Tips and Tricks: Communications Planning for Small Businesses

Written By Jodi Duncan

Whether your business is a one-person show or has 25 employees, you know that planning is smart ... and it's usually time-consuming, sometimes confusing and often frustrating. To ease the pain, include the following in your advertising and communications planning efforts:

1. Define and understand your brand. Know who you are and what you offer. This is more than a simple description of your product or service. This is understanding the solution you provide and the experience people have with you/your product or service. You then need to set parameters about how you communicate that brand experience.

2. Set specific objectives. Do you want to increase sales? By how much? Do you want your phone to ring more? If so, who do you want calling?

3. Know who you are trying to reach. Profile your audience. Is it men? Women? What ages? What income levels? Where do they live? What do they need from you?

4. Determine your budget. What can you afford to spend?

Once you have answered these questions, you can start to dig a bit deeper:

1. Consider your key message. What do you want people to think about your company? What do they need to know about your product or service? How can they find you?

2. What is your strategy to reach people? This is challenging. You need to consider your budget, who you are reaching, when, where, why and how.

3. MEASURE. This is easy some of the time and very difficult the other part of the time. You can easily measure hits and visits to your websites or inquiries based on an ad or special offers. It is more difficult to measure who has heard of you and then ensuring they know to call you should a need arise.

4. Perform measurements frequently and analyze the gathered information to improve your outreach efforts.