11 Breakthrough Business Communications Tips
Molly Ishkanian
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Connecting with your target audience requires thoughtful planning, diligence and consistency. But it doesn’t have to be hard. Here are 11 tips to keep in mind for more effective communications:
- Fully engage your employees. Your ambassadors bring your brand to life. Be sure they are the first to know what you’re doing/saying, and actively solicit their questions and ideas to ensure you’ve fully vetted a campaign before it goes live.
- Bring your organizational values to life. Your values serve as guiding principles for your business. How are you modeling them and using them to communicate?
- Hone your messages. Simplicity. Clarity. Focus on just three or four key messages, and perfect them with quality writing.
- Follow a communications plan. Make sure communications team members are in the room where your highest-level decisions are being made to help you communicate them effectively, internally and externally.
- Focus on your audience’s needs and interests. Who are they? What do they care about? (Have you asked them?) Who are their trusted sources?
- Use compelling visuals. Video, video, video. Strong photography and great graphics. Humans are visual communicators.
- Tell great stories. Share your most compelling stories-your successes and even your challenges-and do it strategically. Connect emotionally, so people understand why it should matter to them.
- Orchestrate a mix of paid, earned, social and owned media. Grab your baton: Your owned media (website, blog, podcast, e-newsletter) and social media are the places to start to share your stories. Set goals and use metrics to measure, and use paid and earned media to grow from there.
- Prepare and rehearse. Anticipate questions. Practice answers. Be sure the people who will deliver your message are equipped to succeed with proper social/media training.
- Develop a crisis communications plan and manual. If you already have one, when was the last time you reviewed it? Would staff training on crisis management be useful? Do you need to add new topics to the “what if?” list for responses?
- Define what success looks like. Articulate ahead of time what you are trying to achieve with a PR campaign, and establish measurable metrics so you’ll know what the finish line looks like.
