Business owners understand the importance of growth; it is key to the success of a company. This blog post explores the reasons in which communication plays a critical part in growing your business and what can be done to make use of it.

By maintaining a consistent image for your customers

From branding and style, to messaging and customer service - a consistent image is key. We’ve already established that we can use communication more efficiently in order to improve the customer experience (link to Chapter One), but it’s also important to highlight the importance of keeping a consistent image visually; throughout your branding, style and messaging. These are crucial in business growth as they contribute to building your reputation whilst increasing brand awareness.

By keeping frequent communication with customers

A misconception of regular communication with customers is that it can be seen as being too pushy and spammy, which in turn, drives the customers away. After all, if the customer has a problem with your product or service, then they would directly come to you - right? Wrong.

"For every customer who bothers to complain, 26 other customers remain silent" - White House Office of Consumers and Affairs (Source)

By communicating just the right amount to ensure that customers are always up-to-date and by being clear in your messages, you can effectively communicate whilst satisfying your customers and reducing churn. It’s also worth noting that it’s always important to take feedback on board from customers and to show appreciation; for instance, if a customer prefers to be contact by email, or phone - you should try to respect their wishes (when possible) to make sure your communication is efficient whilst keeping your customers happy (read Chapter 4 for more information on this).

By ensuring that your content is always up-to-date

Happy customers equal a happy business. Keep your customers excited by continually offering new resources, content and information - whether that’s in the form of whitepapers, video tutorials or e-books. Out of date content should be removed, whilst existing content that has potential can simply be refreshed. You can regularly cover new topics, interview industry influencers and start conversations with your customers.

Keeping content up-to-date will show your customers that they are valued and that you want to support them further than just selling you your product or service. In the long run, you’ll be improving brand loyalty whilst reducing customer churn; just like when you’re keeping up with frequent communication (see the point above).

In fact, you can go further than ensuring that your content is always up-to-date - you can choose to segment your content by interest and industry in order to maximise its effectiveness. It is notable that the one thing better than having up-to-date content is having relevant up-to-date content. Customers will be much more likely to feel engaged and show loyalty to your company if you’re providing them with valuable information and insights that they never realised they needed. They will also be happy if you provide them with visual content. You can use editable poster templates to make visually appealing posters that convey valuable information in an engaging way.

By continually monitoring, measuring and modifying

It is always important to know how communication is being used in your business and to make adaptations when necessary. Developing a concise communication strategy and policy can be one way of doing this, as they are designed to help yourself and your business to communicate more effectively, to meet core organisational objectives and to enable your business to communicate in a more focused manner.

Upgrading to the cloud

With cloud-based solutions becoming a viable option for businesses in recent years (thanks to its easy implementation and subscription-based pricing), it’s worth considering this route if you want to offer customers a more secure way of working in unison with your business (as opposed to using on-premises software or even the traditional filing cabinets). 

While one of the foremost benefits of cloud-based solutions is the ability to improve communication and collaboration (think: real-time conversations and comments, file approvals and version control); such solutions can also work to overcome the barrier of business growth through increased transparency, flexibility and security.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the facts vs. fiction of using cloud computing for business here.