InMarketing This Week: Get to the point
Andrew Carrier
Strategic marketing and communications leader | Financial Services | Fintech
Innovate > Interact > Influence
Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it.
This week, you'll learn why:
① The most important rule in communications is to respect your audience’s time.
② Your reader’s needs must be your first consideration when crafting your message.
③ Your Marketing team should be your Centre of Communications Excellence.
④ J.P. Morgan thinks that incumbent banks should fear fintech rivals.
⑤ Being a fintech founder doesn’t mean you can scale and manage a profitable bank.
⑥ Marketing spend on social media increased 74% between February and June 2020.
⑦ Nearly 50% of the best startups to work for in London are fintechs.
What’s new?
Last Monday, financial journalist and broadcaster Paul Lewis caused quite the stir with this innocuous little tweet.
In short:
- At the time of writing, the quip had generated many hundreds of replies, quote tweets and Likes - and at least one other journalist started a LinkedIn thread about it.
- The majority of people engaging with Paul’s tweet objected to his “grumpy” and “miserable” attitude.
- A debate then raged about what is - and what is not - a suitable email ice-breaker.
Why does it matter?
It doesn’t, not in the slightest. It’s a storm in a teacup and one that - given everything else going on in the world right now - should never have happened in the first place.
But it did get me thinking about a more substantial topic: how to craft effective communications. The interesting point to consider is not whether it’s alright to wish someone you don’t know personally ‘well’ (of course it is, how could wishing someone ‘well’ ever be a bad thing?) but whether writing that sentiment or reading it is a good use of your time and theirs.
“Respecting your reader’s time is the golden rule of business communications.”
① DMR reports show that the average office worker receives 121 emails per day. I suspect a journalist like Paul receives substantially more than that. A few of those emails may have something of value in them. Most will not. In business communications, respecting your reader’s time is perhaps the most important rule.
② The implications of respecting your reader’s time are profound. If you do, you put your reader’s needs first when crafting your message. That means conveying relevant information as clearly and succinctly as possible as well as leaving your reader in no doubt as to what action you expect them to take as a result. Reading a well-crafted piece of communications should be easy, acting on it should be second-nature.
Is it ruder, for example, to forego a “Hope this finds you well” or to make your time-pressed reader wade through an ice-breaker 1st paragraph of platitudes before he/she gets to the substance of your message?
I would argue that the most polite thing you can do is to get straight to the point.
What’s next?
Take action
The ability to communicate information - both internally and externally - is one of the most powerful commercial advantages a business can have. It saves time and makes it more likely you’ll achieve the outcomes you want. But many of your staff probably aren’t very good at it. It’s not easy - not least because of the natural diversity of almost every audience.
The ability to communicate is one of the most powerful commercial advantages a business can have.
③ Your Marketing team should be best-placed to help you tackle this problem. Given the inherent skills of any good marketer, they should be your firm’s centre of excellence for communications. With that in mind, ask Marketing to put together an internal guide to good communications. Your marketing team should author, promote and train others on it. Such a guide will cover tips like:
- Understand which channel to use for different types of communications
- Consider your audience every time you communicate. Step into his/her shoes
- Put what your audience wants to hear before what you want to say
- Make it clear, as succinctly and quickly as possible, what the purpose of your communications is: what do you want the reader to know and do as a result of your communication?
- Differentiate between broadcasting and communicating (which is a two-way process)
Get help
I’m currently looking for a full-time, in-house role but in the post-Covid age of depleted marketing budgets and remote teams with skills gaps, many organisations need marketing and communications support that’s agile, flexible, and risk free. That’s why I founded WhatsNext Partners.
Whether it be as a permanent member of your team or with 'on demand' support, let me know if you need my help.
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What else?
Three other articles from the last seven days that are worthy of your time.
FINANCE
Dimon scared shitless by fintechs
④ J.P. Morgan’s CEO thinks that incumbent banks should fear fintech rivals, not least because some compete “unfairly”.
- “The J.P. Morgan chief said payments will be the main battleground. Among the rivals Dimon has warned his team about are PayPal, Square, Stripe and Ant, as well as Big Tech players like Amazon, Apple and Google.
- “Dimon also took aim at bank data sharing startup Plaid. There are ‘people who improperly use data that’s being given to them, like Plaid,’ he told analysts.”
- “These are among the ‘examples of unfair competition, which we will do something about eventually,’ said Dimon.”
TECHNOLOGY
Monzo founder is departing the challenger bank
⑤ The skills of a fintech startup founder are very different to those required to scale and manage a profitable bank.
- “As well as being unhappy during the last couple of years as CEO when the company scaled well beyond a ‘scrappy startup’, the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns exacerbated pressures placed on Blomfield’s mental well-being.”
- Blomfield said: “The things I enjoy in life is working with small groups of passionate people to start and grow stuff from scratch, and create something customers love. And I think that’s a really valuable skill but also taking on a bank that’s three, four, five million customers and turning it into a 10 or 20 million customer bank and getting to profitability and IPOing it, I think those are huge exciting challenges, just honestly not ones that I found that I was interested in or particularly good at.”
- “Monzo now has almost 5 million customers, up from 1.3 million in 2019. Monzo’s total weekly revenue is now 30% higher than pre-pandemic, helped by over 100,000 paid subscribers across Monzo Plus and Premium in the last five months.”
MEDIA & MARKETING
CMOs: Adapt Your Social Media Strategy for a Post-Pandemic World
⑥ The Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey found that social media has become critical to marketing during the pandemic. The survey reported that social media spending has increased from 13.3% of marketing budgets in February 2020 to 23.2% in June 2020 — a 74% lift.
Harvard Business Review offers 10 recommendations to marketers who are looking to maximize returns on their social media investments.
- Run formal experiments
- Play with new channels and features on existing platforms
- Integrate social media strategy into your overall marketing strategy
- Invest in top social media talent
- Ensure agile social media management
- Harness the power of influencers and creators (I wrote about this last year)
- Carefully consider the right platform(s) for your brand
- Reduce friction between social media and e-commerce platforms
- Adapt your creative content to the times
- Take care to select and onboard the right agency partners
Quotable
Amanda Gorman, the US's first-ever youth poet laureate:
"The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light, if only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it”
One more thing…
If, like me, you’re looking for your next role, you might be interested in the Rocket List published by job site Otta and reported on this week by Sifted. The list of the 50 best startups to work for in London this year is based on the company’s employee growth rate, financial investment, corporate mission and the number of jobs they have available. And they’re all hiring...
- ⑦ “Nearly 50% of the jobs that made the list this year are fintechs, including Revolut and Checkout.com — which are also the companies hiring the most roles on the list, 79 and 68 respectively.”
- “The list also includes several tech unicorns, namely used car website Cazoo and events company Hopin, which became a double unicorn at the end of last year. Recipe box provider Gousto, which secured unicorn status in November last year, also made the list.”
- “Four startups and scaleups have appeared in the Rocket list every year since it began three years ago: fintechs Cleo, TrueLayer and Revolut, as well as Multiverse, which just secured the UK’s biggest ever edtech raise.”
About
Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday evening to give you a head start on the week. Read it here, or have it delivered straight to your inbox at six, before it's available anywhere else.
InMarketing is a broader celebration of marketing that innovates, interacts and influences. It's available on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and as a Flipboard magazine.