Rule #1 of Advertising, Marketing and Promotion:

They aren’t paying attention.

Your potential audience for everything from a TV commercial to a tweet is not concentrating on what you’re saying. You’re lucky if a few stray brain cells light up in recognition of your message. So Rule #1 of communicating with potential or current consignment, resale, thrift clients is

Don’t make them have to puzzle out what you’re trying to tell them.

For example, I see tweets or FB posts all day long that leave your followers wondering what they missed. Such fuzzy messages don’t do a thing to build a connection between you and them. In fact, these might make them feel like outsiders or wallflowers, and we don’t want to lay that on our fans, do we? Here’s three from the past week or so:

HALLOWEEN COSTUMES… PLEASE CALL ME! What about? Why should I? And, BTW, what’s your phone number again? Don’t make me hunt for it.

ACCEPTING CHRISTMAS DECOR (NOT CHRISTMAS TREE SHOP) Huh? What’s the difference? If there are “guidelines”, tell them more with a link to a blog entry or a page on your shop’s site. Otherwise, you could be discouraging the supplier who bought her items in a… Christmas Tree Shop.

This nice caption on a group shot of some very upbeat folk: Great folk! Raised $5287 Terrific Huh? Who are they, what did they do to raise that sum and for who, and just how was the business involved? Maybe I might even stop by to drop a buck or two into the donation jar (and, BTW, even shop a while as long as I’m there), if I understood what was going on.

Now of course we want to make our messages snappy and not load them down with unnecessary info. I’m not saying that a snappy little headline isn’t wonderful…but a headline is just a hook to capture interest, it’s not a message. Lead to an explanation, clarification, a call to action. Directing them to your “private little parlor on the Internet”, AKA your blog or web site, is perfect. You can list which costumes or decor items are best-sellers. You can tout the cause your folks were raising money for.

No easily-altered site or you haven’t gotten around to using a blog? You’ll be restricted, then, to short and easily-grasped “sound bites.” That’s not bad. If you haven’t the means to offer a further explanation, keep your message short and direct. All you have to do is

clarify your message so it’s instantly understandable.

Make it complete in and of itself. Yes, you won’t be able to communicate complicated messages, but you can still get a single point across. Like

MyShop customers want yr Halloween costumes NOW! Bring to MyShop M-S 10 -4  Questions? 451-0078