Your company’s marketing communications strategy is built around informing your target audience, while building trust and reinforcing brand credibility. And the ultimate goal of that is to drive more sales and persuade prospects to become long term customers.
Sounds fairly simple for a process, but as you know marketing communications includes a ton of techniques and tactics to convey messages about products or services.
It’s also easy for your organization’s strategy to grow stale as the markets evolve or become lost in the rest of the standard digital noise.
However, there are ways you can start to improve your marketing communications strategy today.
Results might not happen overnight, but you’ll be positioning your organization to succeed and grow past stagnant outcomes.
Important Aspects to Any Marketing Communications Strategy
While there are many aspects and personalizations to your marketing communications, there are three aspects that are the same for any organization to pay attention to.
So before I share specific tips to improve your marketing communications strategy, evaluate that these three essentials are being thought about and executed at all times.
Utilizing Persuasive Message
Your company’s prospects, customers, and employees all have various expectations and interests. This means that your messaging has to be engaging enough to keep them connected to your brand.
Focus on how your messaging is perceived for key groups and find that persuasive communication that will resonate with them.
Mastering Overall Design
Since marketing communications expands to all sorts of mediums (blog posts, paid ads, print media, video, social), each outlet has its own design requirements. Additionally, your creative and messaging will need to be tailored.
Capture Feedback More Often
It’s easy to think your marketing communications are doing the right things for your business, but just because you think it’s connecting, doesn’t mean it actually is. So what can you do? Start collecting feedback from your audiences (prospects, customers, employees).
Feedback can help guide your marketing communications strategy, reveal if content is getting stale, or show that something is working and how your organization should focus more on that winning aspect.
You can collect feedback through social listening, online polls or surveys, listening to feedback from customers and employees about areas of the brand, etc.
All of these aspects help you align your marketing communications and help you develop your strategy further. These points should help guide any marketing tactics or decisions your organization plans to make.
Marketing Communications Strategy
As you know, a marketing communications strategy is imperative for your brand, communicating important information to audiences, and getting your company’s product or services out to the world.
Generally, your marketing communications are for your customers and prospects, but also do not forget about your internal audience too — employees!
And while your organization may follow the standard marketing strategy and comms playbook, often that can just get your messaging lost amidst the sea of digital communications. You’re competing against rapid moving information, competitors, ads, and attention spans that seem to be waning every year.
Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is narrowing due to the amount of information that is presented to the public.
This means your marketing communications strategy needs to work harder, but also smarter. Throwing more communications out there for the sake of being seen is not a good long-term strategy.
Tips for Improving Your Company’s Marketing Communications Strategy
Every company is unique and how your products or services are communicated will vary. While there are numerous tips out there that can improve your company’s marketing communications strategy, I didn’t want to list everything. For the simple reason that not all will apply or be useful to you specifically.
However, out of the various tips I felt there were a few that all organizations — no matter what industry — should be using to boost marketing communications. Ready to explore those further?
Use storytelling to build trust
What does any good brand do that builds a connection to their audiences? Have a strong narrative that tells a story and is woven into all marketing communications meticulously.
If you want your information to connect with people and to be consumed, then tell the brand story! There is no perfect formula when it comes to storytelling, but you want people to recognize and pay attention to your messaging.
What needs to be defined? At a minimum all messaging should point to things like:
- The unique selling proposition
- What your organization represents
- What the values of your organization are
- Why people should trust your information
While your strategy may alter for different mediums and audiences, your overall messaging should tie into those unique points about your brand. Each point will ensure that your brand messaging is always recognizable, consistent, clearly identified.
Start Communicating Like A Human
More than likely, you’ve seen business leaders and organizations focusing more on brand empathy, especially in recent years. You might also have heard it as empathy marketing.
The goal behind this is to be more empathetic or understanding the feelings of your customers and prospects — including their needs and challenges. But instead of only recognizing their challenges, you now take their point of view to connect on a more emotional level.
And what does this all have to do with your marketing communications strategy? Well, it means applying empathy to your marketing, communications, and sharing messages that sound like an actual human.
Generic marketing copywriting, generic templatized formats, and industry jargon does not connect to your audiences like it may have in the past.
If you want marketing communications to be absorbed by customers, employees, and prospects — treat every marketing piece like it’s communicating like a person.
- Write like you’d speak (it’s not always easy, but you can always talk to text to help).
- Put yourself in the customer’s shoes (how do they consume, what are their challenges, how do they feel?)
- Abandon standard marketing templates. (They lose their value and do not feel genuine at all).
- Give before you ask (always create value and give, before you ask for something in-return).
Engage Your Employees Further
We often think of marketing communications for audiences outside of the organization (customers, prospects) that sometimes can neglect employees. There are a few key areas to engaging your employees to help your marketing communications.
First, focus on something called internal marketing.
The purpose is to improve employee engagement within, increase overall brand reach, and also that employees can provide value to potential customers because they believe in, trust, and understand the company’s goals and vision themselves.
More than 80% of Americans say employee communication is key to developing trust with their employers. (Lexicon)
Second, when employees are motivated, informed, and know their unique selling proposition — they can quickly become a channel to help spread awareness about the brand. This is called employee advocacy, and is the process where employees help share and create content via their networks.
When they are on the same page of your company’s mission, values, and brand — they can help your strategy and messaging reach more potential customers.
Develop Creative With A Purpose
While the messaging, copy, and storytelling are incredibly valuable to your marketing communications strategy, you cannot forget the need for creative too.
For your message to be seen, read, and engaged with — it means going beyond the standard templatized format that you see.
Of course your creative needs to be on brand otherwise you risk brand confusion. However, this does not mean that your images, videos, or ideas that help get information across should be stale.
When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. (Brain Rules)
Yet, there needs to be a caveat to this marketing communications tip — be creative with a purpose.
Throwing out random designs or videos just to jump out at the consumer does more harm than good. You may get the click or some consumption at first, but you risk driving further brand confusion.
The last thing you want to do in your marketing communications strategy is to disorient your audiences. This means you need to pay attention to more than just the copy, but the design elements too.
Think about the unique ways you can get information into the hands of people that matter most to the success of your company.
