When everyone else already seems to be saying everything that could possibly be said about business, there are times when the choice of going outside and enjoying the sunshine can appear preferable to thinking about something original to say about your own business.

However, no business survives without customers and most of us have to promote or advertise our products and services to attract those customers.

So what can you say that hasn’t already been said a million times before?

Ideas rarely come out of thin air, so it’s good to start with your business plan and objectives, as all communications should be based on these. If you’ve got a communications plan, this should also give some ideas of what you want to achieve.

Start by listing topics based around products, services, launches, events, achievements, changes or industry developments. If your business is seasonal, do you change your products every quarter? If your business is linked to events triggered within your industry, list key changes about to occur or important dates. If you have product launches or events, list these too.

When you’ve made your list, start to fit these to dates when you need to blog about them, issue a press release, update your web site or produce a new brochure. If you don’t already have a communications plan, this could be the basis of one.

Announcements don’t need to be major, although the appointment of a junior employee is unlikely to hit the broadsheet newspapers and you should have realistic expectations of what each piece of news is capable of achieving. That doesn’t stop you aiming as high as possible, especially when you do have a really good story.

Also, you may have a great story without knowing it. Ask colleagues or contacts what they think about specific issues. If they’re excited about them, will your audience also be interested in them? What appears uninteresting to you could be exciting to your audience.

By creating a store of ideas, which you can add to regularly, you’ll never be short of an interesting topic to write or talk about.

After yesterday’s blog, have you thought about how well you check your written material?

z2zine tomorrow: Think before engaging typing finger!

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So we’ve developed a communications plan and are putting it into practice by working towards long-term goals and taking short-term actions daily, but how do we know if anything’s working?

Like anything we do in business, it’s essential to measure success, especially where we’re putting a lot of time or money into an activity.

Our business plan will suggest appropriate targets to us, but we have to work out how to tell if we are meeting these.

There are many different ways of measuring the success of communications. One of the simplest is to ask people, such as asking customers how they found out about your company or product. You can do this in person or on the phone or develop a more comprehensive survey for people to fill in.

You can also develop specific response mechanisms so that customers respond with a unique code printed in an advert (letting you know they saw that advert) or access a special web page so you can count how many responses your activity generated. While simply measuring increases in responses or sales tells you that your communications are working, it won’t tell you why it’s working or which activities work better than others. If you advertise in three publications, it’s useful to know which one generates a bigger response as you might wish to increase your advertising in that one and stop advertising in the other two. You can use this in any form of communication, not just for advertising and marketing.

By discovering what works best, you can focus on successful methods and stop or improve less productive activities. Your planning and use of communications will become more sophisticated and you will get more value from your communications budget.

After our last blog, are you taking action every day?

z2zine next Monday: Realistic communication objectives

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If you’ve been doing everything we’ve discussed so far, your communications should be starting to work effectively for your business.

Knowing what we want to achieve, being clear about how we’re going to achieve it and working on our communications every day ensure that we continue to progress, even when we’re busy with client work. Having a plan and doing a little towards it, even just 10 minutes a day, is good practice. It helps to keep us focused on what’s important, reminds us to keep in touch with customers and makes sure all our material is up to date.

Some elements of the plan will probably be long term and, especially if they are major projects, progress can seem slow. Perhaps you’re building a new web site, writing a business book, developing an employee communications programme, all of which can take a lot of time. It’s important not to be put off by this and to continue with daily tasks so that short, medium and long-term activities continue in parallel. As long as your development work continues behind the scenes then your web site, book or employee programme will be launched on target to achieve your aims.

Effective communication requires daily action. As your activity increases, you will start achieving your objectives and need to update your plan to set new ones. This will be easier as you’ll know what questions to ask and will have seen what works, what doesn’t and what can be improved.

After our last blog, have you started writing?

z2zine tomorrow: Measuring your success

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