Your firm's promotional materials and e-commerce activities serve multiple purposes. They provide you with a way of introducing and branding your firm, building credibility, reinforcing your expertise, and communicating key services and benefits. These materials include annual reports, newsletters, product and firm brochures, case histories, testimonial sheets, and article reprints, as well as e-commerce sites, promotions, and e-mail.
Here are four ways that words, photos, information, and presentation can help you secure new business and reinforce your role with existing clients:
Choose your words carefully. Make your writing convey credibility. Focus on engaging your readers and making them more receptive to your ideas. The goal is to structure your information so that it keeps readers reading.
There's always a need to communicate the benefits of doing business with a firm. However, the way you package those benefits - whether as a story, testimonial, case history, or anecdote - is what matters.
There's a crime and a place for everyone's photo. Too often, photos of senior management appear on covers of promotional materials. Yes, there are situations in which using an employee photo has its place. It can put a face to a name and a story. A photo pre-sells and reminds customers who the salesperson is. Depending on the size of an organization, its products, and its approach to clients, including a recognizable face can be appropriate and enhance the value of the brochure or report.
But there are also times when who is in the photo can be a big disruption to the theme and balance. When a photo is used solely for the sake of satisfying egos and becomes a distraction, rather than an important element, it's a crime. Recently, a community bank attempted to promote its personal service and customer focus with a brochure. Instead of selecting a photo of a customer, the bank settled on a photo of its board of directors talking among themselves.
Make sure your company newsletter is newsworthy. Don't try to fool the reader by packaging advertising as a newsletter. Ads are ads and direct mail is direct mail. Both provide information and detail and are designed to sell products or services. In a subtle way, both of these communications should be completely self-serving, but they should be written in a way that involves the reader and moves them to the next step in the buying process.
On the other hand, a newsletter should communicate helpful information, ideas, and strategies relevant to the readers'/customers'/prospects' interests. While the editorial mix doesn't have to be 100% news, a high percentage should be material that's interesting and informative.
When a newsletter becomes a self-serving, loosely disguised ad, it becomes an insult to the reader. Recognize the business development opportunities presented by providing a properly written, carefully edited, customer-oriented marketing newsletter.
Understand the reason for using a Power Point presentation. It's not to show off pretty pictures, panoramic views, or pie charts. It's not to wow the audience with 3-D perspectives, fancy fonts, and cool background effects. The goal, according to Ed Callaghan and Peter Nauert in their book 'TechnoSelling,' is to use a dynamic visual presentation to make a difference in how much information the audience member retains. This is true for groups large and small that attend new business presentations, training sessions, and motivational programs.
Creating a dynamic will make an enormous difference. The retention factor for remembering new information 24 hours after exposure is 20% of what one hears and 30% of what one sees. But when one sees and hears the information together, the retention rate increases to 65%. Think of the retention factor the next time you're in front an audience.