What are you communicating about?

How will you communicate?

How will you know if it worked?

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Communications strategies and tools are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is why they must always be connected to a business goal. Otherwise, they tend to be ad hoc, without an anchored purpose, and a useless drain on your available resources.

Internal communications strategies and messages have a strong influence on external communications. If you have employees, it is critical that they have a clear, consistent understanding of who the company is, what it is trying to achieve, and how their contributions fit in. When they are in the know, these messages and their resulting view of the organization resonate externally through discussions with clients, potential clients and others.

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Building relationships through networking and then one-on-one communication is the cornerstone of acquiring, retaining and developing clients in most businesses. Regular contact with clients and potential clients helps you to build reputation and recall. You need to have a strategy for doing this in a way that is useful to the people you are contacting while not intrusive. Even web-based businesses struggle to find ways to personalize their contact with clients.

The key reason you use collateral materials and other techniques is to support your personal contact and to bring you and your expertise to people you would not otherwise meet.

To be effective, your communications tools should be few in number and of a high quality. They also need to convey clearly, concisely and consistently who you are, what you are doing, and how you differ from the competition.

The list of ideas for how to communicate is endless. You don’t need to use them all. Start with three or four good ideas that will clearly relate to your goals. Then be sure to evaluate them after a while to ensure that they did what you wanted them to do. If they didn’t, turf them and try something else, or explore how you can change them to make them more effective.

Generate one look for your promotional materials. Everything from corporate letterhead to your brochures and web site need to appear as part of the same "family" and to communicate consistent messages about who you are and what you do. This includes choosing colors and a corporate identity, through a logo or word mark, that you use consistently on any printed or visual materials. A good way to test how you are doing in this area is to spread all of your printed materials out on a table and see if it looks like they all came from the same place.

Whether you use it as a rallying cry or just keep it in mind for when people ask, "What do you do?" a one-line carefully crafted description of your business will help you and your colleagues to communicate clear and consistent images of your business in every situation. Put this statement on your business card, your web site, your stationary, and commit it to memory.