What Every Small Business Needs To Know About Communications Synergy

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The world of marketing and advertising is a place that is governed by a number of different things. But what they all add up to is impressions.
Impressions are, quite simply opportunities, to put your branded identity in front of the prospects in your target audience.
These impressions are made in just about every way you can conceive of from both on and offline ads and commercials to your web site right down to your business card and company letterhead and the signage on your vehicles and buildings.
This also includes the kinds of things you and your sales people say to prospects in sales and networking opportunities.

Impressions Are Paramount

These impressions are very important for three main reasons:
1. They give people information about your products or services.
2. They maintain your company’s awareness and
3. They demonstrate and reinforce the character of your company.
Put together over any given period of time, these impressions create what is called your Effective Reach, one of the few marketing terms that means exactly what it says.

Synergy Is Directly Proportional To Effective Reach

Synergy is a way to describe how all the elements of your communication program connect with and reinforce each other, both in terms design, information and voice.
The greater the synergy that is built into your communications elements, the stronger your effective reach will be. Because the accumulation of impressions can have either a building effect or a flattening effect depending on how much or how little synergy is built into the elements of your communications program.

Why A Lot Of Businesses Struggle With Synergy

The main reason is that, while they may have an understanding of the principles that make good communications, they don’t have the kind of expertise required to actually create and maintain this synergy across the board.
In the ad agency business where I grew up, synergy was very much a part of campaign thinking.
We called it look and feel.
As digital media started to play a larger role in the communication process, absolute synergy became harder to maintain because, in the beginning, the web design process, for example, was put in the hands of people who were just a notch above programmers and almost total right brain thinkers.
So they would design sites based on functionality and pretty much ignored synergy, because they didn’t really understand it or its importance in the communications process.
And that’s still the case in a lot of businesses these days. What these people don’t realize is that every time you create a communication element that doesn’t have synergy with your core branding, the impression that element makes will have little or no effect on your overall effective reach.

How To Make Sure You Are Achieving Maximum Synergy

1. Hire or contract a professional creative person or team to create or upgrade your corporate identity and communications program.
2. Give them the control they need to expand your branding synergistically into all areas of your communications.
3. Work with them to learn how they go about creating synergy, even in areas in which they may not normally be involved (packaging, internal communications, sales support etc.)
If you do these simple things you will have both a well-defined brand dentity and a highly effective reach.
This means your prospects will know who you are and what you can do for them no matter how they come to know about you.
It means that your awareness will grow through time and you won’t find yourself in a one-step-forward-and-two steps-back situation.
And it means that your prospects will also know, that because you have a strong identity and real synergy in your communications, you are a company that knows what it’s doing, and that always creates a very positive pre-disposition.
In today’s highly competitive world, you need every advantage you can get in your branding and communications. When done right the investment in synergy is very worthwhile.