Human resources

How to communicate effectively with your stakeholders

Management team of a company communicating with different groups of stakeholders visually represented by a management team connected to different stakeholder groups by lines

Let’s face it – marketing can seem like a bit of a minefield when you’re a busy entrepreneur. When you’re occupied with new business meetings, dealing with suppliers and the other hundred and one things on your to-do list, embarking on a marketing campaign can seem like opening Pandora’s Box.

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But getting your offering in front of the right people is integral to its success, and a cleverly-crafted marketing campaign can help you achieve just that. Strapped for time? Here’s a cheat sheet to creating a good marketing strategy.

What are your marketing aims?

Before you start thinking about who you want to get in front of, you must seriously consider what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. This can be more than one thing, but remember to be reasonable with your expectations. For example, you might be:

Trying to get your product or service in front of potential customers

Figure out who you need to get in front of to fulfil your aims

The scattergun approach to writing a press release, paying a questionable newswire service to post it on a few websites that nobody reads, and then sitting back and hoping for the best will not cut the mustard if you’re serious about getting in front of the right people.

If you’ve created a sound business plan, you’ll know who your various stakeholders are. Let’s use an example. I’ve just set up a great new education tech company that teaches Swedish to secondary school children using a revolutionary method (over-dubbed One Direction songs) outside of class. I’m also looking for more investment. I’ve got loads of different stakeholders, and the message that I want to relay to each of them is slightly different. These stakeholders could be:

Once you’ve come up with an exhaustive list of stakeholders, make sure you’ve recorded them in a spreadsheet to keep track of your activity.

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Think about what you want to say and what they want to hear

If you get into the mindset of your potential stakeholders and what drives them, you’ll be able to craft messages that appeal to them more. Create personas by asking yourself the following questions:

Let’s take the parents of our secondary school pupils in my example. They’re likely to be between the ages of 35 and 50 and will be the ones buying the product for their beloved children. They probably don’t speak Swedish personally but are keen to see their child progress in their Swedish lessons at school, however, they are having problems convincing their troublesome teenager to do their homework (because they would rather swoon over Harry Styles on Twitter).

How does my product help address their pain points? It makes their life easier and helps them feel like good parents when their kids ace all of their Swedish exams at school. In this case, my marketing message might be: “My product makes learning fun, so your kids succeed without you having to moan at them.”

Track down where they hang out

You may have your marketing messages sorted, but if they’re not reaching the ears of your target audience, you’ve wasted your time. It’s important to think carefully about the types of places that each of your stakeholder groups goes to for information. Here are some of the biggies and how you might use them in your marketing efforts:

So if I’m trying to get in front of parents, the best course of actions is probably a PR campaign that gets attention from the national and broadcast press (unless they’re incredibly keen, parents are unlikely to reach any education trade press.) I would also make sure that I had ads on social networks targeting my chosen demographic with my key messages, and also make sure that my website was keyword optimised so that for any parent searching ‘how to get my child to do their Swedish homework’, my product would be the first thing that pops up in Google.

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This process should be repeated for each of my target stakeholders. It may seem like a complex process, but refining your messaging to the key needs of stakeholders means that your precious time is not wasted in the long run.

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