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Channel Your Message: Elizabethan Style
An article for Document by David Martina
Sometime around 1580, Sir Philip Sidney wrote his Apology for Poetry, and in it, among many other insightful and significant observations, he makes the point that poetry is the highest and best means of teaching, as it both delights and instructs. Now you might wonder, "What does this have to do with channel management?" I ask you to bear with me for a few more sentences, and I promise to make a case for a 16th Century treatise on poetry having direct relevance to your marketing and sales strategy, seriously.
Let's consider
Were Sir Philip a marketing consultant right now, how would he react to your channel communications? Language issues aside, would he agree that your communications are at least pleasant to view, easy to understand and educational? For example, would a visitor to your web presence come away from the experience educated about your company and with a positive feeling about your business? By Sir Philip's standards, your web presence should delight the visitor and create an atmosphere and mood conducive to absorbing the information that you are presenting. A course on web design doesn't belong here, but consider whether your web presence is easily navigated and pleasant to visit. Minefields of rollovers and distracting advertisements splashed into a garish or utterly stark background may be obscuring your message from your site visitors.
A good portion of my time is spent evaluating products, and not surprisingly, I spend most of that time on vendor websites looking for information about their products. It is probably not very surprising that I will quickly move away from a site that doesn't make it easy or pleasant for me to get the information I need. I suspect I'm not particularly unique in this behavior.
What applies to a web presence applies to a social networking presence and especially to TransPromo communications. At the heart of TransPromo is personalized communication, and a good deal of work and expense goes into producing a TransPromo campaign. While developing the infrastructure and mining the demographic data are crucial, they are wasted efforts if your target audience doesn't get your message. Here again, we can look to Sir Philip for guidance. If you've invested the effort into developing, for example, a personalized billing statement, with targeted advertisements, special offers, statistical usage and billing information, it only makes sense to ensure that the messages are clear, easily understood and organized in a manner that is pleasing to the eye and appropriate to the audience.
I doubt Sidney ever intended that his Apology for Poetry would be applied to the 21st Century channel management practices, but I believe he would agree that whether your message is being presented in verse or as a personalized, automated billing statement, it will be read and retained more effectively if the recipient enjoys the experience.
DAVID MARTINA [david.martina@NEPS.com] is the vice president of systems integration for NEPS, LLC of
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