Whether you’re writing an email, blog, sales copy or shooting a video, delivering a webinar, or launching an ad, despite the technical actions involved, you are essentially communicating.
What is communication? If you look it up in today’s dictionaries, you will find a useless and confusing and overly simplified definition with no value to you.
If you go to Wikipedia and read the article on communication, it tells you right at the beginning that communication is very hard to define and there is no exact meaning for it.
I found that quite odd. A quick research on the internet shows widely different methods and definitions and ideas regarding communication. I found one definition which is quite useful by English literary critic and author I.A. Richards who in 1928 offered one of the first definitions of communication as follows:
Communication takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience.
To make this even simpler, let’s boil communication down to a question that you can ask yourself “Who said what to whom with what effect?”
Let’s break these definitions down into a workable formula for all marketing, PR and sales.
To have communication take place, you need to have at least two entities present. Whether that is two human beings, two animals, two objects, two anything.
In marketing, you are communicating to your target audience to get them to do your desired action. This could be calling-in, emailing you, clicking a button, leaving a review, subscribing to your list, purchasing a product, giving referrals, reading your blog, watching your video etc.
Who you are and how you communicate, your style, your voice, your aesthetics, your points of differentiation, your values is the subject of branding. This establishes who you are and your unique personality and it applies to you as an individual or you as a business.
Most small businesses don’t have their branding done correctly and thus they never communicate effectively. Once you know who you are then you need to be present on the communication channels where your audience is. Remember the first rule of communication is being present. If you were looking to date someone, the first step would be to show up and be present on the channels where you could find the right one to date. That would be making your profiles on dating apps, going to events, parties, hanging out with friends etc.
Similarly, you need to show up and be present where potential prospects are. That means social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc. Attending business networking events, talking to past customers for referrals etc.
The next step of the communication process is to whom are you communicating? Who is your target audience? Who is your ideal customer? It can’t be everyone. When you communicate to everyone, you communicate to no one. Knowing who you’re talking to greatly affects what you talk about or how you talk about it.
So this is where customer research comes in. You really need to dial in on the demographics of your customer. Are we talking to women or men? Young or Old? What are their goals? Their challenges? What problem do they have? What problem are we solving for them? It’s all about them.
Pro marketers use Customer Avatars to flesh out and give life to their ideal customers. A customer avatar is a representation of what a customer looks like, their demographics and psychographics.
Having this representation helps you to keep in mind
