Hello Friends!

I hope you’re well! This week we seem to be amazingly on the ball and have finished the next toolkit ahead of our plan! As always I thought I’d give you a quick run down of it to help you decide if it’s useful to you (or not in which case…what you doing wasting your time reading this blog?!)

What’s the big deal…

I thought Id start by explaining WHY this one is important and it sounds like such an obvious one. Firstly, this toolkit is a follow on from our previous Define Your Brand and Define Your Audience toolkits. Only once you’ve completed these toolkits should you even bother with this one, the reason for this is that, and I quote…

So you really need to understand your brand identity and your customer personality to apply both. Essentially, it’s a marriage of your beautiful brand and your customers wants, needs and desires. You bring the two together by communicating in a way that works really well for you both. (*It has to work for you both because it needs to Appeal to them and it needs to be Authentic for you otherwise it’s unsustainable and frankly, weird.)

So the toolkit is helpful because it teaches you HOW to do this in a way that works for you and it teaches you WHAT you need to carry that forward. Once you’ve figured it all out there’s a template to write down your take aways (not your pizza preferences but your key messages about communication that you take away from the toolkit) You then just need to put them into practice, following the guidelines you set for yourself and it’ll soon become natural to you meaning you can communicate well and easily without thinking about it.

Decided to print it in ‘draft mode’ cuz I’m not into waste. (so excuse the lines haha)

A Bit Contrived no?

My fear throughout was that this would sound contrived. Like you’ve got rules and regulations for talking to people, making it false and salesy…that’s absolutely not what this toolkit is about. It’s simply learning what language works for your both (both being your brand and customer) how to use different language whilst still keeping in tone with your brand and when to use it. Often with these things it’s about assessing and understanding, we normally don’t stop to think about the things we say or how we say them when actually it’s really important that what your saying is appropriate for your brand and is appealing to your customer. This toolkit should help you figure all that out so that you can continue to speak for your brand in a really natural way whilst also being aware of how you’re saying it.

What’s involved?

As always, there are plenty of exercises (nothing physical! you can do them all in a note book with a snack in hand) examples, guides, information and a template to write down your final take aways. It takes about 2 hours to really consider and make notes and then going forward should very quickly become natural.

How Will the Toolkit Help?

The aim of the Communicating With Your Customer Toolkit is to enable you to take the information you know and apply it in a really easy and natural…but super effective way.

It discusses the difference between Tone and Language which is REALLY important, this will help you to figure out how to always keep your Brand Voice but apply it to different situations – It’s not always appropriate to speak in the same way, I talk to you a lot more casually than I write product listings for instance because here we’re pals having a chat and listings are a more formal arrangement. I’m still the same person/brand I’m just applying my language in a different way. The toolkit helps explain the differences and relevances and helps you to decide what’s appropriate and when.

It reminds you that your communication isn’t just in one place and it isn’t just in text form, images are just as important and gives you prompts to consider in this regard.

It encourages you to create buzzwords for inspiration and encouragement as well as gentle guidelines that will help you roll out your communication (If you have other team members speaking on behalf of the brand for instance)

And most importantly, it should help you find the balance between having a system for communicating with your customers… and using it authentically.

OK enough Chat!

I’m going to go back through my entire website and make sure I’m practicing what I preach (I wrote loads of it years ago so I’m quite certain I’ll need to update it!)

Here’s the listing for the toolkit should you wish to splash the cash (they’re launched at an introductory price of £3.85 then go to full price at £5 after that.)