Signs your brand’s communication is suffocating its audience
What’s one sign you are over-communicating when it comes to your brand?
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organisation comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Your Content Is Text-Heavy
If you’re using text-heavy communications, you’re making a mistake. Users will only read about one-fifth of the content on a web page containing 600 words of text. Meanwhile, engagement with video, interactive pages, infographics and other visual media is skyrocketing. Visual content delivers your message quickly in an aesthetically pleasing package that consumers will want to share.
– Amy Balliett, Killer Infographics
2. The Wrong Target Audience Asks for Your Services
It’s less about over-communicating and more about communicating to the wrong target audience. Keep your eyes on the ball which is, in this case, your first contact with your newly generated leads. If your sales development team has discussions with prospects that expected something entirely different than what you are selling, this is a good sign that you need to recalibrate.
3. You Send More Than One Follow-Up Email
Keeping your customers informed is great, and sometimes you make an honest mistake and forget to include important information in a press release or email. However, when you start to send two or more follow-up emails related to the same thing (product release, new feature, etc.), you are probably annoying your audience.
4. Your Company’s Analytics Show Reduced Interaction
If you’re putting out multiple messages about your brand that aren’t being opened and read, you may have exhausted your influence. Rather than send out shotgun blasts about everything, target your content in a specific way to engage with your audience. This means creating valuable, informative content that speaks to a need or desire your audience has and answers its most pressing questions.
– Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
5. You Lose Sight of Your Original Mission
You’ve over-communicated when the brand has lost it’s one true value proposition. When there are a ton of different messages about what the brand offers, how they offer it, and what they are doing to offer it, the brand can lose sight of its original mission. Always make it clear what the one mission is, and you can elaborate in concise summaries from there. Make the overarching umbrella the main focus.
– Bryanne Lawless, BLND Public Relations
6. You Send Low-Quality Content
When you over communicate with your clients, the quality of your message becomes muddled. The more frequently you post or blast, the more the quality of your message will suffer. Take a step back and read your message from a user’s point of view. Do your customers really need to know that information? If the answer is no, then don’t post.
– Patrick Barnhill, Specialist ID, Inc.
7. The Customer Mentions It
One of our clients had automated some systems before coming to us, and while it worked initially with their ROI, in the long-term, it meant that they were constantly bombarding their most loyal customer base with messages. They did not take too kindly to it and relegated the client to spam. When they weren’t hearing back from a lot of them we decided to investigate — disaster.
8. Your Social Media Efforts Go Awry
It doesn’t stop at mailers. It also means you haven’t paid attention to social media channels. Does your brand only send out 100 robotic tweets and irrelevant status updates every day? Guilty of sending out random invites to your marketing event? If you’re losing more followers with every post or receiving backlash in the comments section, there’s a good chance that you’re over-communicating.
9. Your Email Open Rates Diminish
If your email open rates or your social media following and interactions are diminishing, it may be a sign that you’re over-communicating your brand. Keep your messages concise, and create a schedule of communicating that coincides only with fresh information or content that needs to be shared.
– Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
