Charu is starting her own digital marketing consultancy. She wants to spread awareness around her business by contacting potential clients.
She decides to start an official newsletter to be sent to a self-composed email list. Comprising her past work, success stories and helpful statistics, her newsletter gains momentum as more and more of her potential clients show interest.
Charu’s email list keeps growing with each newsletter and she’s now ready to launch operations.
Emails, newsletters, blogs, etc. are all examples of external communication.
What Is External Communication?
In order for you to spread the message or tell people about your brand or mission, you have to use different forms of communication. When communication occurs between you and an external audience—customers, clients—it’s known as external communication.
Examples of external communication are:
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Events Or Conferences
Organizing networking events and conferences gives you a chance to speak directly to prospective clients. It’s a great way to showcase what you have to offer, address their concerns and sell your brand. Events are excellent because they help you connect to people you may be in business with someday.
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Client Pitches And Presentations
External communication in an organization also deals with informing stakeholders about what you do. There are times when you have to pitch your product or service to a client or deliver a presentation. You have to present it in a way that’s engaging, interesting and appealing.
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Email Marketing
Today, it’s all about reaching the masses but still adding a personal touch. The way to do that is to create an email list with potential clients or your particular audience. Either you can develop a newsletter or a PR kit that you can email to prospective recipients. Not only is this a good way to communicate about your brand but it also helps you gauge your audience’s response.
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Official Blogs
Blogs are an integral part of every e-commerce business. Content that’s tailored, high in quality and informative makes your business accessible to clients or users. You can start a blog online, come up with topics that work for your business and what you want to say to them. It’s a personalized platform and an effective external communication strategy where you can experiment with ideas, study your audience and build a brand.
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Social Media
Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach the masses. External business communication is incomplete without a social media strategy. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you can directly communicate with your customer, ask for ideas and roll out campaigns on any of these platforms.
Other examples include press releases, live events or even conferences. There’s no limit to how you can communicate your brand presence to the world. External communication in an organization impacts your growth as a brand and a business. Investing in long-term external communication strategies for your business can give you a sustained competitive advantage.
How To Build An External Communications Strategy
The customer is at the heart of every business. Organizations may employ different strategies for user conversion, but they understand the importance of building lasting customer relationships through external business communication.
Brands like Nike, Coca-Cola and Apple thrive on their market standing and consumer loyalty. We are likely to trust their products for quality assurance over others. These brands have built loyalty toward their products with concentrated efforts in external communication.
Let’s see how you can grow as a brand with the help of external communication:
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Create A Consumer Profile
Many times, organizations dive headfirst into strategy without really understanding their consumer. Yes, you want to enter the apparel business, but do you understand the demographic? Are you targeting the right age group? What about environmental impact? These are important factors that help you make informed decisions about how to roll out strategies. Customers need to be central to your planning because they are the end-users.
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Run Campaigns To Interact With Your Audience
A fresh take on surveys and gathering customer insights is asking them questions via social media. Many brands run campaigns where they ask questions and record responses from their audience. Developing a product or service that’s directly based on what the consumer wants is often better than a shot in the dark.
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Focus On Quality Over Quantity
You may run the risk of overcompensating with content if you develop too much too soon. You must remember to pace yourself and focus on quality communication.
Communication is part verbal and part nonverbal. Speaking well, communicating your message and establishing your brand are all part of the process. One skill that’ll help you do more with your brand is powerful communication. Harappa’s Speaking Effectively course will teach you how you deliver impactful messages. Whether it’s delivering presentations or attending a networking event, you can learn how to stand out from the crowd. Frameworks like The Three Appeals of Logos-Ethos-Pathos or Reasoning-Credibility-Emotion will teach you how to speak with confidence, empathy and precision.
Explore topics such as What is Communication, Business Communication, Types of Communication, Channels of Communication & Vertical Communication from Harappa Diaries and learn to effectively perceive, respond and interact with others.