- HoneyHat

How to reduce marketing noise

The majority of brands only care about spreading their message (OK, they may even shout it) to their target audience. They are essentially focused on increasing the noise level in their customer’s lives. Smart brands are able to share their message while actively eliminating noise and friction in people’s lives. They do this by creating a seamless buyer journey.

Here’s how you can tweak your marketing strategy to make it more effective.

Step 1. Identify marketing noise.

Noise is everywhere. From emails and Slack pings to popups, ads and more. Noise isn’t just external. Your audience’s thoughts, feelings and experiences can also affect the ability to hear messages.

You need to know what kind of noises they encounter as they go about their daily lives, especially in relation to the content or applications they use. There are more “noise types” than you may realize.

Channel noise: The consumer is bombarded by multiple messages coming from various sources and across many channels. It can be hard for one message to stand out in a sea of competing messages. This is often the case when marketing messages are bland and uninspiring. They become white noise. )
Physical noise is external distractions which can interfere with communication. If a TV commercial plays in a noisy and crowded environment, your audience may find it difficult to hear the message.
This noise is caused by a noisy language, when the meanings or phrases of words, phrases or symbols are not understood because of language barriers, jargons, technical terms or cultural differences. Your audience may be confused or misinterpreted if you use complex terminology.
Psychological noise Personal influences such as audience biases and emotions, challenges and anxieties, attitudes and opinions, can influence how they perceive your marketing.

Consider the noise you hear in your daily life. What content catches your attention, what makes you irritated, and what you can’t remember? You can better understand your audience’s problems by understanding what they are going through.

Tip: Create buyer personas by using our guide. This will help you to understand your audience better, including their demographics and wants, needs, and desires. This will help you to get into their head and hear what they are saying every day.

2) Select the stories that stand out in the crowd.

Brands often make the mistake of churning content out without a compelling narrative. Your content will be less effective if it is fragmented or uninspiring. You need to have a coherent story throughout the buyer’s journey if you want your content to stand out.

Kaykas Wolff suggests that you create a product value matrix. This will help you to identify and isolate what makes your service/product unique, compelling, and interesting. How to do it?

Determine the industry you are in. You need to know what your main competitors are saying about their brands and how you can compete with them.
Find three key value points that will make you standout in this particular category. This is your brand story.
These are the talking points you will need to create for each of the three values. This is the evidence that supports your claims.

This matrix of produce value will help you identify the value you offer your audience and the most meaningful ways to tell your brand’s story.

Tip Use the framework for brand messaging in order to determine your product value and build your story pillars. You can then implement this messaging through your content strategy.

Optimize your customer journey to tell these stories.

Audit every stage of the buyer journey, using clear messaging to reduce barriers and noise.

Make it easy to connect the dots by using all of your tools.

Visual identity: Are you consistent in your visual identity across all channels? Consistent branding makes you stand out, and your audience can recognize your content instantly. To build this, see our toolkit.
Brand voice: Infusing your content with the brand voice is a great way to humanize your brand and capture your audience. This goes for all of your content. Add personality to calls-to-action and emails. You can delight your customers and not just break through the noise. Our team still laughs about the funny Native deodorant email that a C5er got years ago. Moments of happiness can help you break away from the everyday noise and form stronger relationships with your audience.
Leading with benefits-focused messaging. This not only creates an emotional hook to pique their interest, but also saves them time in sourcing and synthesising information so they can understand what you do.
Formats: Use the correct formats to convey the right message. You could, for example, replace a long and text-heavy website with a quick and snappy explanation video to save your viewers time. You can also break up a video into smaller clips to use on social media.
Timing: Communication bombards people all day long (especially in their inboxes). Schedule your content to coincide with times when your audience is likely to be most receptive. We know that the holidays are busy times for our clients, and their inboxes will be flooded with holiday content. We choose to reduce the noise by not sending our newsletters during holiday weeks.
Personalization: Use data to customize your messages. You can address recipients by name and suggest products or services that are based on past behavior.
Preferences: People like the option to choose what appears in their inbox. But you can show empathy by asking what they want and, even more important, what they don’t. We were especially moved by the way Milk Bar, a chain of desserts and bakery restaurants, offered their customers the opportunity to opt-out of Mother’s Day communications. This was a thoughtful, empathetic and thoughtful way to show that they cared about their audience and didn’t want to celebrate Mother’s Day.
There are areas where you could streamline, simplify or condense the process. For example, do you need multiple confirmation emails? You need to have them click on multiple landing pages in order to contact you. Reduce noise by making it easier for your customers to navigate the marketing funnel.

Tip: It’s always helpful to observe how other people in your field communicate effectively or not. Use our guide to perform a content review of your brand and your competitors to determine how well you are doing, where you can improve, and what you could do to optimize your presentation.

Be Aware of Noise in the Future

You may be tempted to focus on the quantity of content rather than its quality. However, your content will only be as valuable as it is. You are not doing anyone a favor if you keep cluttering your audience’s inboxes and feeds.

Consider the following as you implement your content strategy to ensure that you are adding to the conversation and not creating more noise.

Empathetic marketing is a powerful tool. Empathy can be a powerful tool for identifying with your audience, and creating a better experience. It can also be used to inspire new content ideas. See for more ideas on how to use it in your marketing.
Content can be used to improve the lives of people. Content that helps people to learn or accomplish something more efficiently will always add value. Instead of talking at your audience, think of creating tools, templates or other resources to improve their lives.
Test and optimize. Test and optimize.

If you liked these tips, you can listen to the Best Story Wins Podcast, where we interview leading marketing experts to learn how they are winning hearts and mind. We’d be happy to work with you to bring your brand to the market. You can also contact us or look at our FAQs about content strategy.

As you build your content strategy, you should always be looking for ways to provide value to your audience and to create connections.

The first column , Column Five , published the post Reduce marketing noise throughout the buyer journey.

Author: Katy French

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