Business Advice

What's Your Story?

10/09/09

By Andy Coote

Marketing materials within business have a tendency to develop tactically over time. To support their activity, businesses develop brochures, leaflets, postcards and other printed material. Online it is a given that most businesses now have a website. Press Releases and articles are used to build business visibility and Social Media such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter are also being used by more and more businesses.

Often the responsibility for these different outputs is in different places and the business treats them as if they were separate entities, developed in isolation, often without coordination of message, of...

...tone and of image.

The audience, however, is not fragmented. The same people will read the different messages coming through these uncoordinated channels. The result is that brand gets muddied and confused. Customers don't buy if they don't understand what the business is about. They ask, just what IS the story?

Despite all the many options for communicating with your audience, content is still a, maybe the, critical factor. It needs to be consistent, effective and it must contribute to building the right image. That image must also be one that will be sustained by the actions and behaviours of the business. Clearly, the potential for this is greater in larger businesses, but the problem exists even in the smallest. Even a single person business can manage to deliver mixed messages and, in my experience, many do.

Communication can be instantaneous and its reach is almost unlimited. Your message can be broadcast across the world in seconds. So it is worth investing time into putting some basics in place.

My first interest in developing content is to understand the audience(s) we will be talking to. Particularly, I want to establish -

- What... continued on page two >

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