Strong Effective Communication Helps Your Business Prosper

07th Apr , 2021

Communication needs to be very well done in both communicating to and listening to people. But for this to happen, you must have a great communication strategy in place.

A communication strategy is a plan to achieve communication objectives. This may apply to internal communications, marketing communications or public relations.

A communication strategy has seven major components:

1. Identify the target audience to communicate with
2. Determine communication goals and objectives i.e. why we want to communicate
3. Develop key messages i.e. what we need to communicate
4. Develop a tactical plan of how we will communicate, to whom and when
5. Decide which channels we will use
6. Identify and set measures of evaluation so we know if we are successful
7. Implement the communication strategy and evaluate

Any business mentor will tell you that good communication is always vital in business. Communication becomes even more critical during periods of significant change. The last year has forced major changes on all businesses, elevating communication to the critical range of risk and strategy.

Major Changes Businesses Are Adopting

Potentially significant business changes by owners, senior executives, shareholders and boards include:

• “Pivoting” the business strategically into new areas
• Addressing marketing and advertising campaigns
• Revamping the business due to COVID
• Dealing with a public relations crisis
• Getting the business ready for sale or growth through acquisitions
• Having brilliant new business ideas to evaluate and invest in
• Engaging with business mentors to provide a fresh perspective
• Redoing IT architecture
  • moving into the cloud
  • using new ERP and CRM software
• Refunding or raising fresh equity
• Renegotiating with suppliers or establishing supply chain alliances
• Reorganising physical offices and operational spaces
• Right sizing the staff and organisation structures for the changes to come

In the absence of an effective communication strategy, what you’re trying to achieve might not work. This can impact your relationship with stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, your people, funders of the business, potential equity partners, business brokers, potential buyers of the business, industry, and society as a whole. If you do not succeed in effective communication, then you may have doomed your business to second rate performance, or worse.

Strategic communication skills go far beyond basic communication skills into the ability to carry out organisation communication and demographic analysis, understand modern communication styles, and craft messaging for a global or specific audience.

Communicating and Listening Are Always Business Critical

To be effective, communication needs to be tailored to its audience and be relevant, current, clear, concise, accurate, and without pretence or jargon. In other words, it needs to be easy to understand, even if it is dealing with complicated or specialised information meant for experts.

At International Business Mentors, our business mentors and business coaches often help business leaders to develop their communication strategy or respond to specific needs. A problem with communication is that we may know exactly what it is we’re communicating, but this may not always be appreciated or understood by others. Fresh eyes from a business mentor can help you re-orientate and improve your communications strategy and implementation.

Another consideration in communications is how you communicate digitally, as this needs to be done properly, on the correct platform, for those it is aimed at.  Likewise, in traditional print media, the correct publication needs to be impeccably sourced, and the messages tailored appropriately.  Some things to consider:

• Are we empathetic and show responsibility in communications?
• What is the message needed to be relayed?
• What are the words needed to express this?

Communications generally need to be well established and maintained, reviewed, and delivered in a comprehensive and timely manner. Your people need to feel connected, valued and inspired to perform to their maximum, and your stakeholders need the relationship to develop and your communications to be well understood and delivered appropriately from their perspective and in their preferred media and style.

Call International Business Mentors today to discuss how business mentoring can assist you with communication and other business challenges.

David Cartney, April 2021