The top 3 methods to make certain your customer is getting your message.

Here's a "How To" designed to get your message noticed, read and acted upon. 

This article is about how to optimize your chances that someone will get your message.

We’re not writing this down for our health.  We want our message heard. 

1.      We all want our the messages we send to customers to be heard. 

2.      We want our selling message to a potential customer to be persuasive. 

3.      We want our message to customers acted on. 

There are some clear steps you can take to increase the chances your message will get processed in the manner you're hoping for.

Of course your message has to have merit.  This blog entry is not discussing content.  But let’s at least say, you should be trying your best to say something important.  Time is short and we’re all busy so let’s not waste people’s time.

Statistics tell us the odds of being heard are against you.  Consider that we receive 5x as much information today as we did in 1986. We consume about 100,500 words on an average day.  We’re overloaded. 

We’re consuming most of these words on line but it’s tough to get people to interact.  Up by ½ hour each year, people spend over three hours a day on social networks while TV, Radio, newspaper and magazine reading/watching is down year after year.  Your chances of getting someone to interact with your posting are low…consider that people average 36 posts per month on FB and spend 20 minutes per FB visit. 

People are spending their time on social networks more than any other medium.  They have a lot of information to choose from.  This is why it’s important to make sure your message counts.

Most of these suggestions are things you probably either know, or thought you knew.  But I think in our haste we forget how important these persuasive steps can be to help us be successful.

Be Concise

We’re humanly no better at reading this overload of information than we were 30 years ago.  When you put your message in front of your audience, they take in about 20% of the words.  Think about that.  That means you have to keep your message short.  Concise. 

Be Aware of the Medium

Don’t forget your audience may encounter your message via a variety of media.  They can look at it:

·       on paper,

·       on their desktop computer,

·       on their laptop,

·       on their tablet,

·       on the screen in a meeting,

·       on their smart phone. 

Make sure your message has a self adapting component.  In other words, it works in any format.

Use Color

Color increases readers’ attention spans and recall by 82%. Researchers found that color visuals increase the willingness to read by 80%.  Color gains readership by 80%. It’s 39% more memorable. Color increases comprehension by as much as 73%. And increases retention even more.  It increases sales results and brand recognition.  Are you getting this?

Use Pictures

People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.  In fact this works for in person presentations and in tests 67% of the audience were persuaded by the verbal presentation that had accompanying visuals.  Think about it…when you’re looking at a news-feed, aren’t you more likely to click on the entry with a picture?

 

Brain Scans?

Adding pictures of brain scans and mentioning cognitive neuroscience make people more inclined to believe what they are reading.  It’s kind of hard to sneak it into your message, but it does fit into this story so what the heck.

Conclusion

We’re inundated with information.  Yet we all want OUR message to be heard.  Maximize your chances for successful communication by being Concise, by using Pictures and Pictographs.  Of course make certain you’re writing something worthy of being read.

Sources:

www.expandedramblings.com/

Alleyne, R. (11 Feb 2011). Welcome to the information age – 174 newspapers a day. The Telegraph.

Nielsen, J. (2008). How Little Do Users Read?

Green, R. (1989). The Persuasive Properties of Color, Marketing Communications.

Dowse, R. & Ehlers, M. (2005). Medicine labels incorporating pictograms: Do they influence understanding and adherence?, Patient Education and Counseling, Vol 58, Issue 1.

Levie, W. J. & Lentz, R. (1982). Effects of text illustrations: A review of research, Educational Communication and Technology.

Wharton School of Business. ‘Effectiveness of Visual Language’.

McCabe, D. & Castel, A. (2008). Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning, Cognition 107.

Lester, P. M. (2006). Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication.

Ron Shulkin blogs researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on social media, innovation, voice of the customer, marketing automation and enterprise feedback management.  Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas for CogniStreamer®, an innovation ecosystem.  CogniStreamer serves as a Knowledge Management System, Idea Management System and Social Network for Innovation.  You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60 .  Ron manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (Join Here). You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.