Communicate Your Marketing Strategy
Creating a strategic plan for your brand is not an easy task. It takes months, endless work, and great skills. The key to success is communicating your strategy properly to your people and execute in the right way.
Communicating the plan is where a lot of brands go wrong. It is considered an imperative step between designing and successfully practising a strategy. Clear communication is imperative for your team to understand the goal and how you can achieve them. It will let them know how your company can make it happen and when your team needs to take steps. This will motivate them to make the strategy a reality.
If you fail to communicate efficiently, employees might forget your strategy or never get your point. Your employees might struggle to stay awake during two-hour long presentation or avoid reading your long email. They might continue working exactly how they did instead of using the techniques you mentioned. This way, your business will struggle to achieve goals or execute the plan. Your strategic planning and invested time and money will be wasted, and your business will not grow.
So, communicating your strategy is more important than anything in marketing. But how can you communicate so that your team can understand? Here are five amazing ways a marketing communications agency uses to make communication easy and understandable.
Table of Contents
1. Keep Your Message Simple
You might need to communicate a complex marketing strategy with different concurrent and input projects. However, the primary objective should be easy to understand. When you communicate your plan to the employees, focus on high-level milestones and main objectives that help your brand to get there.
Most importantly, use clear and simple words to discuss the framework you want your team to use. Also, you can get into more specific details when communicating with individual contributors and smaller teams.
2. Tell a Story
Figures and facts are hard to remember, and if you discuss many, your employees will forget all or get confused between them. But it’s easy to remember experiences and stories. Using the storytelling method to bring humanity to the briefing of marketing strategy will help the team understand the relevance of your strategy.
Give real-life and relatable examples so they can take an interest in your speech. You can also ask your employees to share stories and allow them to give examples to understand whether they get your point. These dialogues will help you develop behaviours you want to enhance and encourage employees to achieve your goal.
3. Use Different Communication Channels
It’s not compulsory to practice only written communication to discuss your strategy with the employees. In fact, it’s best to use different ways to present your strategic plan. Different employees absorb information differently.
For instance, if you only use posters to present your marketing strategy and have some team members who are not visual learners, these employees will not learn anything. Or if you email explaining your strategy and have employees who usually ignore long emails, there will be no use in writing a long email.
To ensure that your team gets your point, you must present your plan differently. You should use a mix of audio, video, written, and visual strategy communication for your team so that everyone can understand the strategy easily. Try to be creative and keep the content interesting so your employees get motivated to learn more instead of leaving half the video.
4. Make Your Progress Visible
Most companies conduct a meeting, bombard their team with a plethora of information, and don’t opt for follow-up meetings. This is something we need to avoid. Providing a continuous stream of information is crucial to keep people engaged and interested.
Discuss your plan every week or two weeks to keep people motivated. This will ensure that your team does not forget the strategy and its framework and rules. While discussing the marketing strategy, make sure to discuss the progress and results with your team.
Also, review KPIs once a week and praise the efforts of your team frequently. This will be a joyous moment for the team, as they can see they are achieving success together. This trick will help you motivate your employees to work harder as well as build a strong connection between you and your team.
5. Show Employees How they Contribute
While you will continue discussing your strategy for months until you achieve your goal, it is also important to keep showing employees what role they have played in bringing the project to this point. You don’t need to discuss the success rate of every employee, but you can show the achievement of individual teams, like the production team, marketing team, analyzing team, etc.
If you have a small team, you can also discuss individual efforts and how much a person has helped in the process. You can praise the day-to-day work of your employees that help them understand that they are on the right track. If you have any data or visuals, then showing it to your employees is also a great idea.
Bottom Line
Marketing is a challenging task that requires lots of effort and time. But your energy and time investment can go in vain if you don’t communicate your strategies properly. You need to be clear, precise, and friendly while communicating. Also, you must ensure you are using the right channel for communication.
Companies’ biggest mistake is not communicating the plan correctly to the team. For your team to comprehend the goal and how to attain them, clear communication is essential. It will inform them of the measures they must take to achieve the goal. This will encourage them to carry out the plan. If it’s getting challenging, you can also get help from a marketing communication agency to ensure your company’s success.