Do you know that communication can make or break your business? Many people think business communication is easy but it really isn't. There is more to it than just words.
Communication is an essential tool for building your business and brand online. It actually has a direct relationship with content development and content marketing.
If you have an email list and social media community, you'll need to know how to communicate with them.
In order to communicate effectively, there are nine questions you'll need to ask yourself:
- Who is the message for?
- What relationship do you have with your target audience?
- What is the actual message?
- Will your message be useful to your audience?
- Is the timing right?
- What barriers are you likely to encounter?
- What communication channel will you use?
- What feedback are you likely to get?
- How will you work with the feedback?
Basically, there are 4 characters involved in the communication process; the sender, the receiver, the message itself and channels.
Many people assume communication as a system that only has to do with words
The roles of the sender include:
- Developing the appropriate message/content for his audience: I once came across a college Twitter account with an update that said something like, "Get 1,000 followers in not time. Click here" or so. Please don't do this. I was shocked when I saw it.
- Identifying channels for content distribution. Channels include: e-mail, social media and video sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc., whitepapers, ebooks, etc.
- Identifying barriers that may hinder the purpose of the message. Likely barriers include email filtering (to prevent spam), nature of your list (e.g. demographics, income levels, etc.) and language.
- Analyzing response: The kind of feedback you get will let you know how effective your message was. This is an essential part that is actively being considered by both new and old businesses.
As the sender, you have many tasks on your hand and you should make sure to follow through the above roles if you want to be effective. For example, once you identify appropriate channels for certain types of messages, you'll not have to worry about what type of message to communicate and how to deliver it.
The receiver's roles include:
- Consuming message
- Sharing message to other people who may be interested
- Giving Feedback
- Doing any other thing the message asks them to do.
The receiver has the magic wand when it comes to sharing and acting on your content.
Your message could be any of these types:
- Newsy
- Sales pitch
- Survey/feedback request
- Tips/tutorials
Messages can serve the following purposes:
- Inform
- Educate
- Convince
Messages can be converted to the following formats:
- Video
- Audio
- Document files; .PDF, .doc, .txt, etc.
- Graphic; .gif, .jpg, .png, etc.
- Regular text/ undocumented text
- Regular speech
Channels are paths for communication; email, social media, telephone, TV, Radio, etc..
The channels I currently use to communicate Sociatic are Q&A sites, Twitter, LinkedIn, Junta42, Social Media Today, Bizsugar, Delicious, Google Buzz, blogs (via this blog and via guest posting on other blogs) etc.
When you identify and recognize the communication process like this, you can easily convince and convert your leads into sales.
Let me know if I left something out.