In the modern world, businesses are often expected to do more than just provide a product or service. Clients and customers increasingly expect companies to speak to them directly and to maintain a conversation, be it about their offerings or more. This is something that’s valuable for small businesses just as much it is for larger corporations. And with many business owners having more in the way of time on their hands of late, we wanted to take a moment to talk about how you can improve the way your own company handles its communications.
Starting off right: Buyer personas and demographics
If you’ve never put too much thought into who your audience is and how you should talk to them, it can feel a little daunting to get started. The good news? It’s easy to break down the process and get stuck in.
Buyer personas are a fantastic place to start. Generally speaking, any business will be able to think about its clients and customers and break them down into typical types of people. You could be a company that sells a subscription IT service, for instance, and have a regular buyer persona of an IT manager of 30-50 years old. Conversely, a retail company aimed at selling sneakers might have a more common buyer persona of 12-18-year-olds who love to shop in malls and in person whenever they can.
When you’re starting to put together buyer personas, it’s good to think about these kinds of data points. What’s the general age range of your personas, what job title do they often have, and what’s their preferred way of interacting with a company?
What you are likely to find is that, by defining your audience in this way, you’ll immediately start coming up with ideas of new marketing activities and efforts to focus your time on. And better yet, it doesn’t have to cost a single dollar to get started.
Thinking channels
Next on the list is the different methods your business uses to communicate. Even for a small business, it’s likely you’ve got a few different options you regularly choose from when it comes to promoting your offerings and engaging with existing clients and customers.
Where tone of voice is concerned, it’s important to think here about the context of each engagement. A person that’s likely to read a social media post on their phone, for instance, is going to have a much shorter attention span than someone who is browsing their business inbox from a desktop.
Knowing this, you can start to tailor your communications to both your personas and the channel you’re expecting to speak to them through. For social media posts, you’ll generally want to tend towards an informal, upbeat tone that has a low character count. Conversely, an email sent to a manager’s inbox might benefit from being longer in length and slightly more formal in style.
Once more, this is an activity that you can put effort into at no cost. And when it’s done consistently, it can help to improve the perception of the quality of your brand while boosting your sales and conversion rates.
Investing in help
If you’re not sure about engaging in these kinds of marketing activities by yourself, that’s perfectly understandable. With communication being such an important part of any business in 2021, it can be helpful to turn to the support of marketing experts to make sure the job is done right.
If you’re doing this, you’ve got plenty of great choices to look into where financing is concerned. Think about what flexible business funding option suits you best and don’t be afraid to spend money on an integral part of your company. The work an agency will do in this area will provide you with an asset that will continue to pay dividends for your company in time.
Another day, another helpful article!
Getting communications nailed down properly is a great activity to place on your list of priorities.
The Idea Financial team wishes you the best for the months ahead and hopes that the information we’ve provided here has been useful and informative. Take care.
Marketing communications stock photo by carroti/Shutterstock