Every Startup Needs Effective Communications
Having started many businesses over the years I have understood the importance of communications.
I am not just talking about telephone calls between you and your customers, but how you communicate your USP´s (Unique Selling Points), your culture your beliefs, your wins and your losses!
Modern communications has given business owners a greater opportunity to spread their message to wider and more diverse audiences than ever before. It is an incredible time to be in business with potential to market and sell into every corner of the world.
However, with so many marketing channels and tools, the thought of launching even the smallest of marketing campaigns can be; daunting, time consuming and even demoralising.
My best advise is to break everything down in to small parts – remember to get to the top of a mountain you have to take a first step, and then another. You will achieve far more by focusing on a small step as part of your overall communication process. Get the first step under control and then move on to the next.
Think of your business as an active Volcano. It rumbles away, sometimes a small smokey fissure appears and sometimes it just shakes – all of these little tremors and smokey pockets are pre-cursors to your explosion in to world scene of global acceptability.
The little rumbles, smokey fissures are small natural processes, and in your case a tiny move towards the ultimate goal of bringing your product or service to the masses.
It is very rare to come across ‘An Overnight Success’. In fact if you study many of the so called overnight successes you’ll find there was huge effort, investment of time and other aspects before any one of them became successful.
Human nature dictates we are impatient, we want our success today, we can’t wait and want to do everything now – we want to force the Volcano to explode – one way of doing that is by pouring cold water in to it – of course the result is just a lot of hot steam!
I love the expression; “In with a bang out with a whimper!”, because it reminds me of the companies that throw their entire marketing budget into the pot at launch, creating a huge stir, and then become forgotten entities a few months later.
Growing a sustainable business takes time and patience, it also takes making mistakes, withdrawing, reassessing and moving forward again.
As with any active Volcano, there are times when nothing appears to be happening. For your business this may be stagnation in development, cash-flow issues, mistakes, disillusionment, or even fatigue. But as with a Volcano, there is still activity, it is just below the surface out of sight. You need to continue those small steps with your marketing, ensuring you are seen as active.
Every startup needs effective communications in order to survive. Without a solid front-to-back strategy, it can be difficult to attract investors, build customer base and even stay afloat. Here are five tips for improving your startup’s communications:
1. Plan ahead. Make sure you have a plan for how you will reach your target market and what kind of messaging you will use. This includes everything from social media marketing to targeted email campaigns.
2. Build relationships.
An entrepreneur or business owner is like the seismologist – they can feel every tremor and notice every small fissure, whilst people only a few miles away see, feel or hear nothing! You need to convey what is happening, be it through an email, a blog post or other social medium and more importantly to your colleagues and staff so that they too can pass the news on. Just because you felt a tremor, does not mean others did, so you need to be the messenger.
Break your communications in to small manageable tasks, find out what is working and try to automate it and then move on to the next. Above all keep communicating, how ever small or inconsequential your tremor seems – they all lead to an ultimate Volcanic explosion.
