Don’t waste your time and money on the wrong communications priorities – Online workshop

DOES THIS SITUATION SEEM FAMILIAR TO YOU?

  • “We’re not getting the results we want from our messaging. We suspect that we’re chasing after the wrong communications priorities. But, we don’t know how to reprioritize.”
  • “We need to do a communications health check. We’re concerned that we’re investing in unnecessary work that gets us nowhere. We’re also concerned that we’re missing out on key issues.”
  • “We’re being told what a great job we’re doing creatively and in our media selection. The problem is that these may reflect the wrong priorities. How do we see if we’re focusing on the right things?”

Highlights of the discussion about the 2-hour workshop (7 minutes)

  • THE CHALLENGE WE ADDRESS

    Are you wasting your resources on the wrong communication opportunities?

    • Most people do not know that there are 24 communications opportunities. These are levers you can use to grow sales and improve how your brand is perceived.
    • If you do not consider all of them, they may cause your communications campaign to underperform.
    • Typically, people focus on the 7 opportunities that they are most familiar with and ignore the rest. That is because working out which of the 24 opportunities is a priority is complicated.
    • This means that you overspend where you do not need to while ignoring critical opportunities.
    • It would be reassuring to have a process and an algorithm to help you prioritize these opportunities. Comprehensively, fast, and online. Irrespective of the business you are in. So that you do not make the wrong decision.
      
  • WHY YOU SHOULD USE THIS

    WHAT THIS ONLINE WORKSHOP DOES

    Identify communications priorities, within 2 hours, so you can deploy your time and money on the most important communications levers, even if you have limited marketing experience.

    HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT FROM IT

    Run through an online, comprehensive Communications Health Check in a 2-hour online workshop

    • This means you will be asked relevant questions to understand what your communications priorities should be, even if you do not have a communications background.
    • You get to do this anywhere it is convenient for you.
    • Results will be provided immediately in the workshop.

    Get an independent perspective without any further commitments

    • Get an independent party to ask the right questions using a proven methodology.
    • You will get the results immediately and can use them with any of your suppliers to develop a way forward.

    Benefit from a comprehensive process

    • A detailed series of about 50 Yes/No questions are used.
    • They are tested and customized for your situation to understand exactly what your brand is facing.
    • We link your challenges to 24 potential areas of communications leverage. To do this, we access about 1,200 strategies to see what matters most.
    • This means you have peace of mind that the process is comprehensive and customized for your circumstances.

    Avoid the bias that sometimes affects insights of this nature

    • We have run this across many clients in many industries. After these experiences, our tool was refined to get the relevant information while lessening the bias that can be an issue.
    • This means that there is less influence to slant the findings in a particular direction.
  • WHERE YOU CAN USE THIS

    Communications Health Check

    • Useful for quality control to spot problems.
    • A quick and private Communications Health Checkup to see if everything is okay.
    • Change focus as your business and brand grow.

    Eliminate Unnecessary Work

    • Limit the cost of producing unnecessary creative work. Even if you do it yourself.
    • Focus on opportunities that matter most.

    Prioritize Communication Opportunities

    • Quickly and easily identify communications opportunities.
    • Have the peace of mind that you are not missing out on opportunities.

    Adjust Your Direction

    • Perhaps things are fine, but something has changed and you need to adjust ahead of time.
    • Have some preparation for the unexpected.

    Need To Get Help Fast

    • Communications not working out the way you had hoped?
    • An impartial view if you are concerned your team is not on the right track.
    • Instant feedback so you do not have to wait for an opinion when time is limited.

    Impartial Thinking

    • Handle sensitive issues with greater ease.
    • Useful if team members disagree on what to focus on.
    • Essential if everyone is heading off in the wrong direction.

    Translate Business Challenges

    • Not a communications specialist?
    • Convert business challenges into communications opportunities.
    • No consultant is necessary.

    Quality Control

    • Different skillsets?
    • Adopt a process to ensure your marketing team has covered key bases irrespective of their experience.
  • HOW THE PROCESS WORKS

    The Workshop

    • We will run you through a 2-hour online workshop to identify priority communications opportunities using The Communications Profiler
    • The Communications Profiler helps you quickly identify priority communications opportunities for your specific requirements.
    • We start by confirming the scope of this workshop by selecting the name of a business, product, service, market, and segment you will be reviewing (Useful if you do several of these over time and wish to compare results).

    THE REST OF THE QUESTIONS IN THE CATEGORIES WE EXPLORE ONLY REQUIRE A YES OR NO RESPONSE. THESE CATEGORIES INCLUDE:

    How well are you known and differentiated?

    • Are you communicating something that is unknown?
    • Do you have an established reputation?
    • Are you perceived as being different?

    Each aspect will result in different weightings of priorities.

    What is the performance like?

    • How is business? Are sales growing? Are sales declining? Are there market share issues? (We do NOT require actual sales figures at all.)
    • Do we need to change the game to be differentiated?

    These all affect how the challenge is pursued due to prevailing obstacles.

    How long is the selling cycle?

    • This affects many aspects of prospect availability and how and when we communicate.
    • This has a strong effect on where you prioritize opportunities.

    Identify risk levels associated with the purchase

    • It helps to identify the types of perceived risks that need to be mitigated by the communications.

    Levels of competitiveness

    • What level of challenge are you facing?
    • How competitive is it?
    • How many communications are there?

    This affects a variety of issues simultaneously.

    What is your reputation?

    • Is there admiration for the business and its brands?
    • Are there issues to be resolved?
    • What are the levels of trust?
    • In which direction is sentiment moving?

    Affects where and how much we place our focus on certain opportunities.

    Define your social credibility status

    • Are you getting recommendations?
    • Are you getting good reviews?

    What you will receive

    A comprehensive analysis

    • Your input is run against 1,200 potential strategies.
    • This identifies the priority communications opportunities available to you. 

    Instant results

    • Once you have submitted your input, you have your results.
    • No waiting. Great when you need answers fast.

    Easy to understand

    • Final scores for each of the 24 communication opportunities are indexed on a chart.
    • You get the message fast without needing further interpretation.

    Learn more

    • Every single opportunity is also explained concisely.
    • This is useful to avoid confusion in case you are not certain or need someone else to take this further.

    Export your results

    • Export your result so you can view it and share it.
    • Exports are in the format of an Excel or CSV file.
      
  • OUR EXPERIENCE

    Clients

    • We have worked on over 70 global and local B2C and B2B brands over a period of over 20 years.
    • Clients have included Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries.

    Expertise

    • Areas of expertise include communications strategy, brand strategy, research, and analytics.
    • We have written strategies or have been consulted to understand how a client’s strategy might benefit from a change in direction.

    Experience

    • This experience has been invaluable in terms of understanding what is likely to work.
    • Equally importantly, it has helped us identify what is likely to fail.

    How this works to your advantage

    • After working on numerous strategies, and going through many campaign debriefs, we noticed that most clients focused almost entirely on creative strategy and media strategy.
    • There was an assumption that communications opportunities were well understood and agreed upon. But this was not accurate.
    • Therefore, a focus on execution before understanding exactly what needed to be done to best fit the business’ challenges was an area that required improvement.
    • We aimed to close this gap by helping to automate the process of translating business challenges into communications opportunities.
    • This helps to prevent a focus on communications opportunities that are unlikely to deliver, while not highlighting other options that may be quite rewarding.
    • We started by identifying the questions to ask to assess the business’ current situation. It had to be comprehensive but easy to answer with Yes/No choices.
    • It also had to eliminate unnecessary questions by customizing questions based on previous responses to make the process faster and simpler.
    • Over 1,200 strategies were used to identify the best opportunities based on the responses provided. This was automated to be comprehensive.
    • Outcomes are then compared to one another and indexed for easy presentation.
    • Explanations of each type of communications opportunity are also provided, just in case.
  • ESSENTIAL REQUIREMENTS & FAQ

    WILL IT WORK FOR MY SITUATION?

    • This has been tested across different brands and categories.
    • This covers existing businesses and new businesses.
    • It also covers existing products and services, and new products and services.

    DOES THIS WORK FOR SERVICES TOO?

    • Yes. In fact, it works especially well for service businesses.
    • It also works well for product businesses with a service component.

    HAS IT BEEN TESTED EXTENSIVELY?

    Before launching this service, we had successfully tested this approach in over 40 client workshops across different brands and categories.

    HOW CAN I TRUST THE RESULTS?

    • We have built-in a variety of fail-safe mechanisms to ensure that one “incorrect” response will not bias the results.
    • We ask many questions and customize these based on your prior responses so that you do not waste your time on a generic questionnaire.
    • Your responses are run against 1,200 potential strategies ensuring we do not miss anything.

     

THE CHALLENGE

Here’s the problem you face

Most people do not know that there are 24 communications opportunities. These are levers you can use to grow sales and improve how your brand is perceived.

  • If you do not consider all of them to identify the best ones to prioritize, they will cause your communications campaign to underperform.
  • This is due to underspending where you could get a benefit and overspending where there is likely no benefit. Simply put, investing in the wrong places harms your ROI.
  • Because they are levers, some of them could also get outsized benefits for relatively little effort and cost. As long as you consider them so you can use them.

After over 20 years and working with dozens of client teams, we found that people focus on the 7 opportunities that they are most familiar with and ignore the rest.

  • That is because working out which of the 24 opportunities is a priority is complicated.
  • Most people can’t even tell you what all those 24 points of leverage are. So they aren’t even fully aware of their playing field and the game that they are a part of.
OUTNUMBERED

Which means you face growth and profitability challenges. Sometimes it even means you will go out of business.

Missed communications opportunities are like an iceberg

  • Most of the iceberg is below the water. Invisible to the eye. It can sink you! Similarly, if you do not aware of, consider all of your communications opportunities, they may sink your communications campaign. Or only cause it to underperform if you’re lucky.
  • This means that you overspend where you do not need to spend or invest your time while ignoring critical opportunities.
  • Overspending on what does not work raises your acquisition cost. But, the real danger arises when you underspend in areas that are critical.

Focusing on only a few of your communications opportunities is like starting a game of chess with fewer than a third of the pieces you could be using.

  • Why would any rational person do that? It clearly puts you at a disadvantage.
  • Yet, many of us behave this way when planning communication priorities. Then, we wonder why we’re not getting the results we need.
HOW IT WORKS

Here is how this solution works

Let me introduce you to our online workshop to identify communications priorities, within 2 hours, so you can deploy your time and money on the most important communications levers, even if you have limited marketing experience.

THIS CAN DELIVER ANY OF THESE EIGHT BENEFITS:

  1. Communications Health Check
  • Useful for quality control to spot problems.
  • A quick and private Communications Health Checkup to see if everything is okay.
  • Change focus as your business and brand grow.

2. Eliminate Unnecessary Work

  • Limit the cost of producing unnecessary creative work. Even if you do it yourself.
  • Focus on opportunities that matter most.

3. Become Aware of and Prioritize Communication Opportunities

  • Quickly and easily identify communications opportunities.
  • Have the peace of mind that you are not missing out on opportunities.

4. Adjust Your Direction

  • Perhaps things are fine, but something has changed and you need to adjust ahead of time.
  • Have some preparation for the unexpected.

5. Need To Get Help Fast?

  • Communications not working out the way you had hoped?
  • An impartial view if you are concerned your team is not on the right track.
  • Instant feedback so you do not have to wait for an opinion when time is limited.

6. Impartial Thinking

  • Handle sensitive issues with greater ease.
  • Useful if team members disagree on what to focus on. 
  • Having an independent person ask the questions through this online session can be useful.
  • Essential if everyone is heading off in the wrong direction.

7. Translate Business Challenges

  • Not a communications specialist?
  • Convert business challenges into communications opportunities.
  • No consultant is necessary.

8. Quality Control

  • Different skillsets?
  • Adopt a process to ensure your marketing team has covered key bases irrespective of their experience.
  THE PROCESS 1

IT FOLLOWS THIS PROCESS

We will run you through a 2-hour online workshop to identify priority communications opportunities using The Communications Profiler

The Communications Profiler helps you quickly identify communications opportunities for your specific requirements and prioritize these by their importance.

We start by confirming the scope of this workshop.

  • Confirm the business, product, service, market, and segment you will be reviewing
  • This is useful if you do several online workshops over time and wish to compare results. 

Then we take you through a variety of approximately 50 questions that have been tested and refined over several years.

  • These questions only require a Yes/No response. This is based on our experience doing this over a variety of industries, categories, and clients over a number of years.
  • You do not have to reveal any sales data, only directionality. i.e. Increasing or decreasing.

The nature of the questions we ask includes the following topics:

How well are you known and differentiated?

  • Are you communicating something that is unknown?
  • Do you have an established reputation?
  • Are you perceived as being different?

Each aspect will result in different weightings of priorities.

What is performance like?

  • How is business? Are sales growing? Are sales declining? Are there market share issues? (We do NOT require actual sales figures at all)
  • Do we need to change the game to be differentiated?

These all affect how the challenge is pursued due to prevailing obstacles.

How long is the selling cycle?

  • This affects many aspects of prospect availability and how and when we communicate.
  • This has a strong effect on where you prioritize opportunities.

Risk levels associated with the purchase

  • It helps to identify the types of perceived risks that need to be mitigated by the communications.
  • We measure your challenge according to a variety of potential perceived risks.

Levels of competitiveness

  • What level of challenge are you facing?
  • How competitive is it?
  • How many communications are there?

This affects a variety of issues simultaneously.

Quality of reputation

  • Is there admiration for the business and its brands?
  • Are there issues to be resolved?
  • What are the levels of trust?
  • In which direction is sentiment moving?

Affects where and how much we place our focus on certain opportunities.

Social credibility

  • Are you getting recommendations?
  • Are you getting good reviews?
THE RESEARCH BEHIND THIS

The research behind this

We have worked on over 70 global and local B2C and B2B brands since 1999.

Clients have included Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries.

Areas of expertise include communications strategy, brand strategy, research, and analytics.

  • We have written strategies or have been consulted to understand how a client’s strategy might benefit from a change in direction.
  • This experience has been invaluable in terms of understanding what is likely to work. Equally importantly, it has helped us identify what is likely to fail.

After working on numerous strategies, and going through many campaign debriefs, we noticed that most clients focused almost entirely on creative strategy and media strategy.

  • There was an assumption that communications opportunities were well understood and agreed upon. But this was not accurate.
  • Therefore, a focus on execution before understanding exactly what needed to be done to best fit the business’ challenges was an area that required improvement.
  • We aimed to close this gap by helping to automate the process of translating business challenges into communications opportunities.
  • This builds quality control into this process by helping to consider a wider scope of opportunities consistently.
  • This helps to prevent a focus on communications opportunities that are unlikely to deliver while highlighting other options that may be quite rewarding.

We started by identifying the questions to ask to assess the business’ current situation. It had to be comprehensive but easy to answer with Yes/No choices.

  • It also had to eliminate unnecessary questions by customizing questions based on previous responses to make the process faster and simpler.
  • Over 1,200 strategies were used to identify the best opportunities based on the responses provided. This was automated to be comprehensive.
  • Outcomes are then compared to one another and indexed for easy presentation.
  • Explanations of each type of communication opportunity are also provided, just in case.

Works across a variety of situations

  • This has been tested across different brands and categories.
  • This covers existing businesses and new businesses.
  • It also covers existing products and services, and new products and services.
  STILL UNSURE

Not sure about this approach and need more information?

Complete version of the discussion about the 2-hour workshop (24 minutes)

What you will receive

1. A 2-hour online workshop

  • To identify communications priorities, so you can deploy your time and money on the most important communications levers, even if you have limited marketing experience.
  • To discuss the findings.

2. Once-off use of The Communications Profiler that normally sells for $69.99, at no additional charge.

3. 90 days of access to The Communications Profiler workspace so you:

  • have time to read through the findings,
  • better understand each of the 24 communications levers, and
  • export these findings for use elsewhere if you wish.

THIS ALSO INCLUDES THESE FIVE BENEFITS:

1. Instant findings

  • Once you have submitted your input, you have your results. Right there in the workshop.
  • No waiting. No setting up a time for a follow-up presentation. Which is great when you need answers fast. Because it’s ready to be discussed right there and then, you can start thinking about your next steps.

2. A comprehensive analysis

  • Your input is run against 1,200 potential strategies.
  • We know that it makes more sense to automate the implications of the workshop inputs. So that we don’t ignore potentially critical inputs. And we can do this consistently every time.
  • This identifies the priority communications opportunities available to you.

3. Findings that are easy to understand

  • Final scores for each of the 24 communication opportunities are indexed on a chart by order of magnitude. Anything greater than 1 is a priority. That’s it.
  • You get the message fast without needing further interpretation. And it’s easier to share this thinking.

4. Learn more

  • Every single opportunity is also explained concisely.
  • This is useful to avoid confusion in case you are not certain of what each lever means.

5. Export your results

  • Export your result so you can view it and share it.
  • Exports are in the format of an Excel or CSV file.

 

IS IT WORTH IT

Is it worth the price?

There are examples of brands who focused on their priority communications opportunities to change their destiny forever. That’s all they needed. But they did things differently.

Still not convinced? Try to calculate the cost of not using this…

This cost includes:

  1. The cost of trying to figure this out on your own with YouTube videos, e-Books, blogs, articles, etc. You know the time this will take. Especially when you’re wasting your time on opportunities that may never work out or are really low priorities.
  2. The cost of never even being aware that certain levers exist. So, you miss out on those opportunities. Blissfully unaware. And your Cost Per Acquisition stays high when it shouldn’t have to be.
  3. The cost of a freelancer to put this together for you.
  4. The time you are spending on this already, without getting a positive result. While your competitors are taking your clients.
  5. The higher acquisition costs due to wastage, since you’re spending your money in the wrong places. And even worse if it’s your time that you can never replace.
  6. The cost of not getting additional clients. And how it can kill your business and raise your average servicing cost.

 

SCEPTICAL

Yes, I read through your research process above. But, I’m still skeptical. Will this work for me? And how do I know it really works for my situation?

Works for product and services business

  • It works especially well for service businesses.
  • It also works well for product businesses with a service component.

Works for new and existing businesses and brands

  • Because we had to cater for all eventualities when building this.
  • We had worked with a variety of different clients so we could develop this thinking accordingly.

Extensive testing

  • Before launching this service, we had successfully tested this approach in over 40 client workshops across different brands and categories.
  • These included a variety of Fortune 500 companies across industries and categories. 

Trustworthiness of results

  • We have built-in a variety of fail-safe mechanisms to ensure that one “incorrect” response will not bias the results.
  • We ask many questions and customize these based on your prior responses so that you do not waste your time on a generic questionnaire.
  • Your responses are run against 1,200 potential strategies ensuring we do not miss anything.

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