Test All Marketing Communications With Five Quality Checks  

How effective is your marketing communications?  Otherwise slick and attractive communications often have fatal, but very avoidable flaws that make them fail to register with prospects and customers.  You can elevate the effectiveness of your marketing communications by employing a quick quality test to screen your marketing and sales collateral, direct mail, web site, ads and PR in the creative stage.  Just ask these five critical questions of any marcom effort before proceeding.

Test 1 – Clear objective.  Does the communications piece in question have both a specific purpose and audience?   Very often, usually in the interests of economy, a single ad or brochure is expected to accomplish multiple missions with multiple messages and audiences, but fails because of fuzzy, unprioritized objectives.  Certainly some communications, such as annual reports or capabilities presentations, are general by design.  Yet their objectives are equally general, and modest as well.  When you encounter a communications piece trying to be all things to all people, consider whether you might accomplish more with several more limited, but hard-hitting pieces with separate, clearly understood objectives and audiences.

Test 2 – Relevance.  Does the piece relate to market problems, issues and priorities in the way that customers think and talk about them?  The relevancy challenge of “why should I care” is especially tough for companies dealing with new, complex or esoteric technologies.  The key is to identify – almost on a personal level -- with the specific audiences you are trying to reach.  Avoid product jargon.  Communicate with them instead in the context of industry-specific issues, terms and applications with which they are readily familiar.  Likewise make maximum use of analogies and metaphors to help them understand and relate to your message.

Test 3 – Value.  Does the piece add useful information or perspective?  The scarcest resource people have today, particularly in a business setting, is not money.  It’s time.  Your audiences, just like you, are becoming harder to reach and increasingly sophisticated in how they allocate time to the continuous stream of messages competing for their attention.  Accordingly, successful marcom is all about providing value, not just selling.  Value can take many forms:  fresh, objective information, an informed viewpoint, explaining or simplifying a complex issue; illustrating a solution to a recognized problem, and many more.  But product promotion seldom constitutes value.  For PR, the question of value is the primary metric by which editors determine which fraction of the voluminous submitted material they receive finds its way into print or broadcast.

Test 4 – Credibility.  Is the piece believable -- backed by evidence or testimony?  The credibility question is the one that marcom efforts fail most frequently.  Perhaps puffery and hyperbole sneak in because they sound so good internally, but they destroy credibility.  Avoid, for example, referring to yourself as “industry leading” unless you are acknowledged as such by credible third parties.  Better yet, let them confer that distinction on you.  And remember that all “more, better, faster” claims demand compelling supporting evidence.

Test 5 – Dialogue, not monologue.  Is customer feedback encouraged and acted on?  Marketing communications’ primary purpose is to convey messages to target audiences.  But soliciting and acting on feedback from those same audiences is just as important.  Knowing what customers think about your company and products and why, particularly in competitive markets, is invaluable information.  The key is to ask for it.  Yet too many companies are too busy talking to listen.  Try building a customer feedback loop into all your marcom efforts.

by James R. Helbig as published in ICCB

9/19/2000