A few days ago, I had the pleasure of delivering a virtual business writing course for a multinational in the consumer goods industry.
The company, a beloved global brand that ignites warm, fuzzy feelings, and boasts of a wide range of products—from baby food and nutritional items to chocolate and water—sought my services to run a customised session on the fundamentals of business writing. Participants were from different units of the organisation, including corporate communications.
The session was interactive, and the energy was encouraging. The discussions reiterated vital principles that you should note as a brand advocate/champion so that you succeed in boosting your company’s image.
When you’re required to write to connect with customers, increase sales, forge collaborations, or present your employer in the best possible light, the points below are non-negotiable.
1) Be clear about what persuasive communication entails
You should know, as a starting point, why persuasion is critical to your results.
Now, persuasion is the second most desired soft skill for 2020, as revealed by LinkedIn in its report for the year, having considered data from its platform of 660+ million professionals across 20+ million jobs.
And since persuasion encompasses effective communication in speech and writing, honing these skills will serve you well.
Therefore, ensure your communication is effective by writing in a way that achieves your goal (such as increasing leads or generating more interactions with your social media content) or brings you closer to completing a purpose (such as more exposure).
As I dryly noted in the workshop: communicate effectively or don’t bother communicating at all.
2) Espouse simplicity, brevity, and clarity
These three beacons of effective communication guarantee a sharp piece, whatever you’re writing, and more importantly, they get you results.
As a regular reader of this blog, you know the beacons are my second rule of effective business writing (with the first being considering your audience, and the third being editing and proofreading thoroughly).
If you want your content to trigger meaningful action, you must guarantee the following:
a) Write in a simple, understandable manner
Archaic, pompous, redundant words and ambiguous expressions win you no advocates. People must understand what you mean without needing to re-read sections of your text. If they don’t, they’d quickly move on or click away from your site – losing you potential customers and clients.
Make reading your message and taking action a delight – not a dreaded chore.
b) Make your point quickly
Use brevity not only as a tool to deliver with greater impact but also as a way to ‘coax’ your audience to ponder your messaging.
In the workshop, I introduced an exercise on conciseness that often sparks robust discussions. Participants were given a text of four lines and advised to delete all the clutter – unnecessary or redundant words/expressions that added no value and made the piece wordy. Then they shared their abridged versions and provided the rationale for their choices. The activity was to help them understand the power of pruning written work to emerge with a crispier, sharper product.
When writing for your brand, ensure that you’re concise. Not only will you achieve a more effective outcome, but your audience will also be relieved to get to the heart of your message quickly.
Respect the time of your audience and write what you mean as concisely as possible.
c) Address the so-what angle
Be clear about your call-to-action (CTA): what you want your customers, clients or the public to do after reading your brilliant text.
Also, ensure that your content addresses the inherent so-what angle.
For example, posting on social media that your company’s brand was named ‘Brand of the Year’ by the national stock exchange is a so-what issue.
Adding that given the recognition, your organisation would increase its distribution of medical supplies to needy communities during the coronavirus pandemic is newsworthy.
But ending with a call for your organisation’s partners to support the worthy cause by pledging a donation of x% of their budgets, via a link you provide, ensures that your content is complete.
Always build a clear CTA into your piece, otherwise, your audience will be unsure of how to proceed – and so will do nothing.
3) Incorporate Aristotle’s three pillars of persuasion
He’s been dead for a long time – over 2,300 years, but the Greek philosopher’s three pillars of rhetoric: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotional slant of your audience), and logos (logic/facts) are still powerful tools in your communication arsenal.
Ethos refers to your credibility. As a writer for your company’s brand, think about ways you can highlight its influence, laurels, and reputation to build trust. Has it won awards for its quality standards? Does it score high in ethics and transparency? Is it the only/the best/the leader/among the top five?
Pathos highlights the emotional leanings of your audience. How does your content connect with viewers on an emotional level? Do you want it to incite joy, anger, longing, fear, etc.? In this age of automation, Artificial Intelligence and other advanced technologies, content that triggers emotions will produce more significant, consistent results because emotion separates us from machines.
Logos appeals to logic, facts, and rationale. There should be a logical flow or sequence to your points to make them acceptable. If your piece is rife with sweeping statements and not supported by some evidence (and personal experiences of employees and customer testimonials are examples of proof), then your writing will be weak and unconvincing.
As a brand champion, you should incorporate ethos, pathos, and logos in your content to make it persuasive and relatable.
However, of the three, pathos carries the most significant weight, if you have average doses of the other two. Without the emotional angle, your credible, factual piece will be dry and uninspiring. Remember that people first make emotional decisions about a product/service before validating or justifying their decisions with logic. Humans are emotional beings; therefore, use emotion to nurture connections with your target audiences.
Conclusion
After sharing the recommendations above at the workshop, I realised one point: when writing to boost the corporate brand, other criteria contribute to the effectiveness of your communication.
For example, aligning your messaging with business goals and measuring the effectiveness of programmes is worth considering. Similarly, developing a strategy for managing your organisation’s internal and external reputation is advisable for long-term rewards. Finally, positioning your company’s content to dominate its niche is a valid activity that you, as a brand content writer, mustn’t ignore.
Nevertheless, consider the three recommendations given in this article and use them as additional techniques to boost engagement, sales, partnerships, and goodwill.
Your precision will pay off when favourable outcomes validate your efforts.
And you’d catch the eye of those decision-makers at the table, which will lead to more opened doors for you.
Over to you:
Do you need help in boosting your business writing skills? Sign up here for my free quarterly newsletters and learn best practices. When you sign up, you’ll receive my evergreen resource on giving persuasive presentations. Ensure you download that document and refer to it before any high-stakes presentation or speech.
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N.B: First image is courtesy of Peggy & Marco Lachmann-Anke, via Pixabay. Video is courtesy of Lucille Ossai. Second and third images are courtesy of Gerd Altmann, via Pixabay.
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