you’re having a personal conversation. For some individuals this is a double-edged sword. You needn’t be the most interesting person in the world nor do you need to be Robin Williams. Be yourself, use your own unique voice, and remember that people buy emotionally and justify logically
Be clear
Simplicity creates great power in communications. Hemmingway wrote powerfully with great simplicity. Just because you know what fenestration is doesn’t mean you should ever use the word in the marketing brochure for your window company. Simple is good, avoid jargon and write at about grade eight level.
Be bold
Realize that being bold will turn people off and on don’t write like an automaton. In these days of political correctness inclusive language and hypersensitive interest groups fearful companies can be sorely tempted to say nothing. While there is no reason or excuse for any type of questionable writing saying nothing at all is inexcusable.
Strengthen the effectiveness of your marketing communications by taking a stand based on your core beliefs and weaving the facts together in a provocatively persuasive way.
One of life’s great tragedies is having strong beliefs weakly held. Make sure your marketing communications accentuate and reinforce your beliefs and they will provoke a reaction. For every person you turn off you’ll turn on another. Remember what Oscar Wilde wrote, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
