Rules were meant to be broken. Not these. If you follow these, you will be well on your way to more strategic communications: better engaging of customers, clients, partners, funders or anyone else who can help you achieve your goals.
6 Strategic Communications Rules
1. A good list is worth it’s weight in gold.
Behind every effective communications effort is a great data base of customers, clients, partners, funders, supporters and others who can help you advance your business or cause. Take the time to create good lists and segment them. There are lots of good platforms for relationship management such as salesforce.com and it’s worth taking the time to investigate some of these. Creating good data bases and segmenting them around interests, focus etc. is a lot of work but the payoff will be 10 times the effort you invest. And make sure once you set them up that you regularly update.
2. Reach out and target.
Less is more. By that I mean stop sending out hundreds of eblasts and press releases to people who don’t care and actually find it annoying to get more email. When it comes to media and bloggers, for example, you want to target the folks who follow your issues or industry. Take the time to figure out who those folks are. And don’t simply rely on lists or data bases that you purchase. That’s a good start. But do your homework especially with media. Look at they’ve written in the past six months. Use don’t send out thousands of press releases or eblasts. There’s not excuse with all of the tools and research available with just one or two clicks.
3. Focus on Engaging Not Talking
Think about what your target audience needs and wants. You”ll know that by doing your homework. Think about sharing information, insights and perspective that will be helpful to them rather then telling them about your product, service or cause. Ask yourself whether your communication is answering the following questions: 1)Why would this individual, reporter, business care about what I have to say? 2) Have I given them something that is of benefit to them?
4. Communicate for Action
Have some call to action in your communications. What do you want the recipient of your communication to do with it? Buy your product? Tell a friend? Donate money? Be a smarter consumer or citizen? Make an ask. For example, if you think this blog post has been helpful to you, please share it with others.
5. Think long-term and Integrate.
Too often people think that the goal is the press release, the email, the blog post, or the tweet, and that having sent it, they’ve communicated. In fact, you’ve only just begun. Think of your communications as part of an ongoing process of engagement, not as a string of events or activities. It’s kind of like a story unfolding. How does one communication support the one before it? How does it add to your audiences impression, knowledge and delight of you and your company or cause? How will you keep the conversation going? It is also important to think about all the different ways you are communicating and make sure they are leveraging and supporting each other.
6. Listen.
Don’t assume that the recipient heard your messages as you intended them. Take the time to follow-up and create methods to obtain feedback from key audiences such as clients, customers, or donors. You can do this by asking them questions the next time you see them. You can conduct online surveys using free tools like survey monkey. You can call people up (yes that old technology still works really well) and ask them. Social media offers so many possibilities to listen to the conversation about you and your issues. You should be reading blogs about your industry or issues.
Sometimes following the rules gets you where you want to go. I hope you find these rules useful. Please let me know what you think.
