Is your business experiencing growing pains, and you feel like you are being held back from your full potential? Adding more people to your business creates challenges, like when people at the same business have different visions. Aligning your communications gets much more difficult, with “too many cooks in the kitchen,” when you add more people to your teams and departments.
You must ensure that your communication is consistent regarding the processes that must be followed and how you talk about products, the brand, and your core values. According to research conducted by Deloitte, 77 percent of executives claim that their businesses need to focus on aligning employees' goals with the corporation's purposes. Because of this, there will be tension between the goals you want to achieve and the actions your team members are taking. By being consistent with your messaging, you can ease the discomfort caused by this growth. Let’s look at a real-world example one of our customers provided to illustrate this point.
Communication Is Important For Growth
The key to easing the pains of a growing business is to focus on creating consistency with your brand messaging. You may be thinking of ads, social media posts, and other marketing messaging, but the truth is that consistency is just as crucial in internal messages as it is externally. You need a brand strategy paired with an effective communication plan for success. These two tools work together to deliver stand-out messaging to a target market. They become a powerhouse for marketing, allowing businesses to get the right message to the right customer at the right time.
So, how do you get your entire team to use the communication you need? You can run internal communication campaigns to get employees onboard with a change and communicate what’s most important to the business. Businesses that market to other businesses use language distinct from consumer-facing brands. The way an organization anticipates being addressed is a common source of contention. They may not be as forgiving of your failure to meet their expectations as one might hope.
However, there is no need to panic; if you have a basic understanding of how business relationships function, you will have no trouble picking up the nuances of B2B communication. Here are five guidelines for effective B2B interactions.
To guarantee the success of your B2B marketing communication strategy, your communication plan must incorporate the following four components.
- Your target demographic: How does your product solve the issue your target audience has? How can you provide a remedy that will work for them? How are you finding common ground with their predicament? Where will you find them?
- The point of your communication: What is your target market looking for, exactly? What resources can you give them that will teach them about possibilities and how to use them? What does this have to do with their dilemma, anyway?
- Content calendar: Aids in scheduling and deploying campaign assets at the appropriate time (day, week, month, season, etc.).
- Location (chosen channel): electronic mail, weblogs, social media, etc. — how are they doing? Are you getting the response you expected? Where do you see the most growth potential?
These tactics earn your team and employee buy-in, feedback, honest communication opportunities, and alignment toward a common goal.
The Keys To Effective Communication
When communicating new goals, changes, or important business information, there are a few things to remember. You should help every team member understand why the information should matter to them — not just the business, but the individual. Help them understand how it will affect them, whether it will have a positive or negative impact, and why they should care and get on board.
You should also share why it matters if they don’t get on board! What are the stakes for them and the business? Make it clear what will happen if everyone’s not walking the same path.
Another important thing to communicate to your team is what problems the change will solve and the pathway to the solution. You may be tempted to use the high-level language used in developing your plans, but instead, you should keep it simple, baseline the issue, and offer a simple plan for achieving it.
- Understand Your Target Audience: Who Are You Selling To?
- Define Your Brand Voice: Who Are You?
- Develop a Content Marketing Strategy: Why Do You Matter?
- Maintain Consistency in Brand Communication: Don't Let Your Audience Forget You
- Embrace Visual Communication: Make People Pay Attention
- Measure Your Success: How Will You Know You've Succeeded?
Keeping the key points consistent across communications to the entire team reinforces the message to everyone who hears it repeatedly. These messages can go out in all forms of communication, from meetings to slide decks and more.
Align With Your Business Goals:
How An Agribusiness Improved Communication Consistency
This agribusiness based in the Midwest recently merged with another agribusiness that rapidly increased its headcount. Suddenly, they were handling multiple operations locations, two main corporate groups in two different locations, and international teams. They needed a way to communicate the vision for their business to their employees, investors, leadership, and new staff that was consistent and driven toward the change they were looking for.
We created a communication plan for each group of people that was broken down into messaging snippets. These were used across the business in multiple locations and mediums.
In addition, we helped them launch an initial engagement survey before the rollout that showed many of the employees were on different pages and were not fully aligned to the business’s goals. A post-campaign survey we conducted three to four months later showed a significant shift toward common goals. Since then, there have been continuing efforts with communication to refine and align the teams toward common goals.
By following this advice, your business, too, can align its communication across all departments.
Connect Your Business Through the Power of Aligned Communication
There is a way to alleviate the discomfort that your B2B business is experiencing if it is going through the growing pains stage. When you try to align in your communication on how things need to be done and how you communicate about products, the brand, and your values, it will help everyone get on board with what you are trying to accomplish.
TANK New Media has successfully steered many businesses through this process as their guide. If you’d like a partner to help you push through your growing pains, book a meeting with Krista to see how we can ease your business’s growing pains and help you grow on purpose.
