You’re marketing yourself and/or your business in all the right channels, reaching your intended audience(s), but are you making the right impression and impact?

It’s enough of a challenge to identify your ideal clients and markets, establish where they ‘hang out’ so that you can get in front of them physically or digitally, and then decide on a marketing/advertising strategy to maximise your reach.

The challenge doesn’t stop there though.

What’s equally important is to consider your message and how you want to say/portray it, so that it makes the desired impact and right impression on your potential clients.

Ensure your words pass the ‘Alien test’

So you’ve written some marketing materials, social media posts, blogs and so forth – if an alien read them would they understand what you were trying to say?

Take care to use simple, clear language, avoid any company/industry jargon and avoid those TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms…..yes, we know what we did there!). Of course some people might understand, but others won’t and for some it’s a bit of a turn-off and means they will move on and not think about you or what you’re offering/providing.

Don’t pack too much written content in. A readers’ attention span isn’t long and typically they’ll want to consume information as easily as possible. When the content is longer, such as a blog, make sure the headline grabs their attention, the opening paragraph sets the context and that the proceeding sections are bite sized.

Make that image a scroll-stopper

In this digital era of simple access to a mass of information, more and more we scroll through our social media feed and emails, making immediate assessments of the relevance of what’s there and moving on quickly if it’s of no relevance. Or if it quite simply doesn’t grab our attention and make us stop scrolling to find out more.

We don’t recommend to always use an image, but where it can add to your message, invoke an emotion or provide social proof to what you’re talking about, then it’s worth doing. And make sure that the image is relevant!

I’ve often seen posts describing something important, educational and valuable, accompanied by a random image of the author drinking a coffee at their local Costa.

And be careful when overlaying words on top of an image – there’s a big risk that they won’t stand out or even won’t get noticed at all.

Let your audience read your video

Yes, you read that right. Let your audience read your video. We’re talking about adding captions here. A surprising amount of videos get watched with the volume muted (e.g. when on a bus or train, without any headphones), so it’s important to think about adding captions to videos to help the viewer read what is being said. We use www.rev.com to transcribe videos (or audio files) into captions for a very small fee, and then a program called Handbrake to burn the captions back onto the video.

Remember, if you’re going to add captions, they’ll take up space across the bottom of the video so you need to make sure they won’t inadvertently be on top of something important that the viewer would want to see also.

A little free hint on us – you can use Microsoft Word Online to transcribe video/audio files into text, which you could then use to form short social media posts, blogs, articles, etc!

You are your marketing

You’ve signed up for a networking event and turn up with your brilliant business cards and leaflets – the other people there want to get to know YOU. In that moment, you are the face of the business you’re representing. And by face, we mean your whole body!

Imagine you’re with someone who is talking to you, but won’t make eye contact, positions their body to face away from you, has their arms crossed and is too easily distracted saying hello to other people passing by. How likely are you to want their business, tell others positively about their business or even pursue them as a potential client of your own? (unless of course you’re in the business of helping people communicate better when networking).

So make sure you’re not that person.

Be interested in who you’re talking to. Even if it’s in a group of people, make eye contact subtly with them one by one, position yourself so that you’re facing centrally into the group when talking to them all, and subtly change it to face the person who is then talking to you/the group.

Body language is responsible for over 50% of our ability to communicate and influence other people, so use it well!

When it counts, look down the camera



Simply put, when you’re in a virtual meeting (e.g. over Zoom, Teams, etc) with one person, ten people or however many people, unless you’re looking into your device’s camera, you won’t be making eye contact with the person/people at the other end.

It’s an (almost) impossible challenge. You’ve got a load of people’s faces on your screen and you want to watch them individually. But what they see is you looking halfway down your screen, which for them is their neck, chest…anywhere other than their face.

So, when it’s important for your communication to be as effective as possible, deliver it by looking down the camera. That way, your audience all feel like you’re talking to them directly.

If this blog has given you some food for thought, you might be interested in our ‘Effective Communication Skills’ course or maybe some 1:1 coaching. Head to www.momentus.uk.com to find out more.