ideahaus : creative + intelligence

Peter Drucker succinctly stated, “It is the purpose of business to create and keep a customer.”

As businesses, why do we need to communicate? Well, for a number of obvious reasons:

• Sell products / services
• Make money
• Fame and glory

To be effective, we want to clearly target our message to a specific audience so that you can differentiate your message from the competition. The result will be a detailed communications plan that describes the tactical implementation of your message strategy.

A tactical communication plan should also include, and take advantage of, a mix of media and marketing programs (i.e. advertising, public relations, promotions, direct marketing, events) in order to convey your message to your target market(s).

Who are your target markets?

Most businesses will say, “our customers”. That’s true, but business has more groups to communicate than just the people that give them money. There are a number of targets that influence your customers, and impact whether or not you can even operate as a business.

• Customers (or Clients)
• Press
• Industry
• Government
• Investors

How are you communicating today?

Many of the ways your business communicates with its markets are probably the same most business communicate. We use Marketing, Branding, Advertising, Internet, Design, Public Relations, Multimedia, and Events. As much as many professionals will argue these are all very different ways to communicate, they are nonetheless communications.

And as much as developing each of these different types of communications may seem daunting or expensive, they are not. Not really. Each of these types of communication actually share the same common elements.

Once you are comfortable with these elements you then can become comfortable with adapting them to other containers, other mediums and other delivery practices.

Exercise: Most business don’t utilize every channel, and your competitors probably use a different combination. To find an opportunity that has been overlooked by your competition perform a simple review, just like your mutual prospects do every time they start shopping.

What if there was a way…

• You could make informed decisions about all of your communications, not gut reactions
• You could save time planning your advertising, marketing, sales, Internet, etc
• You could save money on your communications investments and increase your returns
• You could improve the way your business communicates to your multiple markets - impact sales, marketing and your brand
• You could get the peace of mind in knowing its all taken care of

We’ve been able to help our clients plan their communications and we’re going to show you how.

Communications Strategy

This diagram is a sample of our strategy planning for our client, MojoPages. As you’ll see we used multimedia, public relations and the Internet with high frequency as our primary vehicles. We also used branding and design as supporting vehicles with lesser frequency respectively. Collectively, this strategy positioned MojoPages so well that they had greater traffic before their launch than two of the competitiors that already had products on the market.

Exercise: Map out your current communications then map out your competitors using the worksheet. When you’re done map out strategies that could use what you’ve learned.

Tip: A communications plan is an annual plan that tracks schedules and budgets for marketing, branding, advertising, internet, design, public relations, multimedia and events.

Communications Plan

Strategy is one thing, execution is another. In between is a communications plan that accounts for all of the activity for all of your target markets for every month. Sound intimidating? It isn’t that bad.

Once the strategy is finalized the tracking begins. Each type and each vehicle is documented and totals for cost and impact are calculated. How long will that ad generate a return on the media investment? You have to decide. And what did it cost you? More than you think. We track the internal cost in man hours, the agency costs and the media expense. That total is amortized over the total impact time to determine cost and return on investment.

Ready to start your communications planning?

One of the ways we’ve helped other entrepreneurs gain traction in a competitive marketplace is by evaluating what they’ve been doing then recommending change. Using a best-practices evaluation tool designed by practicing professionals (non-academics) called Market Ready Index we’re able to take a quantitative and qualitative look at your communications efforts - so far.

This “lite” version of this MRI : Communications module examines a sampling of communications basics, like situational analysis, objectives, targeting, messaging, planning, and evaluation methods for impacting how a product or service is perceived in the marketplace.

This survey takes 4 minutes to complete.

Answer 25 questions and learn 20 things you can do today to immediately…

• make informed decisions not gut reactions
• save time planning your advertising, marketing, sales, Internet and more
• save money on your communications investments and increase your returns
• improve the way your business communicates to your multiple markets - impact sales, marketing and your brand
• get the peace of mind in knowing its all taken care o

Click here to take the MRI : Communications Survey