Marketing Communication Planners Reading

(First appeared in Second Opinion Marketing e-bulletin October 2010 - subscribe to the e-bulletin here )

Keeping in touch with customers and prospective clients is something most businesses seem to struggle with. For large companies the issues are around how to develop a personal, one to one dialogue and avoid corporate aloofness. For smaller businesses the challenge is often more practical, how to find the time and generate enough material for such communications.

In reality, it isn’t that difficult to write and produce high quality customer communications that keep you at the forefront of your customers’ mind whilst also positioning you as an expert in your field.

This point has been amply illustrated with a couple of clients of mine recently. The first, a maker of industrial components, approached me just over 12 months ago with a view to writing and producing a customer newsletter for them. They are a well established brand in their niche industrial market but admitted they weren’t great at keeping in touch with customers. They realised that some customers weren’t aware of their full product range whilst others were going elsewhere because they felt ignored or were being lured away by competitor communications.

Couple this with the fact they had no method for keeping in touch with prospective clients who had requested product information or quotes but never made a purchase, and you can see how important the desire to start a regular newsletter was.

Last October we produced their first bi monthly e-newsletter, with some trepidation on their part. They easily came up with a list of topics for the first issue but had a real fear that they’d dry up after one or two newsletters. Needless to say, 12 months on and the bi monthly newsletter is still going strong and is being added to with another communication during the alternative months.

A second client has recently launched a new website with a blog which they see as the main way to add keyword rich content and therefore improve the site’s chances of coming top of the search engines.

Their challenge was how to generate enough ideas for items so that the business owner could blog once or twice a week. Three months on and the site has 20+ blog posts, all helping to demonstrate the depth and breadth of knowledge of the firm whilst at the same time, providing the content for a monthly newsletter which puts the blog posts right in front of clients and prospective clients.

So how have these two businesses managed to overcome their reservations to generate great, customer focused communications which put them in front of customers on a regular basis?

Plan what to say, when and how

Developing a simple editorial plan, whether you are producing a full blown newsletter or a series of blogs will really help.

Ask yourself when are you going to write. Getting some space blocked out in your diary on a regular basis will really help. Whether t...