Updating your Salesforce: 5 Tips for using broadcast communications effectively
Yesterday we gave a free, 30- minute webinar aimed at helping you communicate out to dispersed salesforces. Here’s a condensed summary of what was said.
Take a good, thorough look at what you’re ‘pushing’ out. By evaluating and honing not only your message but HOW and WHEN you send it and what you actually want readers to do with it, you can drive down sales cycles, improve take up of promotions, and also engage employees more deeply.
The 5 aspects to consider:
1. MEASURE – measure and benchmark readership, click-throughs, surveys responses, and other activity resulting from your push communications. Figure out what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ response rate.
2. CONTEXT – investigate what else is being pushed to your salesforce: by whom, how often, at what times. Profile your audience and communicate in ways they prefer. Evaluate your supporting resources (is the intranet rather crappy, so you need to send pdfs with details? Or should you simply hyperlink to the resources).Â
3. MESSAGE – there are great resources out there to help you craft great content and maximize your chances of it being read and absorbed. See the IABC Report: Preparing messages for Information Overload Environments for six key recommendations; a great starting point. (Available free to IABC members, non-member click here.)
4. CHANNEL – while most push communications still go out in good-ol email, there are many, many ways to deliver your message. Consider using a combination of several messages and evaluate for 5 criteria.
5. INVITE INTERACTION – ‘push’ communications has changed: nowadays it needs to include an invitation to participate/communicate back. More than ever we expect and enjoy contributing our comments to articles, posting our thoughts on Twitter/Facebook, and being acknowledged for it. Align with this changing landscape to meet employees’ expectations but also to gain valuable insight and knowledge that often can be applied to the business in valuable ways.  Send your broadcast communications’ to knock over the first domino in a chain rather than to sledgehammer your audience with your info.
With that in mind, we invite you to have a look through the slides and contribute your thoughts on whether they make sense, if we’ve missed anything, or another aspect of the topic. Thanks!
May 5th, 2009 at 11:30 am
[...] aspect of employee communications related to broadcast communications, technology, or social media. Go here to see last month’s webinar “Communicate to Help, not Hinder, your [...]
July 27th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Some very good points raised here – among the top things we consider when developing a communications plan for a client.
Bottom line is to know before you communicate what you’re trying to achieve, and then to follow some basic best practices:
– keep it clear, simple and focused on a key takeaway or action item
– make sure you identify the expecations and WIIFY for the audience
– be creative, funny or witty, but only if it applies – otherwise keep it straightforward and to the point
– provide multiple points of contact to drive awareness and retention, and to reach different members of the audience in the various ways people like to communicate
– make it interesting so that it stands out in a crowd (and interesting is not always about visual creativity, as presentation and writing style, as well as content, are also key factors in making a communications interesting to the audience)
– always provide a feedback loop, and add some interactivity if it makes sense – let’s you take advantage of the technology, get valuable insights and gives the audience a voice and stake in the effort
Preparing good communications that get noticed and get results is partly an art form and partly science – but it’s almost never something that happens by accident. And it’s always harder than it seems to keep it short and sweet. But if you keep it about the audience, you are greatly increasing your chances of success.
And as the blog mentions, careful consideration should be given to understanding as much as possible about everything else that’s being put in front of your audience. This is important to designing a plan that will work in conjunction with everything else that’s going on (rather than one that looks good on paper but doesn’t succeed in execution).
Of course if you can measure the reach and effectiveness of a communication or program, all the better. It’s not always easy to do, but is usually worth the effort if you can. Using electronic communications, along with tools like the Snap collection, can make that much easier. If you can measure, you can really know what’s going on and understand how to improve.
The Snap tools are also a very cool way to package and distribute your communications, and to help them succeed. But with or without them, bad communications can be at best ignored, and at worst actually generate a negative reaction.
Good communications is paramount to realizing the objectives behind the communication.