While you may be a business-savvy person, one who is quite the expert at operating and managing the business, communicating with people requires a special skill if you’re aiming to build a sustainable successful business. A strategic communications consultant can help you achieve that while sparing you the extra hassle of having to craft and manage your business media as well.
Simply put, a strategic communications consultant is concerned with everything that is media-related to your business, from internal communication between your different departments to external communications with your potential clients and your existing ones.
What does a communications consultant do?
On the internal level, a strategic communications consultant acts more like a medium, helping you build a strong and solid team that is able to communicate effectively with one another, providing you with the optimal results. They help by drawing up an internal communication policy, or, to put it in an actionable term, a framework that is professionally planned to minimize problems and increase productivity.
Communication consultants can sit with your team, learn their points of weaknesses and strengths, define the areas of differences with the intention of serving you to reshuffle your calibers for your business’s best interest. Through employing the most effective problem-solving techniques, they can clear up any miscommunication that may arise for better interactions. Because let’s face it, a weak team reflects badly on business revenues.
On the external level, well, that is where the challenge resides. With the highly competitive nature that defines today’s market, employing a communications consultant will definitely know how to turn the tides in your business’s favor. Keep reading to find out how.
- Shaping your business’s public persona
The dilemma of creating and retaining a brand identity isn’t something to be shrugged off. With millions of businesses worldwide, providing similar products or services, you need to stand out and have a unique presence. If you are lost on that, a professional communications consultant team can help extract your business edge even if you feel like it’s buried miles deep.
Through extensive research and client surveys, they find the right tools to create a mental image for your public that they can easily recall whenever your brand is mentioned. Long gone are the days when a business is just about the product or service they provide. Today, it’s about investing in the emotional involvement of your potential leads to convert it to sales. It starts with your business logo and ranges from how it resonates and relates to your clientele, all the way to the colors and your style of speech.
- Powerful messages
No more of the direct, cutthroat advertisements that clearly push the audience to buy or endorse your service. People are smarter than this; they have gained the much-feared awareness that threatens even the best of the best advertisements. You can easily spot a social service campaign that is launched by the biggest brands to stir a buzz and contribute positively to the world, and you might think that this is very hard to attain.
In fact, employing the right communications consultant will seal the obvious ad and link it to a cause, one that can move the audience to think differently about your business. As the Alfred communications consultancy team puts it, there is more than one way this is provided to your business, but they all fall under the content category. It’s all about delivering big moments rather than momentous messages that are destined to die within minutes.
- Dodging a bullet
When times get tough, especially in the public eye, a communications consultant is much needed to provide you with the best strategy for crisis management. In other words, how to turn lemons into lemonade. Having an unsatisfied customer is a staple for every business as there is no such thing as 100% positive feedback, but knowing the right words to say at the right time requires special skills.
That’s when your consultant steps in, for the heavy stuff, and guides you through one of the most dreaded business times to cross that bridge safely. It usually comprises dealing with the complaint—or in worse cases, the scandal—through press releases, social media posts and frequent updates, and a solution that you can adopt for future use.
- Expanding the reach
Strategic communications consultants are there to link the core of your business with your potential clients. In this case, their services start with creating an all-around marketing plan, from generating the right messages, to selecting the most suitable media platform to communicate with them effectively, and seeing to the perfect execution of such marketing plan.
They have the most appropriate marketing mix strategy at hand to carefully plant and position your business among competitors. Their marketing services can range from traditional to online, acting like a freelance marketing team. The options to achieve this are versatile, but the most important thing is to know how to adjust whenever there is a change in the market or a rising competitor.
Hiring a strategic communications consultant is money well invested. They can help you create your business brand identity, craft compelling messages, draw up an effective marketing plan, and cleverly manage client-related crises.