Every word counts. Setting a winning communications strategy for your business
Communications, particularly public relations, is so much more than just a media relations job. It has evolved to a strategic function that is aligned with all business functions, especially customer facing teams, to identify the needs of business teams and come up with the right message to support them.
Even the best communication campaigns and marketing stunts in the world won’t help you if you’re not speaking in your customer’s language. Before deciding on the message, it is important to know who the message is intended for, how the message would be interpreted, and the medium of communication. As a marketing communications professional, I am sharing some actionable tips that every communications team should consider, before they go all out with their next big campaign.
Know your audience
Identifying your audience is the first and foremost ask from any communications team before they start scripting the narrative of the brand. Who is using your product or service? Which region do they come from? What is the language they are most fluent and comfortable with? – and other such important questions need to be answered. The audience for a company would typically be investors, influencers, clients, and partners. Each of these groups will have their own motives and reasons behind associating with your brand. Creating a distinct persona for each group will give you the focus to connect with the right people and generate positive responses.
Test the message
Like we always beta test a product before putting it out, the same goes for any communications campaign or PR message. The narrative should be tested internally. Talk to your teams and get their feedback. What you may perceive as the right message might have a completely different perspective or meaning which you might have missed. There are many ways in which you can test a message. For example, an internal poll with your key stakeholders, running a social media campaign that targets a set of customers, and other such methods.
Have a unique voice
External audience and the media is constantly exposed to communication from thousands of brands. Managing to hold their attention and staying relevant is a big challenge for companies. Remember, your external community is looking for reasons to connect with you. Whether it’s a customer wondering whether to buy a product, or an influencer reviewing your product, you need to make sure that you’re creating the right impact. Being authentic can be really powerful. Backing your content with proof points like reports and surveys to make a case for your message is very useful. Further, adding examples and use cases are really effective ways to drive home the reality of your statements.
As American writer Jay Baer says, “If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.”
Make employees your brand custodians
For large sales-led organisations, employees are interacting with customers, the growing market, competition, and the public on a daily basis. It is a must to have an internal strategy that is focused on enabling employees to be prepared with the right messages. For example, if you are working in an automobile company and there is a manufacturing defect in a batch of vehicles, your sales team, who are on the ground meeting the dealers and customers, would naturally become the source of word of mouth news. In such scenarios, internal communications plays a key role in passing the right message to employees, to avoid any reputation damage to the brand.
In a nutshell, external communications is one of the most effective marketing channels to drive visibility for your brand. But to extract maximum from it and to make it work well, it must be aligned to the purpose of your brand. This is best emulated by a quote from Geoffrey Zakarian who said, “Determine who you are and what your brand is, and what you’re not. The rest of it is just a lot of noise.”