Recap: 5 Tips For Creating Communications With Impact

We would like to give a shoutout on our blog today to NewMR and thank Ray Poynter for bringing us on as the Platinum Sponsor for the rest of events happening in 2014. Today we sat with Ray Poynter, NewMR and Lucy Davison, the Managing Director from Keen as Mustard while she discussed Research Communications: Getting it Right. The presentation will be available here to play in case you missed out along with other NewMR lectures from May 2014.

Before diving into the 5 tips for creating communications with impact, Lucy's presentation opened up with a great introduction about how the field of communication and journalism works differently than market research. It's becoming more challenging for us to filter through all of this accessible information, tell the right story and spot the gorilla. Market research spends more time collecting and analyzing data and tends to stop after filtering through the information and doesn't follow through with the story. On the other hand, journalists quickly collect and sort through information and spend the majority of time visualizing and telling the story. However, the world is changing and the impact it is having on the way we think and gather information in both journalism and market research fields. The world we live and work in today is one where we expect everything to be intuitive and accessible. Do you think this is harming the way we think? Has the whole IoT (Internet of Things) concept damaged our ability to be authentic and put forward intellectual effort?

The world IS changing. Is the Internet harming the way we think? #NewMR #IoT pic.twitter.com/Drj3wS9bA3
— Survey Analytics (@surveyanalytics) May 14, 2014

The 5 Tips for Creating Communications with Impact

1.    Know your audience and target

The way we communicate things all starts with knowing who we are communicating to. Sure, we can quickly identify who is a target to buy our products and services, but it's a fuzzy subject. Really knowing your target audience, who makes the purchasing decisions and why they do requires a deeper dive and different approach. The clearer your target audience is defined, the easier it will be to get through to them and define clear goals for your target.

2.    Stick to the story, delete everything else and avoid ambiguity

Refer to this tip as your elevator speech. It needs to be clear and to the point where everyone in your organization can communicate it the same way and it can be clearly receptive to who is listening. For instance, many corporations operate in separate departments that handle and work things in a different way. Talking to someone in marketing is different than talking to someone in say, IT. What they do for the organization may be completely different. That story you tell has to be a structured message to bridge the gap and open as one power packed punch across the entire organization. "At Survey Analytics, we help companies listen."

3.    Work like a communication agency and use a brief

This tip is golden! The communication of your research is important, so work more like a communication agency. For instance, you can never begin a creative project without a creative brief and laying down the project information first. You must know your target first, the details of what you will need to do to get there and have a picture of the end result before taking on any new project.

4.    Manage Time

We love timelines and roadmaps to track the status and manage the time we are taking to complete any given item. Like mentioned in the introduction, we are putting less and less intellectual effort into things we do and expecting things turned around faster than ever before. It's important to manage your time effectively so you can still deliver a high quality of work over quantity.

5.    Get Professional Help

You don't have to be an expert and master of everything. Know when to outsource something or ask for help in finding the fine line of how to break down your data and identify the key results. It's important to keep our main focus on what we are best at and keep in touch with our passions. Although it may sound simple and be simple to set up, do you really have the time to add this into your list of long duties as an ongoing responsibility? Do you have the expertise to step up to the next level when it's needed?

Again, these 5 tips were a part of Lucy Davison from Keen as Mustard's presentation for NewMR that aired on May 14, 2014. The presentation will be available here to catch up on if you are interested in checking it out along with other lectures from NewMR in May of 2014. What are some of your tips and secrets to making your communications stick and make a bigger impact? We would love to hear them and keep the conversation going!