Resorting to business jargon in an effort to appeal to your corporate audience is a common mistake and one that could leave your prospective clients rolling their eyes and clicking the unsubscribe button well before you have the opportunity to ‘leverage your strategic position’ and something that should be avoided.

Corporate clichés will make your clients cringe

There are certain catchphrases that are increasingly popular in business communication, but when it comes down to it many of them are meaningless and often irritating. If you are tempted to use phrases like ‘think outside the box,’ or ‘proactive approach,’ in a bid to make yourself sound more dynamic and professional be aware that this may have the opposite effect. Your original and inspiring sales message could end up lost in a sea of baffling business jargon, leaving your intended audience scratching their heads or, more likely, shrugging and hitting the delete button.

Business buzzwords worth avoiding

Are you a corporate catchphrase junkie? If you are struggling to wean yourself off the office lingo, here are some suggested alternatives to a few common clichés:

1. Thinking outside the box – original
2. Bring to the table – can provide
3. Leverage – use
4. Strategic – useful
5. Going forward – in future
6. Deliverables – results
7. Touch base – talk

Written communication forms an integral part of any marketing strategy but done badly it can do more harm than good. By keeping your communication brief, clear and cliché free you have a better chance of getting your message across and creating a great impression on your prospective clients!

One Etsy store that has caught my eye is Monorail, a shop dedicated to word art.  Big smile!

The Monorail store provides a mix of more corporate and more homely styles in a variety of colours, which makes it a great choice.

My favourites include -

• Work like a captain, play like a pirate
• Ampersand screenprint
• Life is a circus

MARKETING MISTAKE NUMBER TWO:

STYLE GUIDE, WHAT IS THAT?

Not having a style guide for your business makes the ‘design’ process more difficult to oversee and control, whether you work with graphic designers direct or through an agency.

A style guide is there to help you manage one of the most challenging aspects of a brand, which is, consistency over a long period of time.

The fact is, over the life of your business it is going to be pretty rare to have one graphic designer work on your brand, even if you use the same agency.

Why is this a problem? Without basic brand rules and guidelines, the natural instincts of designers will be to ‘play with your brand’, and if you are managing the process yourself, you will have to be very diligent to ensure this doesn’t happen to you.

In summary, a style guide:

• Reduces design time (costs) over the long term
• Facilitates brand recognition (sales) through design consistency

QUICK TIP: Have a style guide for your business and brand. Create an environment where consistent design work is a basic requirement.

If you are looking for outsourced help, Next Marketing can help.

Coming up next – Mistake Three, misaligned brand.

Your customer database provides an enormous amount of information that can help you grow your business from within your customer base. First of all you need to make sure you are capturing useful information about your existing clients.  Knowing their contact details, how much and how frequently they have spent with you and what they buy, is critical.  Analysing this data will show you if your client base is growing, stagnant or in decline.

Look at your inactive clients and consider why they may have stopped using your business as frequently as they used to.  Have price rises bitten too deeply, are you losing ground to your competitors, or is your service or product no longer relevant to them?  Have you lost contact with them because your communication methods are not frequent enough or just not working?  If you don’t know the answers to these questions you won’t be able to solve the problem.  Get back in contact with your inactive clients and find out why they haven’t used your business recently.

To maintain your relevance to your existing client base you might have to rethink the services or products you provide to ensure you are meeting your clients changing needs.

Maintaining existing client relationships is important to every business.  Attracting new customers is vital, but once you’ve engaged them in your business strengthening your relationship with them will make sound financial and marketing sense.

Do you know how best to use LinkedIn to create valuable marketing tool for you or your business? Here’s a quick checklist:

1. Sound interesting

Create an individual and company profile that isn’t going to bore the readers. If it is not engaging people will leave. If it is too long and overly self promotional, it can be off-putting. Keep your profiles clear and concise—you want people to spend at least 1-2 minutes reading what you have to say.

2. Highlight your expertise

Think of your profile as an online resume with a current photo and detailed history of your skills and experience. Fill out all available sections to get the most out of what’s available. If you don’t sell your skills, then who will?

3. Combine your online activity with offline activity

Don’t let LinkedIn replace all of your networking activities. There will always be a place for face-to-face meetings. Familiarise yourself with some of the networking groups on LinkedIn. You might find some valuable groups by checking the profiles of some of your contacts. Join related groups and contribute to discussions. Initiate communication with other contacts through phone calls and emails. You can also use LinkedIn as a way to ‘stay connected’ to contacts you meet offline – when you meet new contacts consider connecting with them on LinkedIn.

4. Ask for recommendations

Testimonials are one of the best marketing tools available and LinkedIn makes it easy for you to add them. Do be selective about which contacts you ask – their personal brands can become a reflection of yours. If you offer a range of services or the types of clients you service are diverse, aim to include a range of testimonials that reflect the scope of your expertise.

5. Outsource the copywriting

Unless you are a writer, consider outsourcing this. When you do something everyday (day in day out) it can be hard to make it sound interesting. A good writer will be able to make the most of your expertise and create interesting and concise content that makes readers want to know more.

INTRODUCTION

As an experienced Marketing Consultant, there are some obvious marketing mistakes that business owners make which result in the marketing function being harder to manage than what it needs to be.

Many articles have been written on the ‘six things that businesses get wrong’ articles. Whilst I probably read most of them as a matter of curiosity, I usually find they don’t add much value and are filled with superficial content.

If you would like to avoid these, then this blog series is for you…

MARKETING MISTAKE NUMBER ONE: BEING TEMPTED BY THE DEVIL

There are a number of marketing suppliers who I call ‘tactical’ players. They are businesses that specialise in offering one specific element of the marketing mix. Examples include website developers, telemarketers, SEO companies and/or Public Relations practices.

Whilst they are an important part of the marketing mix and have a relevant place in the supplier world, I have come across many instances where, a single source supplier, such as those noted above, pitch themselves to a client as a complete marketing fix – wrong!

This seems particularly evident in the SEO industry. A client who I wrote a Marketing Plan for had an SEO company approach them about some quick SEO techniques that would do wonderful things for their business.

Having just written a Marketing Plan for that client, it was very clear to me that unless the business addressed some of the key marketing issues identified in the Marketing Plan, an SEO strategy, at that point in time, was not going to deliver any real results. Fact.

QUICK TIP:

• There are very few quick fixes in marketing that lead to long-term results.
• Remember that marketing is something worth investing in.

If you are looking for outsourced help, Next Marketing can help.

Coming up next – Mistake Two, Style Guide, what’s that?

Using social media as a marketing tactic doesn’t always cost a lot of money; however you do need to commit time to it if you are going to make it work.  If you’re a small to medium business you will need to give about an hour a day to creating interesting posts, uploading relevant information and building relationships with your clients by directly communicating with them.  Do you have time to do that?

Post information on your business page regularly but make sure it is information that your clients are going to find useful.  Social media marketing is personal so make sure you get the right tone in your posts.  It should be engaging and friendly but also match with the branding of your business.  Make sure you check into your page everyday with your status update, this will ensure your business streams into your clients’ newsfeeds.

Creating and maintaining brand awareness is the cornerstone of every marketing activity and this is where social media can really make an impact.  Encouraging clients and potential clients to ’like’ you will mean your posts get fed into their news feeds and they have immediate access to information, updates and any special offers or promotions you offer them.

Social media provides a great avenue for your fans to communicate directly with you and it’s this interaction which builds relationships.  As everyone knows, good business is built on a good relationship, so if your business doesn’t have a Facebook page, now is the time to build one.