Announcement: Han’s Bi-weekly Column on Entrepreneur

Exciting announcement: I now have a column on Entrepreneur.com!

In my most recent article, 5 Lessons Video Games Taught Me About Success,  I talk about how my favorite childhood outlet prepared me for adult life.

Now that I run my own business, I barely have time to play games. But I have had a lot of time to reflect on the life lessons they taught me. In fact, I’m convinced that playing games taught me important lessons about how to succeed at business.”

I relate how the lessons  I learned, such as embracing failure, taught me life-long habits.

“Repeated failure is built into the learning curve of any well-designed game. Overcoming failure is what makes games addictive in the first place. Yet, so many gamers forget this lesson as soon as they put down the controller. Failure is a crucial part of success in real life, too, and you have to learn to embrace it.”

Want to know what other lessons can be learned from video games? Check out the complete article here.
Don’t forget to follow my bi-weekly column on Entrepreneur,  I’ll have a new article out every other Friday.


How to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy

You’ve probably cleaned out your house countless times, but have you ever thought about sprucing up your marketing strategy?

Spring cleaning is a great tradition. After spending months cooped up indoors, it’s a chance to refresh and refocus for the second half of the year. Why not apply that same energy to cleaning up your marketing strategy as well?

Step 1: Organize Your Efforts

If your team has been winging it, take this time to meet and document your marketing strategy as best as you can. Make a list of the different efforts you want to focus on this year, and fill in as much as possible. How are you reaching you social media goals? Content Marketing? Branding? Networking?

Creating editorial calendars and written strategies that document your plan keeps focus sharp long-term.

Step 2: Polish the Important Pieces  

It’s easy to neglect your platforms once they’re set up and rolling smoothly. Don’t make the mistake of accepting “functioning” as “succeeding.” Use this spring cleaning exercise as an excuse to do a self-audit of your platforms, content and brand

Start by pulling all of the data you can—analytics on everything you have. Take a look at them, one by one, and ask yourself questions such as:

Social Media

  • Which social media platforms are generating engagement? Is the engagement valuable (i.e. is it leading to conversions?)
  • Which aren’t? Is it because you don’t have an audience on the platform? Is it because your audience isn’t present on that platform?

Brand

  • A brand evolves over time. Is yours still speaking to your audience? Is it still representative of your company?

Content

  • Which topics resonate well with your audience? Is your content actually useful, or is it just a sales pitch?

By cleaning up and polishing these important aspects of your business, you reboot your entire company’s vision and focus.

Take Out the Trash

Are you wasting your energy on duds? Marketing in general takes a great deal of resources, and there’s no point investing resources into a void.

Now that you’ve audited and seen the analytics, you have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.

To invest your resources wisely:

  • Be selectively social: Having a dead Instagram account linked to your company’s homepage weakens the company’s brand as a whole. If you haven’t posted in months, let it go.
  • Go through the mail: email marketing analytics make it easy to see which email addresses are responsive to your campaigns. If there certain email addresses that always bounce or end up undelivered, delete them. This will make your analytics more accurate and provide deeper insights.
  • Back up your brand: Content that no longer speaks to your brand or provides no value to your customer is the marketing equivalent of having shag carpet in your living room: it sets a bad (and wrong) impression. Let it go. 

Stock up on Essentials

Now that you’ve figured out your plan, dusted off and re-booted your strategies and optimized your efforts, it’s time to make the rest of the year go as smoothly as possible.

Having a generous backlog can ensure that there is always quality content coming out, without having to worry about falling behind during a busy week.

  • If you have a content calendar, try to work 2-4 weeks in advance. This keeps pieces timely, yet provides enough leeway to fall behind every now and then.
  • If you don’t have a content calendar, try to make one for the next quarter or the rest of the year. Keep in mind important company events, holidays and promotions.
  • Make an email marketing idea list. It’s hard to come up with new and engaging topics every week, so having a list of fallbacks and sure-winners helps streamline the process.
  • Stock up on visual content (such as pictures and videos) that you can easily pull from to post on Instagram, Facebook or blogs.

Do You to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy?

Try to remember how good it feels to sit in a nice, clean room and how glad you were that you finally got around to cleaning it.

This year, focus on achieving that same feeling for your marketing strategy:

  • Organizing your efforts: make your goals easy to find and easy to maintain
  • Clean up your presence: make sure your brand and its assets are helping and not hurting you
  • Invest resources wisely: don’t keep dragging along dead initiatives
  • Keep a backlog: Having content to pull helps streamline your strategy

Tailored Ink Co-Founder and CEO Han-Gwon Lung Featured in the Millennial Minds Series

Our co-founder and CEO, Han-Gwon Lung, recently sat down with 20 Something’s Cara Kovacs  as a part of their Millennial Minds series.

The Millennial Minds series “casts a spotlight on those among us who have been creative and courageous enough to make money doing what they love.”

The series features successful Millennials who disprove the negative stereotypes associated with the generation, and uses them as examples the creativity, resilience, and business savvy the generation possesses.

Han is in good company as a featured Millenial for the series. Others featured include filmmaker Nicole Groton, international lifestyle blogger Erica Fox, and pro basketball player turned financier turned entrepreneur, Chris Turi.

During the interview, the two spoke about the inspiration for Tailored Ink, breaking the boundaries of traditional business, and why the corporate life isn’t for everyone.

“Don’t think that corporate life will get better. If you don’t like it at entry level, you won’t like it in a managerial role, either.”

Han also shared a few pieces of wisdom he’s learned along the way:

“If you want true flexibility and the satisfaction of ‘eating what you kill’ (and not relying on the whims of managers for raises and bonuses), learn how to do sales. Then start your own business.”

You can read the full interview here.


Different Strokes for Different Folks: Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

How to Sell a Knife

I’ve always found Cutco’s business model fascinating. If I had to try and sell kitchen cutlery door to door, knives wouldn’t be my first choice (for various reasons). So say what you will about Cutco’s high school and college sales reps—they they know how to sell knives.

The fact that Cutco’s business model holds up at all is a testament to their targeted marketing. They know they’re a B2C knife company—they’re the only one I can think of—and so they market their knives differently than B2B knife brands like Shun or Zwilling that sell directly to stores.

Which brings us to the topic of this blog post.

Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

Marketing of all kinds has only one goal: sales.

The strategy used to achieve those sales, however, differs when marketing to other businesses versus directly to consumers. While B2B marketing is more relationship driven, B2C marketing is more product driven, and these factors need to be taken into consideration when creating a comprehensive framework and strategy.

Who are you talking to, again?

As we’ve talked about before, finding your ideal voice is crucial to business success. Your B2B voice should probably be mature, professional, and knowledgeable. When writing for businesses, you have to consider all of the people you need to sell your product to before reaching the decision-maker. This can include managers, directors and even the C-suite.

On the other hand, your B2C voice could be very colorful or conservative depending on who you’re targeting. After all, there are a lot more individual customers out there than there are businesses. Keep in mind that when writing for consumers, you’re typically only talking to one person—the decision-maker.

Are you speaking their language?

The right content types differ for B2B vs. B2C marketing strategies as well.

In B2B marketing, longer, more technical pieces fare better than the personable, pithy pieces that are staples of B2C writing.

In fact, according to research from the Content Marketing Institute, the most popular content marketing methods for B2C brands are:

  • Social media
  • Illustrations and photos
  • Newsletters
  • Videos
  • Blog posts

B2C tactics revolve around engaging and delighting the individual consumer. In contrast, another study from the same institute identified the most important B2B Marketing tactics as:

  • In-person events
  • Webinars/webcasts
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Videos

The B2B tactics revolve around creating relationships (e.g., through in-person events, such as conferences or trade shows) and developing an authoritative brand (through highly detailed thought leadership content, including white papers and videos).

Takeaway: the decision-makers at businesses make decisions based on logic, rationale, and budgets, while general consumers are more impulsive and make decisions based on their emotional state.

Are you ready to create your own strategy?

It’s not complicated to  figure out how to tailor your marketing strategy to meet your needs, even when considering B2B vs. B2C. When creating a strategy, consider:

  • Generalized vs. Tailored: B2C businesses can afford to talk to a large audience. Consumer purchase decisions are usually based off simple needs, while business purchase decisions are usually very specific, and need to fit the complex needs of an entire business.
  • Emotional vs. Logical: Decision makers at businesses are focused on budgets, benefits, and efficiency. Consumers are focused on happiness.
  • Engaging vs. Valuable: (Most) consumers don’t spend hours and hours trying to decide whether to buy from one company or another, but you’d be hard pressed to find a  business that doesn’t vet all its vendors. Businesses want to see that they’re buying from professionals that understand and care about their specific needs, while consumers want to know they’re buying from a brand that has the same values.

 


Finding and Speaking to Your Ideal Customer

Finding your ideal customer is crucial to business success. Once you create that buyer persona, the rest pretty much falls into place. It becomes easier to build a strong brand, target your social media efforts and create other types of targeted content.

An easy way to understand the power of a buyer persona is to compare a small table of people at lunch to a stadium with thousands of spectators. Which group do you think is easier to sell to?

Define Your Brand From Your Customer’s Point of View

The biggest mistake you can make is to build your customer base around how you want your company to be perceived.

Instead, ask yourself, what benefits do your company offer to your ideal customer? How can it solve their pain points? Then ask yourself, who does this really speak to?

That’s why the most effective way to gauge your audience in an unbiased manner is by taking a data-driven approach.

Take the NFL, for example. Historically, football has been considered a male sport. It seems to make sense for the NFL to focus on a male audience. Right?

Wrong. In 2010, the NFL learned that women make up close to 40 percent of all football fans. So they re-targeted by creating more modern, sophisticated apparel (read: not just pink jerseys) and women responded. In 2014, Super Bowl XLVIII was the most-watched television event among women.

Creating a Buyer Persona

Now it’s time to put together everything you’ve come up with so far. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.

Creating a great buyer persona requires:

  • Data
  • Insight
  • Understanding your customer
  • Understanding your company
  • A little imagination

It takes some work, but in the long-term personas will allow you to tailor your content, services and brand to meet the specific needs, concerns and behaviors of your potential customers.

Once you have an idea of the group you want to target, it’s time to analyze them. Are they more likely to be male or female? Are they younger or older? Are they from the East Coast or West Coast? Do they download apps? How educated are they? Some of these may seem trivial, but they’ve been proven to affect what a customer expects out of his experience.

From there, create a succinct elevator pitch that addresses all of those, and explains how your company can help.

Keep persona in age when building content. This will help you decide whether to spend more time on Instagram or Facebook, whether your emails should be more informational or witty, and whether you need more videos or testimonials on your webpage.

According to Hubspot research, using personas made websites between two and five times more effective to use.

Speak Directly to the Customer

You’ve done the research and compiled a perfect buyer persona, you have an elevator pitch that could sell ice to an Eskimo. Now what?

It’s time to put that work to good use by creating targeted content. By tailoring your content to your specific audience, you are able to concentrate your efforts and optimize your resources.

Skytap, a self-service cloud automation company, launched a tailored content marketing strategy and saw a 210 percent increase in North American traffic and that targeted personas brought in 124 percent more sales leads.

In a marketing world that revolves around social media, email marketing, and user experience, customers expect more than a generalized sales pitch.

Seamless is a great example of the powerful ads that you can create when you know your audience. In 2015 they launched a New York City subway campaign that uses witty one-liners and NYC generalizations to create effective, memorable ads.

They know their audience is the busy millennial, and they speak to that with adages such as “Cooking is so Jersey” and “Avoid Cooking like you Avoid Times Square.”

Who’s your Audience?

Finding the right audience isn’t necessarily easy, but it pays off in the long run. Luckily, experts and business owners have developed a bit of a process to help you along:

  • Define your company from the outside-looking-in.
  • Collect as much data and research as you can find about your audience.
  • Compile the information into a buyer persona that examines demographics, behavioral patterns and translates them into an elevator pitch.

Only then are you ready to sell.


How to Write Copy People Want to Read

Marketers love to say KISS (Keep it simple, stupid.) This may be good advice, but only to a certain point. While you want to make your copy concise and easy to understand, you don’t want to insult your audience’s intelligence.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind when you go to write.

Step 1: Know Your Audience

Ann Handley, author of the go-to handbook, Everybody Writes, puts it in a much better way: “

Assume the reader knows nothing. But don’t assume the reader is stupid.

You want to inform them, to persuade them, to educate them.  You don’t want to talk down to them and you definitely do not want to waste their time.

A surefire stay relevant to your audience when you write copy is to speak to them directly. If you’re publishing an ad in a trade magazine, don’t keep boilerplating your main features, speak directly to your audience’s pain points.

Say you’re selling a cell phone.

Your website might say: “Our latest model connects you to the world around you, one app at a time…” before going over its top features.

Similarly, an ad in a photography magazine should focus on a photographer’s biggest pain point: “Never miss a moment. With our latest model, you can leave your camera at home. Capture professional quality pictures with our 16 MP camera….”

You get the point.

Don’t use your valuable space to push a handful of obviously scripted, vague testimonials, either. Do you actually believe the people in commercials? Testimonials are a great tool, but make sure they’re real and sound like something a real person would say.

Step 2: Make it Interesting

A study by the Nielsen Norman Group estimated that on average, users only read 18% of what’s on a page. They concluded that 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the other copy. You have a very small opportunity to make an impression.

Have a punchy personality

Have you ever tried to read an oven manual? How about a press release? Technical writing doesn’t make for good copy.

Don’t forget your brand’s voice. If you have a strong brand, it’s developed a lifelike personality, and that should shine through. Be sassy, be sarcastic, write copy you would want to read.

Tell a relatable story

Writing copy is very much an art form, just like any other form of writing. Even if you don’t have formal training, just think back to your eighth grade writing class: Show, don’t tell.Have a beginning, middle, and end. Be descriptive. . Find your voice..

Everyone loves a good story. Start by making sure your business has a great background. Make your customers love you because of where you came from and what you stand for. If they can relate to you, that’s fantastic.

That way, when you write copy elsewhere, you have a great foundation to work with. Perfect copy doesn’t make you feel like you’re reading a sales pitch, it lets your imagination do the work. Feed your readers metaphors, imagery, humor, and pithy takeaways.

Not too long ago, York Peppermint Patties did a great job of creating ads with powerful imagery. You remember them—someone in an everyday setting,taking a bite of the cool, minty candy…and bang! They’re on a snowy mountain far, far away.

Imagery is transportive, especially in copywriting.

Be direct and clear

While literary devices are great, they’re not always fitting. Sometimes, it’s more powerful to be direct.

Manhattan Mini Storage launched an ad campaign last year that instantly connected with readers. “I like my wife. I love my storage room.” They showed why customers need their service, speaking directly to everyday situations (my wife wants me to clean out the basement, my parents are coming to visit and I have stuff I don’t want them to see…)

Step 3: Keep the Copy Concise

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” -David Ogilvy

The first 50 words are the most important. Can you make them count?

Stop saying please and start inspiring your audience

When writing a call to action, “Please sign up” is disarming but still demands action, while “Sign up now” seems too pushy. Instead, inspire them to take action. Content Verve A/B tested two call to actions: “Sign up now,” and “Sign up now and get started,” to find that the latter led to a 31.03% increase in sales.

Don’t waste your words

Prioritize what needs to be said. Cliches may be cliches for a reason, but there’s no room for them when every word counts. If you can’t come up with a more colorful or original way to say something, cut it out.

Add value with data
Anyone can write paragraphs claiming to be the fastest, best, or most stylish. Superlatives are too overused to be effective. Look for quantifiable statistics that add value instead. A car afficianado would be wary if you just said that the 2015 Infiniti Formula 1 Red Bull RB11 is the fastest car in the world. If say it goes from 0 to 60 in 1.7 seconds, however, that’s going to catch his attention.


The Brand Psychology Behind Superbowl Ads

The Super Bowl is a huge event that has broken its own viewership record five of the last six years. In 2015, it had an average viewership of 114 million people, or over one-third of the U.S. population. While most people tune in for the game or the half-time show, the rest of us tune in for the commercials.

With an average price tag of $4.5 million per 30-second ad, why are companies spending their entire advertising budget on a single commercial? Brand exposure.

The Super Bowl has a huge audience, and it gives smaller companies the same level of exposure as the Coca-Colas  and Apples of the world. But he fact of the matter is that all of the money in the world can’t buy consumer love.

That takes a strong brand.

An Explanation of Brand Psychology

Without customers, a brand has no value. To understand your customers enough to create a foundation of a brand, you need to get inside their head.

That’s why it’s important to understand the underlying psychology behind a consumer’s choices.

Purchases are usually based off of one or more of the following factors:

  • Brand identification (Apple)
  • Internal state (lonely from not being able to contact friends)
  • External state/social context (all of your friends have iPhones)

This means that a decision to purchase your product or service is dependent on many variables.

Aesthetics and Personality in Brand Psychology

A brand is much more than just how you speak to a customer, it’s just as much about how you present your business.

Something as simple as color can make all of the difference. In fact, color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent. This isn’t to say that you should choose the brightest, most noticeable color there is, because brand appropriateness plays a huge role in what a customer chooses to buy.

A company’s font selection requires just as much thought as its color. No one over the age of eight wants to go into a shop that uses Comic Sans on their storefront, and no one will take a website that uses Curlz as its default font. The smallest details matter.

In 2016, this has never been more true. The gap between company and consumer is more narrow than ever, mostly due to social media. When a customer tweets at a restaurant, they expect a response. These days, a customer wants to get to know the brand as much as your company wants to understand its customer.

They want to know your beliefs, your values, and how you handle complaints. They want to feel comfortable enough with your brand to consider it a friend. You’re on their social media, so they need to like you. That’s how brand loyalty is born.

If you don’t remember anything from this blog post, remember this statistic: 80 percent of your future revenue will come from just 20 percent of your current customers.

How to Build a Better Brand

While there is no set formula to creating a better brand, understanding  brand psychology and how your customer makes decisions is a crucial first step. Keep these points in mind when creating your own brand:

  • Meet your audience’s needs. Every person you reach is a potential customer. Make sure they know that you have the answer to their problem before they have the problem.
  • Don’t forget about the aesthetics. Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, we’re a looks-driven society.Spend time figuring out what colors, fonts and themes work for your company.
  • Be likeable. Customers expect more than ever from brands. They want to consider you their friend, so create a personality that resonates with your customer.

Marketing Resolutions for Your Business (and Yourself)

It was once again mid-December, and I was once again sitting and trying to come up with a list of resolutions. While going through some of the most common resolutions: get healthy, do more for others, etc. it hit me: these are great marketing resolutions, too.

Resolutions are a great concept. They give you focus for the year and motivate you to get more done. So often our work lives overlap with our personal lives—wouldn’t it be easier to just make one set of resolutions?

Resolution #1: Lose Weight and Get in Shape

This is everyone’s perennial favorite, and for good reason: when you’re in shape, you feel at your best. It’s the same for your business. One of your marketing resolutions should be to lose dead weight and make healthier business choices.

This year, instead of indulging in every marketing tactic out there, concentrate on the ones that will strengthen your business. Does your accounting business need a Pinterest? Probably not. Do you need to 

Instead of sending out quick emails and posts that get you through the day, work on campaigns that will carry you into the future.

Resolution # 2: Think About Others

Long gone are the days where a simple HTML website was enough to impress a client.

These days, it’s all about user experience. Consumers have grown to expect a lot from companies. User experience is no longer just about how your website performs, but how it looks, as well as how well it’s optimized for mobile.

Instead of choosing website elements based off of your personal preferences or keeping certain elements because they’ve been there since day one, think of your customer. 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to revisit your site after a bad experience.

How do you prevent that? By focusing on the little things as well as the overall experience. A user experience manager for Bing credited using a specific shade of blue for at least $80 million in additional annual revenue.

You can also just listen to your audience. Have they been asking for a search bar? A better way to contact you? Give them what they want—the customer is [almost] always right. ESPN saw their revenue jump 35 percent after incorporating customer feedback in their homepage redesign.

Resolution #3: Learn from Your Mistakes and Make Better Choices

In 2016, stop sending out tweets that get no engagement. Stop sending emails that are never opened. Stop writing blogs that are never read. Start learning from your mistakes.

Marketing is a vast and complex business. What works for one company might not work for another. A very easy and practical way to figure out what works for your business is to start A/B testing.

A/B testing in its most basic form is simple: make different versions (such as a version A and a version B) and see which one does better. It’s a near-universal practice that works on social media strategy, email blasts, landing page copy—pretty much all types of content.

By A/B testing, you’ll be able to actively compare conversion and engagement rates and use that data to figure out what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing helped ComScore increase lead generation by 69 percent, and it helped Sony increase purchases by 20 percent.

Resolution #4: Write More

In 2015, businesses (both B2B and B2C) that prioritized blogging were 13 times as likely to see a positive return on investment. Don’t miss out on a statistic like that. This year, one of your marketing resolutions should be to make time to write. 

Even if you’re not a writer, you should write more. Setting aside a just a few minutes a day to get your thoughts down on paper is not only therapeutic, it’s a great way to brainstorm, organize your thoughts and come up with the next big idea for your company.

What will your marketing resolutions be?

It’s never too late to set goals for yourself or for your company. This year, try to:

  • Optimize your web, social and physical presence to make an impact. Don’t cheat yourself out of quality leads by spreading yourself too thin.
  • Revamp your website. If you’re unsure how, follow this simple philosophy: Keep it simple. Make it easy to use. Make a great first impression.
  • Decide what works for you. Create variations and analyze data to figure out the best voice, language, and even colors for your brand.
  • Make time to write. Whether you write for your blog or for yourself, your business will benefit from a little spark of creativity.

How to Find The Right Brand Voice For Your Business

I’ll never forget the time I presented a well-researched monthly social media package to a new beauty client. He took a look at the first few posts for Twitter, scrunched up his nose, and said, “Let’s avoid exclamation marks. We’re all adults here.”

First off—what does that even mean? Second, how ridiculous! This client wanted his beauty brand’s tone of voice to match what he was accustomed to (he used to work as an investor on Wall Street).

But he failed to understand a fundamental truth of branding: you market to the customer, not yourself. His target market was beauty, but he didn’t know how to speak with their voice. He just didn’t get it.

The Difference Between Voice and Brand

When you first started your business, you probably heard the word “branding” more times than you care to remember. People like to say: “The brand is the most important part of a business.” Turns out they’re right.

Your company’s brand is what races to a person’s mind when they hear your name. How important is it? Coca-Cola’s annual branding budget is more than Apple’s and Microsoft’s combined. These Fortune 500s aren’t skimping on their branding budget, so you shouldn’t either.

Then there’s your business voice, the most crucial component of your brand. Your company’s voice is how you speak to your customers.

What’s In A Voice?

Why is finding the right brand voice so crucial? Think about it this way: in an ideal world, you’d get to meet every person who visits your website and charm them with your perfectly tailored sales pitch.

Except this isn’t a perfect world. In reality, most people use the Internet as their primary source of information. In fact, 81 percent of customers conduct online research before making a purchase.

What this means is that you need to project your voice onto your website. Your site needs to sound like you’re talking to someone right in front of you.

The Value of the Right Brand Voice

It’s important that you’re creating the right brand voice, but what’s even more important is that you’re creating the right voice for your customers. For most brands, the two do not always align.

Taco Bell is a perfect example of a shift towards the right brand voice. In the early 2000’s, Yum! (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) shares hovered below $10 a share. Taco Bell tried to brand itself as “authentic” Mexican food, even going so far as to have a Chihuahua as its mascot.

Fast forward to May 2015. Yum! Brands stock hits an all-time high close to $94. What changed? Taco Bell found its brand voice. It started talking to the right people, in the right way, and the right people answered.

Instead of going for fast, “authentic” Mexican food for families, they started talking to Millennials. They developed the concept of “Fourth Meal” and created the Doritos Locos Taco. They created a wonderfully human Twitter profile and branded their sauce packets with clever sayings.

Taco Bell rose from the dead to become better than ever by adopting a new voice that was right for its customers.

Finding The Right Brand Voice

So, how do you find your brand voice? Start by asking yourself the following questions:

  • What am I selling? How am I selling it? What are my points of differentiation?
  • Who is my ideal customer? What are their demographics?
  • How do I want potential customers to see my business?
  • What do potential customers think of my business right now?
  • What needs to change?

Once you can answer these questions, the path to finding your brand voice gets a lot clearer.

To summarize, keep the following ideas in mind:

Stay human. Too many people think as soon as their fingers hit the keyboard, they’re someone else. This shouldn’t be the case. In fact, customers are more likely to buy when they can relate.

Know your audience. Will your customers be irritated by emojis or delighted by them? Will your tagline be perceived as aggressive or confident? It depends on what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and where you’re selling.

Nitpick. Be thorough. When you tweet, will you use “we” or “I”? How do you feel about contractions? Acronyms? Is LOL okay? Your identity is your business and vise-versa.