COMMUNICATING THE COMPLEX - FIVE STEPS FOR SUCCESS

Anyone that has been around Communications for any length of time will tell you that whilst everyone appreciates its importance - indeed many will tell you it's their core skill - the realities of doing it well often result in its relegation to an after-thought.

If your ambition is to communicate effectively, I've found there are five tenets to bear in mind, particularly where the objective is to support major change in your business, or a key initiative.

Understand your audience(s): You won't communicate effectively unless your message is appropriately tailored for the people you want to engage; it's not a 'one size fits all' discipline.

Focus on what they want to hear: It's so easy to fall in to the trap of downloading what you want to say, rather than in cherry-picking the 'bite-size', sequential information that your audience is more likely ready for.

Plan for success: Too often we set ourselves unrealistic timescales that take little heed of the infrequency of 'news' changes, which can stimulate much scratching of heads when executing a plan that mandates frequent touch points. Similarly, when it's about something big, we underestimate the time involved in defining the key message takeaways, drafting the relevant communication, getting agreement from key stakeholders, then pushing the message out to the target audiences. The availability of social media might make it seem easy, but for that 'something big' especially, the potential ramifications at least need to be fully thought through before the 'send' command is activated!

Use your channels wisely: Particularly in the corporate world, it can seem that the plethora of communications tools and social media platforms increases day by day, so pick your battles. If your day job becomes more about reshaping each communication in to the multiple formats required to hit all available channels, then it could be that you're negatively impacting your effectiveness. Go back to your audience definitions and direct your efforts only to the places they frequent.

Include a clear call to action: Be it a request to 'watch this space', or driving the audience to take a specific action, make it clear what the reader should do next - your audience will remember the message better if they can associate it with a 'next step'.

In an ideal world...we would guarantee that every reader would peruse, digest, and quickly act upon every communication that we put out, but that's unrealistic. At best, a successful communicator must target what they do with an ambition to achieve laserlike precision, but expending only the optimum effort required for maximum return.