Communication is critical to the success of your brand. Whether internal or external, communication across your organization makes or breaks the relationship between your brand and your customers. Poor communication can even break relationships within your organization.

All communication from your brand should strive to convey your brand’s message clearly and concisely. Even one poorly conveyed message can negatively affect your brand. 

Understanding organizational communication, how it works, and why it matters to your brand is imperative to your brand’s success.

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Three Types of Organizational Communication

There are three types of organizational communication. Each type is critical to the success of your brand’s messaging and should be given equal weight when thinking about how to effectively utilize your communication. 

Three Major Types of Organizational Communication:

1. Employee engagement
2. Customer engagement
3. Public perception

Each of the three major types of organizational communication is integral to your business and leads to greater success in messaging. Having a solid approach to all three types of organizational communication requires having a comprehensive communication strategy. 

An effective strategy includes communicating with consistent messaging, establishing a recognizable brand for employees and customers, and delivering messages that are in line with your brand voice and mission.

But what can you do right now to improve your organizational communication? You can start by looking at your communication plan and formulating it around the three types of organizational communication. 

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Employee Engagement

Employee engagement includes all internal communications from email to in-person interactions, including the level of the employee’s interest or “positive feelings” towards your company and brand.  

Honest engagement builds trust between your employees and your brand. It feeds into positive morale within the organization and motivates your employees. Forthright communication also builds stronger working relationships and eliminates misinformation, disinformation, and mix-ups. 

Most importantly, honest and forthright communication ensures your employees have a voice and allows them to provide invaluable feedback. 

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How To Improve Employee Engagement

Hours-long in-person meetings held in uncomfortable conference rooms are ineffective. Conducting these with a presenter who flips through meaningless slides and flies through difficult charts is a terrible way to engage your employees. But the need for group communication lingers.

A second ineffective way to engage your employees is through one-way conversations. Rambling without engaging your employees, inviting questions, or asking for feedback ensures your employees tune you out.

Instead, give employees the power and encouragement to provide feedback when necessary, and involve them in major company discussions. After all, many of these discussions can be life-altering for your employees.

Community offers a large-scale text messaging platform where businesses can group their contacts via the Location Filter. This feature allows instant communication with members of your Community in your location segments. 

For example, you can group your employees into the same category on the Community platform and text them directly from one convenient place. Plus, the Community platform lets your employees text you back, creating a deeper connection with them. 

Keeping this clean, clear, and concise communication style with your employees is key in developing these relationships. 

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Customer Engagement

After building a positive communication style with your employees, ask yourself whether your customers are experiencing the same warmth and friendliness when they interact with your brand. Customer engagement is the direct relationship your brand has with your customers. What is your customer’s experience like with your brand? 

• Is it positive? 
• Will they return? 
• If a customer writes a review on social media, is it good? 

Top brands constantly ask these questions. 

The first important piece of customer engagement is communicating your brand’s message clearly to customers. 

Customer engagement runs much deeper than brand building, though. 

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Public Perception

Public perception is the relationship your brand has with the community at large. This audience includes:

• non-customers
• customers outside of your target audience
• would-be customers who haven’t made a purchase yet
• news outlets
• blogs
• commentators
• influencers in your businesses’ area
• and your competitors and peers
  

In today’s world of social media and influencers, it’s important to have a solid plan for positive public perception. According to a recent study by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, a dissatisfied customer will tell “between 9-15 people about their experience, and around 13% of dissatisfied customers will tell more than 20 people.” 

What’s worse, according to the same study 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain to the company about a bad experience; they share it with those 9 to 15 people. 

Unhappy customersare more likely to share their bad experiences (and with more people) than their good experiences. That’s why it is critical to incorporate a positive public perception strategy into your businesses’ organizational communication plan. 

Community allows you to communicate with a large audience at scale. Businesses and Leaders all use Community to have authentic one-on-one conversations with segments of their audience. Grouping these audience members into categories, then filtering those categories to send mass texts to your desired segments has a huge impact on the public perception of your brand. 

For example, if you recently had a product mishap with a certain segment of your audience, Community lets you filter those audience members and reach out to them directly via text message. 

This is a huge breakthrough in improving public perception as it drives your message directly to the audience members most affected. 

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Best Ways To Improve Public Perception

A positive customer experience goes a long way in determining your brand’s public perception. However, there are many more steps you can be taking to improve this perception right off the bat. 

For example, if there has been a recent mishap by your business it is best to address it straight away by acknowledging the incident and responding properly. This could be directly addressing the issue at hand, apologizing for it, correcting the issue, and ensuring the issue does not happen again. 

But what happens if there’s no easily identifiable issue plaguing your businesses’ reputation? Or if there are no current issues, how can you be ready or prepare for future ones? The simplest antidote is to monitor your company’s brand perception. 

Monitoring your brand’s image across media gives you first-hand intel on what your public perception is. If there are news stories about your company, are they overwhelmingly positive? Is there chatter about your product or service on social media, and if so, is it negative? 

How are the reviews for your products and services on review apps in your field? And if there aren’t any reviews available, how are you creating feedback loops for your customers to voice their opinions on your product or services? 

With Community’s text messaging system you can go directly to your audience and get their feedback. Community allows you to text your audience members on a mass scale and lets them text you back. 

Another key way to improve public perception is to keep a consistent message across all channels of communication. This goes hand-in-hand with the steps laid out above in the other two key areas of organizational communication. 

Keeping your brand’s messaging consistent avoids confusion and provides clarity for your customers and the public.

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Summary

Solid organizational communication is critical in every area of your business. Whether it’s internal relationships, relationships with your customer base, or relationships with the public, good organizational communication determines the ultimate success of your business. Community can be a powerful tool to help your business reach your organizational communication goals. 

Check out Community for more information. 

Sources:

Managing Organizational Communication - shrm.org 

CSAT stat of the month | An Unhappy Customer Tells 

Word Of Mouth Marketing Statistics, Fun Facts & Tips in 2020

What is Organizational Communication & Why is it Important?

How to Change the Way the Public Sees You in Public Relations

15 Statistics That Should Change the Business World – But Haven't