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How can visual communications and marketing help my business develop? |  |
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What are the issues that make communications so important? Here are a few 'musts' that many organisations don't have:
The better you manage your communications the more you are likely to achieve these standards.
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© Day1 2004 The content of this area of the Be Sussexful! website is copyright and may not be copied, reproduced or extracted from the website without written permission from Day1. It may seem like a disparate range of problems - implementing your business plan, setting marketing strategy, getting your sales and marketing resources aligned to 'the plan', producing effective marketing and information materials, promoting your brand internally and externally. Success comes from the unification of these tasks under a single gameplan. Get the housekeeping sorted out. Figure out the parts of your organisation that should be connected. Once you start, you probably won't stop. The reality is that they should ALL be connected. The following network is a pretty standard, simple structure. Common to all organisations though is the need to have effective internal communications to ENABLE external communications to be structured effectively - in other words there should be collusion and support between HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, R&D, Operations and the Senior Management Team. It's all one team really. The internal communications must be functioning. What's my brand got to do with it? What are you? What do you sell, produce or deliver? Who to? What is your market's perception of you? What do you want it to be? What is your culture? What are your values? Where will you be i n five years' time? Your brand is your entire organisation, not just the mark under which it performs. Internal support for the brand is vital to achieve a cohesive organisation. External appreciation of a well communicated brand will enable your markets to trade with you. The brand must be communicated with complete consistency if it is to be truly representational - one footballer in a team with a different coloured shirt will not appear to be part of the team. Your brand must be clearly and consisently expressed internally and externally.And that brings us on to the Business Plan. What are your objectives and the strategies that will enable you to achieve them? What processes and procedures are in place to ensure that you can operate to the plan? How do you measure performance? How do you reward your people? How do you structure your management teams? What are your review periods? Your business plan should contain the answers to all of those questions and clearly lay out how you will move your business forward. It will also include a marketing plan. This will set out how you are going to take your organisation 'to market', the methods you will adopt to generate income. This can also be called a sales plan. So, assuming we know where we want our business to go and how we're going to get there, can we now talk about our marketing communications? All this strategic stuff is all understandable but our brochures don't look good and they're different in appearance to our website. Oh yes, and our logo doesn't look right on a green background and the guy in Sales keeps using the old logo and typeface in his sales presentations because he prefers them to the new house style. The marketing department hasn't consulted the sales team and has produced a mailshot that the sales team can't support. How do we get around that problem?That's precisely the point. A communications plan, if you have the discipline to stick to it, removes the fog, the inconsistencies, the bad links between people and departments. It enables you to communicate effectively to your audiences and sell more product or deliver better services. Most importantly it allows your audiences to know what you are offering and whether they want it. And all of your internal operations will be behind it because they will have contributed to it. How do we create a communications plan? As a starting point, you should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve in business terms [the business plan]. You then need to know how much money you can invest if you are 'on plan'. If you don't have an internal marketing department with the authority to lead on this aspect of your business, you will need professional help in establishing a plan. Ideally, this will include a consultative session [or workshop] with a broad selection of your people which identifies what needs to be achieved and then your consultant will provide a recommended route in the form of a communications plan. The workshop is a valuable process which often unearths issues which otherwise would not come to your attention.The formula for the plan itself will vary according to your objectives and budget. However, it will certainly need to have an overview of how you are communicating at the moment and where you are succeeding or failing in reaching your audiences with the right information. It will reference relevant areas of the business plan and provide a strategy for helping to meet business targets through communications. It will give a clear set of objectives and a means of measuring success in meeting those objectives. It will explain the tactics you will put into place to get this work done and finally it will contain a full matrix of every communications project you need to carry out with timescales, who's doing what, how much it's going to cost and a rationale for each item. How much will it cost and what's in it for me? The cost involved is likely to be proportional to the size of your business and, therefore, the complexity of the plan. At its simplest, a half day workshop and a simple communications strategy document could cost as little as £1,000. If you need help with developmental work of this nature you should contact info@sussexenterprise.co.uk for further information and whether grants are available to help with the strategic development of your business.The benefit you will gain from all strategic planning is having a clear idea of where you are going with your business. Effective communications planning can save you far more by selecting approprites communications routes than the original cost of establishing the plan. As an example, you may find that the money you spend on press advertising and direct mail would give a better return and reach more of your audiences if spent on a newsletter and developing your website. Once you are working to a plan you will have processes in place to help you measure which communications methods are most successful. If you would like to discuss how to develop a communications plan, contact the authors at info@day1.org.uk or for information on how to develop your marketing plan contact info@sussexenterprise.co.uk. |
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