How can you make an impact in your business? I am not talking about impressing the boss with your ‘can do’ attitude; I mean demonstrating real impact through uplift in sales, opportunities for growth and positioning your business as a market leader.

You might argue that this is the job of your sales and marketing teams and you would be right to some extent. But real impact isn’t driven by individual teams, its driven and achieved by a holistic approach to communications across the whole business.

What does this mean in practice? Here is our countdown to impact.

5. Link to business objectives. Communications, whether it’s via your sales team or your marketing efforts, must be aligned to your core business objectives. Communications shouldn’t be a vanity exercise – it should mean something at board level if you want to deliver real change.

4. Greatness doesn’t work in silos. Speaking of your sales and marketing teams, how closely do they work together? Are they sharing the same values and messages? Are they working together to turn outbound content into inbound leads? Impact doesn’t work in silos and you could be missing potential customers or growth opportunities between the cracks.

3. Who do you think you’re talking to? Does the content and messages you use mean anything to your audience? How much do you know about your audience and how they consume content? Are they mostly online and if so which channels? In today’s world, it’s not enough to count column inches in your trade press or work from databases; innovative businesses think bigger. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are just the start. Knowing your audience means that your communications and sales efforts can be planned to deliver the most impact.

2. How good is your content? Consumers, whether they are individuals or businesses don’t want to be sold to. They want content and contact from you to mean something and add value to their lives, otherwise they switch off and you have lost them. Make your content and sales efforts meaningful, high quality and most importantly of value to your customers. Don’t forget though, it must be aligned to your business objectives if you want to make an impact.

1. Work smarter not harder. It’s a cliché but when it comes to content and sales messages it’s true. Why work hard on getting a piece of marketing or sales material right only to use it once. Multi-channel opportunities mean you can use one piece of content in many different guises. Make your content work harder for you. Now isn’t that smart!

This might all seem overwhelming, particularly when you are trying to run a business or do your day job. However, with a bit of planning your sales and marketing will work better for your business and will deliver impact.  How do we know? Because we do this for our own business and all the clients we work with.  We can demonstrate at board level the impact we create through this approach.

Give us five minutes and we can show you how this could work for you.  Five minutes to impact, what have you got to lose?