All Winning Businesses Have A Communication Plan, Do You?
Communication is the secret superpower of successful businesses. Both internal and external communication is essential to the growth of a business and the realization of its mission. Effective communication extends beyond information exchange. When done right, it establishes and strengthens relationships with clients/customers, builds a strong work environment and office culture, cultivates customer loyalty, and increases short- and long-term profitability. It also fosters credibility of your brand to the customer, thus earning their trust becomes easier. These and so much more explain why constant, consistent communication is needful for any business that seeks to advance in today’s marketplace.
In this article we focus on external communications, with emphasis on how to keep your customers satisfied through constant, effective and targeted communication content.
Customer targeted communication, as important as it is, is many times overlooked, neglected or ignored. This is possible because of the hustle and bustle of the business environment. There are deadlines to be met, meetings to be had, presentations to be made, and proposals to be written — and a thousand things more. Fortunately, there is something that can be done to remedy the situation. A communication plan!
What is a communication plan?
Every business has a story, and stories; a communication plan is simply a document that details how the business strategically intends to share its constantly developing stories with its audience, send messages and communicate its objectives both internally and externally. Simply, it details how the business intends to keep their audience strategically engaged.
Why you should have a communication plan?
Your communication content is how you are heard in the market. Without a corporate communication strategy, which is another way to say marketing communication plan, your brand stands mute before your competition and potential clientele. If you need more convincing, picture a brand nobody hears or knows about. It’s quite difficult to visualize, actually, because silence is tantamount to nonexistence in the business world.
But here a few more reasons why your business, brand, organization should have a plan on how to communicate:
· Smarter conversations: Results from several notable researches done, including one by Facebook, has shown that the average attention span of an adult on social media is less than 3 seconds! This doesn’t give you so much time to say a lot, but it sure is enough to pass your message effectively, even see some conversions. Most of the time these less than 3 seconds messages have to be meticulously developed, because they should be concise and smart. However, it would certainly take more than 3 seconds to craft, create and publish content that should grip an adult, with maybe not a lot of time on their hands, for more than 3 seconds. Your communication plan enables you to create content upfront that are attention worthy and will not only see more quality thinking allotted to your content, but more sales too.
· Targeted content: You want content that people will actually read, or watch, but most importantly, you want content that targets the right people. Just like your content is not all over the place, in its tone, or style or delivery, your audience is not all over the place either. You should communicate, and you should communicate to your target audience. Every component of your content should appeal to your target audience; this then insists that your communication should be tailored for the people you want to speak to. One thing that is a definite turnoff for audiences is when the content is hard to define. People want to come in contact with a brand’s PR and connect with it. If your content does not resonate with your audience, it will turn out to be a huge waste of resources.
A communication plan modifies, even reconstructs, a brand’s message to ensure that there is a happy meeting point between the audience and the brand. What this then does is that besides leading to sales and more brand visibility, it builds credibility, trust, and fosters brand loyalty.
· Thought leadership: Customers are likely to take a business with consistent, strategic, intelligent content more seriously than another that doesn’t. What is interesting is that both businesses might be in the same industry. As a matter of fact, the non-visible company/organization might be older. None of that matters much if the customer doesn’t see you. Branding is about perception, and perception is formed through strategic, effective communication. Any business that seeks to project leadership in its niche needs to be able to convey this information deliberately and tactically. This is easily achieved by first developing a marketing communication plan.
If you’ve ever asked the question, “How do we get our target market to look to us for answers?” The answer is found in first creating an integrated strategy document with the aim of providing solutions to that question. That document is a Business (or Marketing) Communication Plan/Strategy.
If you don’t have a Communications Strategy for your business, we have the expertise to help you create an excellent one. Send us an email: hello@sageworks.ng. Also explore our Business Content Solution designed to ensure you communicate excellently, effectively and get desired results.
