6 tips to improve communication with your customers

It is often said that people no longer read. And yes, it is true that “we” in general are rapidly losing interest in reading, shifting instead to a culture geared towards images. Pages of text aren’t the favored way of selling things anymore. Despite that, the written word remains a crucial part of your marketing mix—if perhaps slightly less center stage than before.

Less center stage, but by no means less effective, rich in information or energizing. It’s an area where you can make your organization shine: how to write the perfect message in a few sentences? Writing remains as much of an artform as it was before. To boot up the creative process, we have prepared several tips for you.

Six tips to enhance your writing

• You likely have accumulated pages worth of text on your website. Why not link those together? Form them into a “mind map” by grouping the texts around themes relevant to you and your clients. Do this by linking directly to other texts in the group. Your theme might be sustainability, customer care, innovation… What would you like to be associated with?
• Keep the tone of your writing light-hearted. Positivity is usually rewarded over negativity, both on social media and on websites. This is mostly a matter of vibe. The point isn’t to be extravagantly joyous, but rather to keep the text to the point, valuable and not too heavy.
• Depending on your chosen tone (optimistic, hopeful, warning, sympathetic?) you will have to find the right language. For instance, in a positive piece it would be better not to use double negatives (“that’s not unwise…”) and only use exclamation marks after the most jubilant of sentences!
• Keep in mind which customer phase the reader is in. Is this their first meeting, would they be somewhat familiar with your company or are they ready to get their wallet out, so to speak? That is important in deciding how forcefully you want to push your product or service.
• Your style of communication depends on the medium and the context. It is perfectly fine to be less formal in a blog post or tweet than on your website. Feel free to switch between business language and more casual language. It is up to you how variable you are in this and something you might even want to put down in a style document (see below).
• And the final tip: be true to yourself in all your communications. It might be tempting to jump in on the latest trends (such as the increased level of humor and assertiveness organizations display nowadays on social media), but if this doesn’t suit the tone of your company, it won’t be a proper fit. Stick instead to your own, genuine tone of voice. Authenticity matters.

This list is of course merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to communication. Would you like to discover in greater detail what your organization’s ideal language is?
We would love to help you bring this into focus with a branding guideline.