Marketing: Working in the Trenches

Five sure ways to improve your business communication.

Know your audience and write for your audience.
Know the difference between features (that your product has) and benefits (that your product can give.)
Talk directly to your reader.
Be kind to your reader, write in prose that anyone can understand.
Do some research and inform yourself. Use the internet.

I work for a marketing agency and have recently been shopping around for learning institutions where I could upgrade my language skills. In particular I've been looking for German courses London seemed like a good idea basically because I live close by (driving distance) and because the big metropolis offers a great deal of options. It was looking for the ideal best German course London could offer that I realized how poorly presented were a lot of these businesses. Their communication was unpolished and unrefined, certainly something that you don't want to happen to your business. It was shocking, by some miraculously bad performance the content writers or translators had managed to produce a copy that was both unnatural for local natives trying to learn a new language and horribly mistranslated so that foreigners would surely stay away from them.

All About Communication

How much of your business do you think rests solely on the quality of your product? Lots? Good answer. Now, how do you think that the amount of your business that depends on the quality of your product compares with the amount that depends on communication? That's usually a trickier question to answer for a lot of new (and veteran) entrepreneurs but let me sum up the answer as quickly as I can: communication, even if your product is literally the best in the market, is essential to the lifeline of your business.

Let's think about it for a moment. Suppose you have a very good, excellent even, product. How well will it sell and how widely used it will become rests solely upon communication. Communication will basically do two things for you: it will get some (hopefully a lot) of people to try your product out, and (if you are good enough) will get you new customers by your reputation. There are, thus, basically two types of communication: the one you can to some degree control, and one you have no influence about. That doesn't equate to either communication put forward by you or your company and communication put forward by your customers or the competition (since you communicate in both explicit and implicit ways all the time and since the communications of others will be influenced by your actions and the quality of your service.)

All of this leads us to understand that since there are two types of communication, and only on one of those you have a certain degree of control, you should strive to make sure that all the elements that you can actually control are working for you instead of against you.

What Should you Look For?

That's an easy question to answer: quality. Your business lives and dies because of the place it holds on the minds and hearts of your customers, therefore it is essential that you don't come off as sloppy and unprofessional whenever you are exposing yourself. Every time you enlist the help of an external source, feel free to enquire about the quality assurance procedures that they have in place to make sure they deliver a great product. This is specially true in the case of translation agencies. Make sure the work is edited and proofread by at least two professionals in the area particular to the message at hand.

Remember, you owe it to yourself and to your clients to make sure that you deliver a quality product. Any self respecting agency will be more than happy to fill you in on their quality assuring methods and procedures. If you are just starting out making sure your communication is of great quality will be the best of any christening presents your business could receive. If you are a veteran, boost the power of your image with great communication.