Create a Communication plan

Communications Planning

Getting the Right Messages Across in the Right Way

Use the right communication medium for your audience.

© iStockphoto/Antonprado

Have you ever received a memo and felt the sender really wasn't thinking about what you needed to know or hear? Maybe you have attended corporate presentations that have simply left you cold? Or perhaps you've even delivered communications yourself and realized, in retrospect, that you really hadn't got the measure of your audience and their needs.

This is at best frustrating. At worst it is such a huge "turn off" that it can have a negative effect, or even produce an effect that is the exact opposite of the one you had intended.

Whether you need to communicate general day-to-day information or "big news" about major changes in your organization, the best communications start with some good planning.

The first step is to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they need to know, and want to hear? What's their preferred way of receiving information? What will stop them listening to what you have to say? And how will you know that they have got the message?

So there's quite a bit more to good communications than preparing a good memo or presentation! This tool will help you through the preparation steps and so help you create an audience-focused communication plan that's sure to get your message heard.

Market Your Message!

Good corporate communications is very much like good marketing. You have a message (product) that you need to ‘sell’ to your audience (customers). If they are going to ‘buy it’, you must package the message so that they can understand it and pay attention to it. You must make sure the value and benefit outweigh any downsides (the ‘price’ you are asking them to pay). And you must reach the audience through the right communication channels. Then, following the communications (promotion), you must be able to measure the effectiveness and how well the message is ‘bought’.

How to Use the Tool

Use the following steps to create a good communication plan for your company or project. Record your plan on a communications planning worksheet, such as the free Mind Tools one you can download here:

Download Worksheet

Understand Your Objectives

Step 1. Be clear about your overall communication objectives. What do you want to achieve, when and why? Record your overall objectives in your plan.

Figure 1: Communications Planning Template

Communications Plan For……………………
Overall Communication Objective:
Audience	Communication Objectives	Message	Channel	Timing

Understand Your Audiences

Step 2. Now identify and list your different audiences. This can initially seem quite difficult: For all but the simplest communications plan, it's good to use Stakeholder Analysis to help you do this. Stakeholder Analysis   helps you identify who to communicate with and why.

Example: Audience Groups

Think of "audiences" as groups that you need to communicate with. Any one person may be a member of several audiences. As an example, consider a project communications plan that has four audiences:

• All people working in New Jersey Office.
• All people working in Sydney Office.
• Customer Services Teams.
• HR Managers.

Joe is an HR manager working in Sydney and is therefore a member of 2 audiences, as is Sue who is a customer services team manager in New Jersey. Whereas Lee, an IT consultant in New Jersey, is a member of just one audience: "All people working in New Jersey Office".

Step 3. Now drill down into your communication objectives and clarify specific objectives for each audience. A good way to do this is to think about the audience's needs – what do they need and want to know from you? List all the objectives (there may be several) for each audience in your plan.

Plan Communications Messages and Channels

Once you have clarified your objectives and got a full understanding of the different audiences you need to communicate with, it's time to plan the communications – that means working out the messages needed to meet your objectives and when and how these will be delivered.

Step 4. Before starting on the detail of your plan, first jot down all the possible communications channels you could use. Think broadly and creatively! You probably already use lots of great ways to communicate in your company, and some new ones may help get your message across. Here is a list to get you started:

• Email
• Newsletter
• Teleconference
• Notice boards
• CEO briefing
• Posters
• Lunchtime meeting
• Intranet article
• Launch event
• Team meeting
• Podcast on intranet

Tip: Remember to Use Existing Channels

Big corporate news often gets announced at big corporate events. But don't forget to use existing channels too, such as staff newsletters, the intranet and team meetings. Using existing channels with the right message at the right time is an effective and familiar way to reach your audience.

Step 5. To plan out the message for each audience, start by thinking about the broadest audience groups first. In our example, the broadest audience might be "All people working in New Jersey Office" and "All people working in Sydney Office".

As you consider each audience in turn, ask the following questions:

• What does the audience need and want to know?
• When do we need to communicate?
• What is the regular or preferred channel for reaching this audience?
• For this specific audience and message, what is the most effective way to get your message across?

Several messages over time may be required to meet the objectives of each audience. Make sure the messages you plan "add up" to meet the audience's objectives.

Tip:

Earlier in this article we compared Communications Planning with marketing. One saying in marketing is that "prospects need to see your message seven times before they buy." While this may be over-precise, you may need to give your message many times over before it sinks in.

On the other hand, as you plan for each audience, remember also that members of one audience may also be part of another audience, and so may receive several messages. Try to plan your communications so that individuals receive the right information and are not inundated, or worse, confused by the different messages they receive.

Monitor Effectiveness

Step 6. It's good to get feedback on the communications you have planned and implemented. Ask people from different audiences how you are doing. Check they understand the messages you need them to hear. By getting timely feedback, you can tune any future communications that you have planned to better meet people's needs or fill any gaps so far.

Example

Rather than provide a fully worked example here (which would take up too much space!) here's an example for you to work on to get a better understanding of how to write communications plans.

Let's consider planning the communications for the implementation of new security passes in your office. The overall objective is to "Ensure a smooth transition from the current security pass system to the new one".

Who are the audiences and what do they need? First consider the universal audience "All Office-Based Staff". Everyone will need to know that the change is scheduled, what to expect and when. If people at each site need to receive different instructions about how to get a new pass and so on, each site needs to be listed as a separate audience ("Staff at site A" etc.) And what about the people who manage security? They are a further audience group as they have specific needs including more detailed information (possibly training) on how to manage the new system.

Now consider the specific messages for each audience. As well as receiving all-staff announcements about the new system, "Staff at site A" must know when and where at Site A to get their new pass photos taken. This information must be communicated several days ahead of time. The day before the change over, people may need to be reminded to have their new passes at the ready, perhaps by leafleting everyone's desk throughout the office.

Sources: http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/CommunicationsPlanning.htm

Brand Strategy

HOW TO BUILD A STRONG BRAND

A key element of strategy planning should involve the development of your brand and how you would like to be perceived.

When designing a brand strategy, this is the first question you should ask:

WHAT IS YOUR UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION?

Consider all aspects of the marketing mix and examine what makes your business unique and attractive to the consumer. If these factors lead to a competitive advantage then you have determined your Unique Selling Points, or USPs. These USPs are major contributory factor to what makes your business successful, so should form the central theme to your brand strategy. Most brands concentrate on several of the most powerful and easily communicated proposition benefits in order to create a clearly understood brand message.

BRAND VALUES

USPs are why customers are currently buying your products and form the basis of your company 'brand values'. However, brand values should constantly evolve to suit changing market conditions and should also reflect your forward looking business strategy. Once these are established, it's important to ensure that your customer experience reflects these values in every aspect of your business. This means tailoring every element of the marketing mix to project your brand values - from the staff you use, the products you produce, the messages on your advertising, and even the way you handle complaints. Building a respected brand can take a lot of hard work and you'll need the commitment from your employees and stakeholders to make it happen.

Example brand values: Zurich

We demonstrate total customer dedication	Our starting point is the needs and expectations of our customers
We're pioneers	We innovate continuously and explore new options with creativity
We excel in all we do	We aim for the highest quality, particularly in activities with the greatest value potential
We encourage everyone to contribute	Every employee counts
We act with integrity	We test every proposed action to see whether it is proper and reflects standards we can be proud of

Remember, a brand exists in the mind of the consumer. It is the intangible sum of thoughts and feelings about a particular company, service or product. A company can steer how a brand is perceived by never has full control.

"A brand exists in the mind of the consumer"

A brand is be represented tangibly by branding, which allows the customer to easily identify a product using an identity which sometimes formalised in a corporate identity document. This can include the colour scheme, logo, slogans, typeface and can go into depth of how these all work together. Successful branding focuses on the company brand values which should be obvious from the promotional materials.

"Brands are powerful influencing tools"

Brands can be very powerful influencing tools, but only once they have been established – and it can take time to build up the necessary trust. When a customer has made up their mind it's often very hard to persuade them to think differently.

BENEFITS OF A STRONG BRAND

• It will add value to a company
• Requires less persuasion for consumers to use other products from the same brand
• Can ensure a lasting customer relationship due to trust
• It aids recognition in a cluttered marketplace
• Has the ability to command a premium
• Allows differentiation between very similar products, for example still mineral water
• Can attract merchandising contracts
• Leads to the perception of quality

There are two core elements to a strong brand – emotional value and practical value. Get these two right and your brand will quickly grow.

However, a brand can be damaged much quicker than it can grow - five things that will quickly damage your brand include:

• Untrustworthy behaviour
• Concern about public safety or health
• Poor customer service (at any level)
• Obvious company financial difficulty
• Poor quality products

Get the balance right and your business will go from strength to strength.

FINAL WORDS

If you still doubt the power of a successful brand, consider Evian mineral water. All bottled mineral waters are essentially the same product - they'll all quench your thirst and taste pretty much exactly the same. However the strength of the Evian brand in the UK means they can charge significantly more than the cheapest alternatives. This ability to charge more due to a strong brand is known as brand equity and is a valuable contributing factor towards the value of any business.

Sources: http://www.marketing-made-simple.com/articles/brand-building.htm#.VItJKDGUeSo

Differences between brand identity and brand image, How to create a strong brand image

Differences

	Brand Identity	Brand Image
1	Brand identity develops from the source or the company.	Brand image is perceived by the receiver or the consumer.
2	Brand message is tied together in terms of brand identity.	Brand message is untied by the consumer in the form of brand image.
3	The general meaning of brand identity is “who you really are?”	The general meaning of brand image is “How market perceives you?”
4	It’s nature is that it is substance oriented or strategic.	It’s nature is that it is appearance oriented or tactical.
5	Brand identity symbolizes firms’ reality.	Brand image symbolizes perception of consumers
6	Brand identity represents “your desire”.	Brand image represents “others view”
7	It is enduring.	It is superficial.
8	Identity is looking ahead.	Image is looking back.
9	Identity is active.	Image is passive.
10	It signifies “where you want to be”.	It signifies “what you have got”.
11	It is total promise that a company makes to consumers.	It is total consumers’ perception about the brand.

Sources: http://www.managementstudyguide.com/identity-vs-image.htm

3 Effective Ways to Build a Strong Brand Identity

The true value of a brand identity lies in the view of the target audience. It reveals the consumer’s knowledge about the existence of the brand and its repeated exposure of the identity draws instant attention from people.

One of the images that view the identity of the brand is the website of the company. People can easily recognize how the brand operates through the functionality of the site.

Advantages of a Strong Brand Identity

• Reveals your unique value proposition and develop a competitive advantage in the market.
• Reflects the voice of the brand through social interaction and outreach.
• Improve the consumer’s experience towards your company through visual elements (logos, color scheme, typography, etc.)
• Maximizes your ability to increase awareness and brand loyalty with your customers.

I’d like to share some tips on how you can improve your brand identity to achieve your goals and become an authority in your industry. Let’s get started.

Optimize Your Content

Trust is the king in inbound marketing and is achieved only by proving great value to the customers. Comprehensive guides, actionable tips and compelling information give credibility to your brand and foster engagement with your people.

The rule of thumb in creating a high quality content is to fulfill your customers’ needs. Use Five Second Test to know if your site provides a memorable experience. NavFlow and ClickTest are good at analyzing your navigation and design engagement. Compress the sizes of your images. Keep each page under 1MB in total to keep your site’s loading speed fast.

Add social sharing buttons above and below the fold to leverage the acquisition of links and share. Don’t splatter all your share buttons on every single page of your site. Otherwise, it will only give a poor user experience and may decrease your repeating visitors.

Create an approachable identity by allowing your readers leave their comments or send personal emails to you. A simple instruction at the end of the post like “Leave a comment below” or “Share with us your experience” would encourage user feedback.

Use Visual Devices

The use of visual devices on your website helps you gain more traction and creates a remarkable identity. Incorporate your core values to the common attributes of your logo like colors and shapes. People will interact with you based on how they understand your logo. Different meanings can be made out of logo since different countries has its own cultural views and personal experiences.

Use fonts and colors that complement your brand. Your customers must be able to grasp what you want to say to them. Select a text color to improve your user’s readability. Avoid annoying ads that can distract your customers. If you run ads, keep them outside of the content area. Pay attention to what your customers want to do on your site such as subscribing to your blog, making purchase of your product or contact you to know more about your services. You have to observe your customers’ behavior using Google Analytics. Identify your top landing pages to determine the most engaged activity of your site (contact page, about us, etc.).

Develop your affinity marketing

Affinity marketing is the use of brand assets to develop lasting relationships with other brands (alliances) and to build closer relationships with the customers. This can be noticed in many authority brands that create friendly personalities to increase their overall customer base.

Be real and friendly with your customers. Use effective platforms such as social media and webinar. People want to see the person behind your company. Talk to your audience and educate them by providing free webinars and video tutorials. Tell them your stories and experiences. Case study is a good way to show transparency and expertise in the field.

Use pictures, faces or even mascots in every marketing channel. Associate them to your brand in a fun and engaging manner. The Roger mascot of Moz helped them established a recognized identity that stands out from the competition of SEOs. This mechanical and sci-fi robot is used to create a loveable hook to get customers into their company. The use of brand assets enables your brand to widen your visibility on the web and makes your users understand the mission, vision as well as the core values of your company.

In order to develop successful branding strategies, your business needs to stand out. You must emphasize what you have that your competitors don’t have. You need to tell your customers what makes your business different from other companies. You need to be consistent, proactive and informative with your brand messages. Brand awareness and purchase intent are highly correlated with repetitive viewing and consistent branding. For example, you should encourage viewers to return to your website by placing frequently updated and informative content.

Partner with other brands whose customers are same as yours. Keep your relationships with them growing since they’ll be your long lasting brand evangelists. Get them to know more about your services/products by giving them discounts or free versions of what you are to offer to them. Promote other brands as well through social media and content marketing.

Sources: Venchito Tampon. July 1st 2013. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-effective-ways-to-build-a-strong-brand-identity/64849/

Visual Identity

10 things to consider when creating a new visual brand identity

1. Make it coherent, not consistent.

A new logo is born useless. The media demands an approach that is instantly useful. Make your new logo useful. Create landscapes that can change and adapt. Information can and should fuel the design and pattern.A brand should be adaptive & coherent, not just consistent.

2. Do more than a logo.

The logo is dying so ask yourself how can you brand without badging?

3. Brand without badging

A rubber stamped logo is not a brand. Remember…

“A new logo should be a symbol of change, not a change of symbol.”

4. The big idea is not the big idea.

The big idea is not the big idea, but rather hundreds of ideas that form the brand. These  ideas should be multi-channelled & multi-faceted.

5. Own moments

Find ownable moments that can be a spring point for the brand. eg. a color, season, taste, feature, etc.

6. Remove the fear

Branding is all fear & risk is attached to everything, but smart clients are those without the fear.

We are hired for our principles, so stick to them.

7. Weird works

Weird shit creates monopolies. Trust the risky weirdo called creativity.

8. Make it people-centric

We are not in design business but in the people business. Educated clients believe in coherent brand worlds. Winning companies are placing design at the heart of their business.

9. Create assets not costs

Design is often seen as a cost in the boardroom but it needs to be seen as an asset. The reason behind it being seen as a cost is that everyone considers themselves as a designer.

“No one trusts creativity because of the dolphin duvet.” (aka everyone is a designer, I chose this dolphin duvet cover for my home). The goal is to show that design is an asset.

10. Chase the opportunity.

Chase the opportunity, not the money. If you are doing interesting work and having fun, enough money will come.

Sources: Jacob Cass September 11th, 2012

http://justcreative.com/2012/09/11/branding-tips/

Corporate communication and story telling

Definition of corporate communication

Corporate communication is a management function or department, like marketing, finance, or operations, dedicated to the dissemination of information to key constituencies, the execution of corporate strategy and the development of messages for a variety of purposes for inside and outside the organisation.

In today’s global corporation, this function serves as the conscience of the corporation and is responsible for the organisation’s reputation.  Previously called “public relations” or “public affairs,” corporate communication has taken on new importance in the 21st century as a result of corporate scandals or crises at companies like Enron and Toyota.

The department usually oversees communication strategy, media relations, crisis communications, internal communications, reputation management, corporate responsibility, investor relations, government affairs and sometimes marketing communication.

The person running the department is the chief communications officer of the firm, and reports directly to the chief executive officer in many of the top global organisations due to the critical importance of the function today.

Example

Jon Iwata, the chief communications officer for IBM, oversees a large department focused on both marketing and communications for the company.

This global function is responsible for IBM’s communications to all key constituencies including customers, employees and communities.  It also plays a role in shaping and executing the company’s Smarter Planet strategy, and initiative focused on developing sophisticated systems to make the world a better place like smart grids and efficient water management systems.

Jon works closely with Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, on strategy execution, and is a member of the company’s most senior management team. [1]

Sourxes: http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=corporate-communication

Science of storytelling: why and how to use it in your marketing

A look at how humans have always loved stories, and six tips for incorporating them into your digital marketing

“They lived.”

Telling a story in two words is a bold move, but Subaru does it in a compelling 30-second commercial. At first glance, hunks and scraps of metal that once resembled a vehicle make it seem as though whoever was in the car at the time of impact could not have survived. But with Subaru, they did.

owerful stuff. Yet it’s not the product that holds the power here – it is the power of storytelling at its best.

This short commercial is just one example of influential storytelling in marketing. As marketers, we know storytelling works and we should be incorporating it in our efforts. But do you know why it works? Do you know how to use storytelling to its fullest extent? Let’s look at the science.

Psychology Today highlights the influential role of emotion in consumer behaviour in four points and makes a compelling case for storytelling:

• Functional MRI neuro-imagery shows that, when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features and facts).

• Advertising research reveals emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content—by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.

• Research conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation concluded that the emotion of “likeability” is the measure most predictive of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales.

• Studies show positive emotions toward a brand have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments, which are based on a brand’s attributes.

Prior to this work, researchers in Spain found that being told a story drastically changes the way our brains work. When people hear neutral words like “chair” or “key,” language-processing parts of the brain called Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are activated exclusively. However, when people are being told a story, the language processing areas of the brain are activated along with other sensory areas being used to experience the story. In this case, it was the primary olfactory cortex that lit up when hearing words associated with odour, such as “perfume” and “coffee”.

In the same vein, Véronique Boulenger, a cognitive scientist at the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, concluded that sentences containing action caused activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements, after participants were scanned as they read sentences like “Pablo kicked the ball”.

Through these studies and others, it can be concluded that the human brain does not distinguish between reading or hearing a story and experiencing it in real life. In both cases, the same neurological regions are activated.

What does this mean for marketing?

In a less formal study than those above, Jennifer Aaker, a marketing professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, had each of her students give a 1-minute pitch.

Only one in 10 students used a story within his or her pitch while the others stuck to more traditional pitch elements, such as facts and figures. The professor then asked the class to write down everything they remembered about each pitch: 5 percent of students cited a statistic, but a whopping 63 percent remembered the story.

“Research shows our brains are not hard-wired to understand logic or retain facts for very long. Our brains are wired to understand and retain stories,” Aaker says. “A story is a journey that moves the listener, and when the listener goes on that journey they feel different and the result is persuasion and sometimes action.”

That action is exactly what marketers work so hard to achieve. If you struggle to write narrative content, these six tips will help you incorporate sophisticated storytelling into your digital marketing efforts:

1. Develop a true understanding of your target audience. This goes deeper than a one-page “buyer persona”. You must speak to your customers and ask why they bought from you. What drove them to start searching for a solution? How did they find your brand? What questions did they ask your sales team? Once you understand their answers, you will be able to create material that truly speaks to your audience.

2. Through your conversations, identify emotional drivers your buyers experience. This emotional analysis will help determine what your customers truly care about and how to tap into that passion.

3. Prioritise authenticity as much as possible. Highlight stories from employees, customers and other industry folk. Don’t shy away from using details like names, settings and positive outcomes. The more relatable your story is, the more your audience will respond.

4. Whether you are using Facebook, a blog, Twitter, direct mail or even a billboard, use the strengths of your channel to tell your story appropriately. From two words to 140 characters, create a story that’s shareable across your channel of choice.

5. Give your stories credibility. “No one says facts and figures should be completely eliminated from your storytelling,” Aaker says. “When data and story are used together, audiences are moved both emotionally and intellectually.”

6. Encourage user-generated content to share different perspectives of your overarching story. Try hosting a contest, managing a hashtag or interviewing industry leaders to create third-party content with storytelling flair.

If, as marketers, we continue to use neutral words and phrases that lack narrative, the minds of our buyers will continue to simply process and forget them. Stories stimulate the mind; it is now in our job descriptions to send consumers on journeys that lead them to solutions that solve their problems and, hopefully, boost our bottom lines.

Sources: Brianne Carlon Rush. Thursday 28 August 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/aug/28/science-storytelling-digital-marketing