Ten Tips to Communicating Clearly

By Ann McGuire
Posted Saturday, October 23, 2004

Improve your marketing and your writing with a few simple, easy to remember tips.
Focus Pardon me while I completely butcher Rudyard Kipling: “If you can keep your focus while all around are losing theirs, than you’ll be a successful marketer my son…or daughter.” Focus, focus, focus. It’s the number one rule of communicating clearly. Without it all you’ve got is a formless group of ideas in search of a topic.

Find Your Voice Your company is a living, breathing entity. It speaks. What does it sound like? Is it informative or educational? Is it tongue-in-cheek, artsy, or technospeak? Find your voice, and then, just as importantly, stick to it. (PS: If you have trouble finding your company voice, look to your corporate identity – one should be reflective of the other.)

Make the Message Meaningful If you must say something, say something useful…or interesting…or truthful…or informative. “Delivering tomorrow’s needs today” is not a message. It’s a woefully overused tagline (and a bad one at that) and a waste of space.

Deliver the Right Message to the Right Audience Always try to communicate from the perspective of the intended audience. This will prevent you from dropping a ton of technical jargon on your unsuspecting non-technical customer base, making them feel stupid, and causing them to take it out on you by ripping your material to shreds and filing it in the garbage. In the same vein, don’t try to sell to a technical audience with vanilla marketing materials. Give the nuts and bolts crowd exactly what they crave…enough technical specs to choke an IT department.

Don’t Lie Don’t make statements you can’t prove, no matter how good they sound. Don’t say, “We’re the first in our market,” unless you have the data to back up the claim. But if you’ve got the blue ribbon to prove it, i.e., “According to Creamed Corn Magazine, we make the number one best selling brand in the country,” then by all means, toot that horn.

Keep Buzzword Compliance to a Minimum The appropriate use of industry-specific jargon is in support of your message, not in place of your message. If you don’t use words like “extensible” and “quantifiable” in your every day operations, than for goodness sake don’t put them in your marketing materials.

When in Doubt, KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) Communicate one idea at a time and repeat it throughout your materials. Resist the desire to be all things to all people. Remember, marketing materials are not a personal ad.

Keep it Uniform Keep your messaging intact across multiple mediums in order to gain maximum recognition. Your website, printed materials, Powerpoint presentations, catalogs, and signage should all be reflective and supportive of each other.

Don’t Fall in Love with Your Creations When you become married to an idea you close yourself off to the possibility that there is a better word, design, concept, or idea out there. Always take suggestions.

Look at it, than walk away If it’s at all possible, after you’ve written, designed, or created any type of communication materials, leave it alone for a while. It’s amazing what kind of perspective you gain after a good night’s sleep. Things you never saw during the heat of creation suddenly jump out clear as day.

About the Author
Ann has been writing professionally for over 20 years. She is also the owner of Spitfire Marketing Communications, delivering high impact words, designs, and programs to businesses throughout the US