4 Things to Keep in Mind When Designing Business and Communication Strategies
Effective business and communication strategies can drive team work, morale and business results. While communication is something that certainly happens in every organization, businesses that take steps to implement sound strategies that have a measurable impact on the effectiveness of their business communications can achieve measurable results.
Communication should take into account communication goals, audience, key messages, communication channels and means of measuring the effectiveness of the communication tactics used.
HAVE A GOAL
Any business communication strategy, regardless of how small, should start with a goal and that goal should give some indication of the intended outcome. A business that wants to communicate with employees about benefit options, for instance, may have goals related to increasing their employee’s level of understanding of the available benefits and increasing employees’ satisfaction with benefits. Goals should be focused on some measurable outcome.
IDENTIFY AUDIENCE SEGMENTS
Rarely will a business communicate exactly the same message in exactly the same way to all of its audiences. It is important to identify the audience segments based on different needs, goals and desired outcomes. Customers may be one audience, but that group could be broken up into a very diverse number of segments such as current, recent or past customers. Employees can be segmented in a variety of ways based on department, length of service, location and position.
CREATE KEY MESSAGES
Based on the identified goals and target audience segments, a business should create key messages for each identified audience designed to help achieve the goal. It is a good idea to limit the number of key messages to no more than five, because attempting to communicate more than that could lead to confusion for any audience.
SELECT COMMUNICATION TOOLS
Today’s businesses have a variety of communication tools to choose from ranging from the traditional (telephone, postal mail, advertising), to the new technology driven (email, internet, social media). The choice of communication tool will be driven by the goal, audience and message. Most businesses today use emails, telephones and letters.
MEASURE RESULTS
It is important to measure results in any communication to determine whether the goal was achieved or not and to what extent. The information gathered from this measurement can give important insights that can be used to modify or improve future communication efforts. Reviewing results can help plan for future strategies and plans for development.
