Corporate communications agency London
Corporate communication means many different things. A corporate communication asset might be a humble email, a PR campaign or an annual report. In this article, we are going to try to define what the essence of any corporate communication might be. No mean feat.
As the headline suggests, Navig8 is based in London, but we work with clients across the globe including Dubai, the US, Italy, Spain and China. We deliver corporate communications across a massive range of channels, from twitter to video presentations. The common themes with any corporate comms, no matter the country of origin or delivery channel, are the same.
Below is a list of questions the client should be asking themselves before creating content and then asking the design agency to communicate them effectively. The questions may seem obvious to a marketing or communications expert, but not everybody is an expert in those fields. Team members come in all shapes and sizes, the CFO may be a dab hand in Excel, but perhaps not the best at messaging. Perhaps I am being unfair to CFOs, but I think you get the idea.
Who are you trying to communicate with?
Firstly, who are you trying to communicate with? And the answer is never ‘everybody’. Even at the simplest level, the messaging will need some kind of focus and that can often mean the messaging is layered or in a hierarchical framework. For example, the main message might be ‘sales and marketing are coming under one management structure’, that is the primary message. The secondary message might be, ‘but don’t worry, your jobs are safe’. This example focuses on the organisation’s main message but addresses the staff's potential concerns.
An example might be in an internal comms email about changes in the organisation (like the one above). In this instance, you will be communicating with ‘everybody’ but only everybody in your organisation (not the customers or clients, for instance).
In this instance, we can breakdown the hierarchy like this:
The board
Senior management
Team leaders
The team
Whilst the overarching message might be ‘Our company is about to change’, each segment of the audience will have different concerns and the messaging will need to be communicated in a slightly different way.
So take time to consider in detail who your audience is and what concerns them. Focus your messaging to communicate to them directly. This principle applied to any message in any format, from an annual report to an exhibition.
What are you trying to say?
Now that you have established who you want to communicate with, it is time to define what you want to communicate.
Focused, clear messaging is crucial to clear communications. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But have you ever been to a company website, read the home page or about us page and still have no idea what they do? Some of the worst examples are corporate communications agencies!
‘We deliver focused solutions on cross-barrier markets to build transparency and recognition in the global economy’ – what? Exactly.
Shouldn’t that read ‘Our strategic solutions help organisations be more transparent in their operations and build brand recognition. We do this by...’?
I’m not sure that is much better, but I’m not getting paid to do a proper job in a blog. But you get the idea, right?
When we develop messaging for our clients, we sometimes work backwards. Something like this:
What do we want the end user to do next or understand?
What are the end users' needs, desires or concerns?
What language do we use to effectively communicate our message?
Are there any additional messages we need to consider?
What is the main message we are trying to communicate?
Obviously, you don’t need to ask these questions backwards, but in our experience by doing it this way, the focus from the outset is shifted and the mindset of the clients and creative team becomes more focused. For instance, the first question is rarely considered when generating content, but surely it is the most important.
In our example of internal comms about an organisation change (whatever that might be), the answer to the first question above is significantly more than just understanding that things in the organisation are changing. For instance, it might involve staff reporting to team leaders in a different way or understanding the new purchase order system. All exciting stuff.
What is the best medium to communicate through?
Deciding what platform (Facebook, email, newsletter or meeting, for example) to deliver your message is very important and the most obvious solution is not always the best. We find that there are often far more creative and more importantly, engaging methods than the initial brief might suggest.
If the brief stipulates ‘just email a PDF or we just want to send an internal email out’, that’s fine. But Jenny the HR Director and Binky in the accounts department all get hundreds of emails a day and one from the management team is way down the list of ‘must read and respond’.
So perhaps a long yawning email isn’t the best way to engage. Here are a few ideas for our imaginary scenario to deliver the internal message that ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’.
Alternative ideas might be:
An animated explainer
An interactive game
A VoxPop video from a wider selection of team members (this gets some serious buy-in)
An incentivised poll or questionnaire
These proposed solutions do not need to cost a fortune, but they do need to be effective and a cheap solution that doesn't work, is no solution at all.
This article has illustrated a principle for effective corporate communications. The principles apply to a PR campaign, an email, a PowerPoint presentation or even a speech.
Speak to your agency at the very early stages of the project. Input, insight and experience make a big difference to results.