Marketing Communications
How To Communicate Your Business Effectively

In previous marketing lessons we showed you how to identity your target customer groups when we showed you what is marketing.

Now you have your marketing groups we'll show you how best to communicate your marketing messages.

Marketing Communications

General marketing communications is the one area of marketing that everyone knows about and has an opinion on as it's the visual side of marketing.

Communications is how your customers will see you, your business and product messages in the market place.

But the communications of your business to your target customer groups should be both targeted and well thought out before any messages are delivered.

Remember that every time a customer sees a communication piece about your company they will remember this and build up a picture about you so you need to be consistent in terms of message as well as *how* you reach out to your customer in terms of "voice" and wording.

Marketing - Your Brand

Your brand is the overall statement of what your company stands for.

It's not about products or services it's the foundations of your company.

You'll need to decide how you want your company to be perceived, and this is broken into several segments:

• Corporate identity - most people think this is the brand but it is simply design in terms of colours, fonts and logos.
• Positioning - where do you position yourself in the market? Think about this in terms of your target customers (eg: are they rich or poor) and your price positioning (are you expensive or cheap?)
• Brand personality - This is very important and sometimes this just simply evolves as your company grows. If you are targeting children versus professionals you will have a different dialogue and tone of voice with these two groups. Think of this like the personalities of your friends. They behave differently and so do the ways in which companies portray themselves (Think BMW against Tango)
• Brand values - What does your company stand for? What are the basic building blocks of what you are offering? These could range from "choice" to "value for money". Your brand values will underpin the way you communicate to your customers.

Communicating To Customers

Now you understand how you are going to communicate your business you'll need to calculate what marketing methods you will use and what channels you'll use to communicate your messages.

Remember that marketing communications is not only in print or on TV. Every time you or one of your colleagues speaks to a customer they are carry your message and these need to be consistent (think "New Labour" - always consistent)

Next time we'll take you through some of the communication channels you can use and how best to use them.

If you have any comments on this discuss them in our business forum

All the best for your business success,

Peter Hale
Teneric Business Plans Ltd