Explain your product in 140 characters or less

Remember the good old days in marketing when you could write newsletters, brochures and flyers that were jam-packed with text? Line after line of glorious and boring text that rattled on and on about your bank or credit union? Do you also remember the good old days when consumers would actually take time to read all that?

We don’t, either.

If those days actually did exist in some long forgotten golden time of marketing past, they have most certainly died. Anymore, the modern consumer is absolutely picked apart for time by competing marketing interests. It is no longer just the “big four” of newspaper, radio, television and the Internet. Consumers are now hit up for time from advertisers everywhere they turn, from their cell phones and tablets to sporting venues to public restrooms.

So if you do find yourself as a bank or credit union marketer jockeying for a few precious moments with your consumers, think for a few moments about the best way to approach them. Is it with a long-winded diatribe the talks forever about boring things most consumers don’t care about? Probably not.

In this day and age, it pays to think in terms of Twitter communications. The popular social media platform requires its users to communicate messages and 140 characters or less. This typically works out to no more than 2 to 3 sentences per Tweet. And while it may seem limiting, forcing yourself to condense language and ideas into more succinct packages is actually a pretty good way of reaching the modern consumer. Think about it this way — your members and customers have less and less time during your day to share with you and your marketing messages. If you can condense it into tiny Twitter sized bites, you’re more likely to snag a few moments of their time and leave a favorable marketing image etched in their minds.

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