by Christine Tatum, CEO, Media Salad
First and foremost, the Media Salad team considers it an honor to serve as the primary producer of communications, marketing strategies and online professional learning for the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association. Our company is rich with knowledge about the impacts of substance use on health and safety — and we deeply respect professionals who act with the skill, integrity and courage required to prevent and mitigate drug harms and connect people struggling with Substance Use Disorders to effective treatment and support. In still other words, we’re rooting for NDASA members and their businesses to achieve the success we know can come from effective internal and external communications.
At the risk of sounding self-serving, building strong communications is smart business. The really good news is that communication that attracts and retains customers and staff doesn’t have to break the bank. However, it does require a great deal of creativity, consistency, grit and time — which should prompt any business leader to get realistic in a hurry about whether they’re focusing on the production of communications at the expense of building revenue generation and meeting other important business goals.
Here are just five areas of concern NDASA members commonly ask us about — and our recommendations for addressing them. Because we recognize that budgets and resources vary significantly and that desired results rarely happen overnight, or even in a month or two, these are just the highlights. Please consider finding a trustworthy and knowledgeable communications consultant who knows how to wring the cent out of every dollar and sells only the services you actually need — and know you can contact me directly anytime.
1. Website creation and maintenance. Your website doesn’t have to function with the sophistication of a news organization or involve a lot of original (and more costly) design work. It does, however, need to communicate a company’s professionalism at a mere glance because while business rarely is won because of a website, it most certainly is lost because of a website. Please consider the following:
- Mobile responsiveness. Make sure your site is tuned to display clearly on an array of screen sizes — including desktops, phones and tablets — and on the most popular Internet browsers, such as Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. A smartly designed, mobile-friendly website can be every bit as good as — if not better than — the creation of a separate app.
- Contact information. No one should have to click even once on your site to find it. Popular contemporary design standards feature contact information at the very top and bottom of site pages.
- News functionality. Search engines reward original content, so build into your communications plan the resources required to update a blog regularly. Newss are also the ideal home for publication of your videos, audio and images. For example, it’s great to post your content on Rumble, Vimeo and YouTube, but take care to direct audiences to your website to view it instead of handing traffic directly to those video platforms.
- Site navigation. Simplify, simplify, simplify. As more people use more mobile devices to access information, it is wise to avoid complex navigation rails (and especially drop-down menus) and to design pages in a manner that allow visitors to access information with a “scroll” of the finger.
- Site accessibility. Make sure your site can be accessed easily by visitors with visual and audio impairments. An array of low-cost, third-party software can be purchased to assist with this — and people like my profoundly color-blind husband will thank you for keeping them in mind.
- Site hosting, site production, site maintenance and site development. They are not the same thing — and businesses commonly fall short of budgeting for them appropriately. In a nut shell, site hosting is the service that provides a parking space online for a website, site production is the act of updating a website with content and some design features, site maintenance keeps a website running smoothly (think software updates), and site development continually advances a site’s functionality to make it more attractive and/or useful for visitors. Ongoing site production is important because, again, it helps ensure your site is found more easily online. So, it is crucial for businesses to budget realistically for the resources and skills required to produce great content. It’s also important to set aside funds to cover the costs of development projects, such as the addition of online stores and significant site redesigns that capitalize on digital business trends.
2. Identity development. I will leave it at this: the difference between the appearance of a company’s communications that have been designed by a bonafide designer and those created by someone who is not are painfully obvious. As in very painfully. Design standards are at the cornerstone of effective business communications. They don’t have to be expensive, but they do need to be established and respected.
3. Marketing and advertising. Just a few thoughts:
- Sizable online followings sound great, but they don’t necessarily advance an organization’s most important business goals. They also can suck up a surprising amount of time that would be better spent on building business. Particularly when ramping up business communications, it is wise to look alive on social media (remember always to direct people to your website to consume content), and to plan for incremental, focused growth.
- Budget for boosting. Running online ads and paying to boost specific posts on social networks will expand your reach, so consider setting aside funds each month to cover this expense. Ideally, the posts you pay to distribute beyond your direct networks will be tied to specific business goals.
- Make sure your outreach follows your company’s brand standards.
- Social networks have different cultures and require different approaches to communication. For example, LinkedIn and TikTok are very different social media networks with very different audiences who are looking for very different things from them.
- SEO isn’t cheap. I wish Search Engine Optimization services that help ensure your website is found through online search were more affordable. Until a business can budget for these services that improve search rankings, an affordable way to improve SEO is by ensuring good website production that assigns all pages and posts with SEO-friendly formatting, keywords and categorization.
4. Internal business communications. Their vital importance is often overlooked and entirely underestimated, but strong internal business communications will help companies make and save money and attract and retain talent. Content should be produced in alignment with these four core payoffs of any organization. Unfortunately, workers spend too much time searching for information and resources they need to do their jobs. One study conducted by global management firm McKinsey & Co., found that employees spent an average of 1.8 hours every day — or 9.3 hours every week — searching for information about how to accomplish business tasks. It is imperative for companies to move most, if not nearly all, of their internal communications out of email inboxes and to establish and maintain centralized internal communications structures, such as an Intranet, that allow for team collaboration.
5. Leveraging communications for revenue generation. One of the most rewarding aspects of our work is helping our clients increase their revenue through the production of smart communications. The strategies for doing so are essentially limitless — but here is a fantastic opportunity NDASA makes available to all of its members: NDASA University. Becoming an NDASA U Partner that resells NDASA’s gold-standard professional training courses has many benefits — and chief among them is giving members bigger, bolder ways to sell their own services and products and promote their authority within the drug and alcohol testing industry. NDASA U Partners collect generous commissions when they resell courses — and our team can attest that when resellers combine courses with their company’s unique offerings, they often see great results.
Media Salad is a Colorado-based communications consultancy serving companies and nonprofits of all sizes and government agencies. NDASA members receive discounts on services and are invited to contact Ms. Tatum at ctatum@mediasalad.com to learn more. She and her husband, Dr. Christian Thurstone, a psychiatrist specializing in addiction treatment, are the co-authors of Clearing the Haze: Helping Families Face Teen Addiction.