You talking to me?!

If you’ve attended any of my training courses, you’ll know how frequently I stress the importance of talking to your target audiences (the different groups of people with whom you need to communicate) using language they understand. By this, I mean making it easy for your customers and potential customers, as well as any others important to your business, to ‘get’ what you’re all about, why you do it and how you can be of value to them.

No jargon, no patronising sector speak, just simple, straight talking.

The Chimera Communications strapline of ‘Simply Delivering the Message’ says it all.

I’ve come across several situations recently where organisations and businesses have made the mistake of assuming customers understand their language. With some sectors like finance, there’s no getting away from regulations requiring information to be delivered in certain ways. There are some companies incredibly effective in translating this to customers, but many are not. People get confused, and results can be misunderstandings, wasted energy and resource, and duplicated work as well as products.

Understanding your customers means knowing when you need to go the extra mile to explain things in the right way. It’ll save you more time and effort later on.

With online polls, surveys, questionnaires and emails, as well as the good old-fashioned method of actually talking to someone, there’s no excuse for not qualifying what your customers need.

So here are some tips:

·      * Ask your customers when, how and what information they’d like from you – in other words, what is of value to them

·      * Know your customers so well that you understand the language, tone and messages they need to receive, rather than what you churn out to them

·      * Ensure all your teams (if you have rotas or shifts) know what’s going on so customers don’t have to repeat themselves again and again, which is not only frustrating and irritating, but can lead to negative PR through word of mouth and bad online reviews

·      *Make things simple and easy to understand – that way, you’re far more likely to engage and do more business with them

If you don’t connect and build a relationship with your customers, the risk is they’ll go to someone else who ‘talks their language’.

Managing social media for a charity

Guest blog by Kerrie Carter, Worthing Churches Homeless Projects

As a PR and Social Media Apprentice, I know first-hand what it takes to get a charity noticed online. There are so many platforms out there and it can sometimes be hard to choose which is best for the needs of your particular charity. You should really stick to two and do them well. Develop these platforms so you have a good following on each, aiming for key decision-makers and opinion-formers. It’s important that your followers should be invested in the service you’re providing.

Working for a charity that helps the homeless, I have to be incredibly careful about the message I put on social platforms as it can so easily be misinterpreted. There is a huge stigma attached to the topic of homelessness and every person has their own opinion to give, which they like to do on social media. It’s important to be neutral to all of this and remember your charity’s aims; those are what you have to deliver no matter what.

Besides, the majority of people who follow you on social media are genuinely interested in the service you give and want to support it in any way, and that’s the valuable thing you need to focus on.

Facebook is a popular platform for our target audience so I tend to post on there the most as we get more engagement. Occasionally we get a negative comment which I may hide if likely to cause offence to clients/supporters, but in most cases I don’t delete a comment as everyone is entitled to their opinion. When posting, I try to stick to the same tone and this is reflected by my colleagues as well so the audience knows what to expect from the charity. We also get the chance to be quite personal as it’s a fairly small, local charity and those in our area are the audience we want to be targeting. I find posts with photos attached to them always work the best for our audience as they like to see the work the charity is doing.

Twitter, on the other hand, is less prominent for us. We get more support from local businesses on here but mostly through the form of retweets and favourites. When we team up with other organisations, Twitter is a valuable tool for tagging and updating people on what’s happening. The same goes for fundraising events however, it’s easier to document these through photos on Facebook as this is where our dominant audience lies.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite are brilliant for managing your social media accounts and for us, ensures there is content going out over the weekend so the account doesn’t suffer with loss of traffic.

There are other platforms we are considering using, such as Pinterest or Instagram, and we do post appropriate videos on YouTube, but since our following is constantly growing, Facebook and Twitter are the main forms of promotion. They are easy to use and can put out a powerful message although restricted to 140 characters on Twitter. Now that’s what I call effective marketing.

Kerrie had 1-2-1 social media training with us as part of her development as an apprentice with Worthing Churches Homeless Projects www.wchp.org.uk