Feb 20, 2019

Ovid Inc. founder Jane Praeger highlights the three key components in a powerful and persuasive communications strategy.

Words have power. In the workplace, employees—from the executives to the entry-level team members—often wonder how to tap into that power.

Jane Praeger, founder of strategic communications firm Ovid Inc. and faculty member at Columbia University, says “most of the people we work with are already excellent communicators,” however “they realize that to be truly entrepreneurial and to move their idea from concept to execution, they have to be outstanding communicators.”

During Viacom’s Spark summit, Prager led a panel discussion in which she shared that strategy is what’s needed to transform an excellent communicator into an outstanding one. Praeger’s definition of strategy, based on extensive research, is “the specific message you send a specific audience to motivate them to take a specific action.”

According to Praeger, successful strategies are made up of three key components: knowing your action goal, defining your audience, and crafting your message.

Component 1: Know your action goal.

“What do you want your audience to do as a result of hearing you speak?,” Praegar asked the audience.

She explained that when building a communications strategy, the first step is to establish an action goal, and warned listeners not to fall into the trap of making increased awareness their goal or objective.

"We don’t frequently ask people to get married on the first date, but in business, we often make this mistake."

“Awareness doesn’t always lead to action,” Praeger explained. “If you’re taking the time and making the effort to communicate, you really want to have an impact not just on how people think and feel, but on how they behave.”

She advised that eager communicators gear their communications to little action goals (aka “the easy, immediate next step”) as opposed to large ones like approving a budget or signing a deal. The ideas is to optimize your chances of getting a “yes,” not to overwhelm your audience.

“We don’t frequently ask people to get married on the first date, but in business, we often make this mistake,” said Praeger.

Component 2: Define your audience.

“It’s not about you, it’s about your audience,” Prager explained. “You can’t just think about what you want to say, you have to think about what your audience needs to hear so that they take the action you want them to take.”

Particularly in the media industry, where so much attention and focus is paid to reaching the right audience, Praeger explained that having “empathy” isn’t always easy, but it’s necessary.

"The ability to understand another person’s point of view is absolutely essential to being a persuasive communicator."

“It’s very hard to get out of our own shoes and stand in somebody else’s shoes,” she explained. “But, that kind of empathy and that ability to understand another person’s point of view is absolutely essential to being a persuasive communicator.”

In smaller audiences, Praeger suggests speaking to specific personality types to enhance the effectiveness of your strategy, evoking the teachings of Myers-Briggs  and other personality assessments. In larger audiences, she explained, it’s wise to “carve out a subset of your audience you are interested in reaching.

Component 3: Craft your message.

Praeger explained, “You shouldn’t go into any meeting, or critical conversation, or job interview without one or two key messages.”

"Start thinking about communications as a way to motivate, activate, and inspire."

In the information age, where we are “literally swimming in information,” it’s not enough for a message to inform, it “needs to have a point of view.” So, by focusing on the “so what” rather than the more basic “what,” it’s more likely to resonate with the person to whom you’re speaking. Even if the task at hand is presenting numbers, it’s critical to think about what the numbers mean as opposed to just the numbers themselves, making sure to include the benefits to the audience.

“The important thing is to remember to stop thinking of communications as a way to inform, educate, or make people more aware, and to start thinking about communications as a way to motivate, activate, and inspire.”