One good communication can make a customer for life.

Today everyone can create marketing communications, but not everyone is listening.

Marketing communications are a big investment, so consider this.

There are over 130 trillion pages in Google’s index–and well over 1-billion websites growing daily. Add to these hundreds of millions of blogs, over 6.5 billion searches daily, more than 2 billion active Facebook pages and as of this writing around 500 million tweets a day—that’s over 6,000 per second! In addition, Nielsen data shows that consumers’ time with TV, Internet and Mobile video continues to increase. Everyone is trying to create a brand.

The average American adult is exposed to over 4000 messages in a day, yet the 5 percent of Americans with the highest income now account for 37% of all consumer purchases. The business-to-business market is even more targeted.

All of these people are creating messages and optimizing all their web pages and content. So, ask yourself how many thousands of websites can fit on the first page of Google’s search results? There’s a lot of spin in the digital ecosystem that can cost you money. So, how do you talk to the right people with the right message so that they will respond?

Companies, agencies and the media are still scrambling to find relevancy and sense in the chaos of the digital ecosystem. Some approach it like Dell in the early days of social media who developed a 50-person team dedicated to social media in response to one lone blogger, (the infamous “Dell hell” blog about bad customer service.) Others desperately try every new venue helping Google to post record profits without a viable return on their investment. Missteps in the digital ecosystem can be very expensive. Clearly many of the old rules don’t apply in the evolving Web 4.x world with shifting reference points, or do they?

In this self-publishing era everyone is essentially a brand–so what distinguishes professional communicators from everyone else? Brands keep trying to join and be part of a conversation when they should be creating something unique that the conversation is about. Brands create the economy not the other way around. In the new world, an old rule still applies and is more vital than ever. You still have to stand out with a unique voice to distinguish yourself from your competitors. It takes extraordinary commitment to creative development.

Marketing communications have always been a social media because they are governed by customer’s needs and responses. We believe effective marketing communications forge customer relationships that continue long after the sale. These bonds are fortified by communicating a unified brand message that manifests itself in every consumer touch point. This takes expertise, experience and talent that not everybody has.

For example, we’ve helped launch cars for Nissan, resorts for Westin Hotels and motorcycles for Suzuki. We have also developed marketing communication for financial products from Bank of America and SunAmerica and helped make Sunkist the biggest selling pistachio in America. These, along with the many, many smaller companies we have worked with, give us a deep understanding of what it takes to succeed.

So the question isn’t so much how do you talk to the right people, it’s how can you do it effectively?

Not everyone is a potential customer. Your customer is not just a target. Not a generality. They have individual needs and want particular things. They have families, get problems, go on vacation, have bosses and make mortgage payments. In short, they’re very much like you and I. How do you engage these people so that they will listen?

In the cauldron of free speech in our market economy, amidst the barrage of multi-device communications each individual is subjected to daily, it only takes one isolated moment to create a customer for life.

Good communications are more important to success than ever before.