Creating the big idea and realising the vision

Innovation in business is critical – by its very nature it means you have created something new and unique. While you may completely understand your business idea and how it works, being so close to it can cloud your vision and actually end up making it difficult to clearly explain and communicate it to other people.   But you need to get it out there, so when it comes to sharing it with the world, how can you do that? Bill Gates has been quoted countless times about his thoughts on the value of PR “If I had one dollar left I’d spend it on PR”. Gates, the man who had the vision of a PC on every desk, knew that he had to use communications to get his message out there to realise the vision.   So where should you start? Firstly you need to work on clarifying your message – what exactly is your product or service? How does it benefit the target audience you are trying to reach? Keep your wording simple and avoid jargon. It can help to think about the elevator pitch; how would you explain what you do in 30 seconds? Without a clear definition of what you do, what you offer, it can prove difficult to build any further communications activity.   People love stories, so if you can try to tell a story about your business. How did it come about? How do people use it and what does it help them to do? Talking about people or business benefits rather than specific pieces of technology or processes will make your innovation more accessible and easy to understand.   As well as defining what to say, you need to think about who you want to talk to. It’s important to think about who these people are, what they read, watch, listen to, engage with and share on social media. Remember that a business-to-business audience is a consumer audience too – so if you are trying to sell into a IT director, they are as likely to read Computer Weekly as they are the Sunday papers.   It can be useful to build a profile of the ‘person’ you are trying to reach and consider all the touch points or channels you could engage with them on. To achieve that it can help to take an integrated approach to your communications and make any kind of content that you create have multiple purposes so that it is working harder for you.  For example, share any news you have with your media contacts and then use this as the basis of a blog for your website, in your social media activity and in your newsletters.   For more information on PR visit www.cubaneight.com