The link between Corporate Communication and Marketing

In a previous article, we discussed corporate and brand communication. The time has come to extend our focus beyond that and into marketing. Marketing is such a vast business function and has grown in scope over the last decade.

The lines are blurred with many other functions and departments, like data, finance, sales, operations and communications. We’re focusing on the link between marketing and corporate communication, specifically, today, so let’s dive in.

Since you already know how to define corporate communication, we’ll go straight into its overlap with marketing.

Strategy

Marketing is one component of Corporate Communication, which means that when you request a communication strategy, it’s going to feature your marketing operations. Your marketing strategy, when informed by a communications approach, extends far beyond your products and revenue. A great marketing strategy considers acquisition, retention and cross-selling.

As your customer inevitably evolves over the course of their life, so too should the way your business serves them. Modern marketing is complex because if you don’t know how to spot a fraud, you’ll never know if you’re speaking to one. As a team, we at Perana Viosa so often pick up the pieces left behind by non-strategic and uncommitted providers. This is why so many SMMEs are starting their marketing journey with us: to avoid those pitfalls.

If you have a question about your marketing strategy that hasn’t yet received an answer, get in touch and one of our team members will reach out to support you. No strings attached.

Messaging

Messaging is a vital component of marketing. You’d think that your website or brochures would cover it, or your ads and your press releases, but it’s really about so much more. Getting a Corporate Communication specialist to assist you with your messaging foundation is crucial because you’ll be aligning the way you speak, as a business, across every format of marketing communication:

Emails
In-person meetings
Public speaking
Presentations
Pitches
Performance reviews
Reports
Cultural events and rituals within your business (useful for brand marketing)
Body language
Instant messages (regardless of the system that you use)
Negotiations with marketing providers and partners
Advertisements
Website content
Chatbot interactions
Automated communication episodes
eCommerce catalogues

Messaging permeates every nook and cranny in your business so it’s best to get someone who really understands that communication landscape before you invest your full budget into using language that you can’t be sure will get the right job done in time.

Reporting

Small businesses can be further broken down into small, micro or

Although we’ve mentioned reports, it’s especially important to zoom in a little more. Marketing reports have been overwhelming business owners and managers like you for years. Long before the pandemic, and the mass digital migration, people have shrugged off complicated 12+ page reports that spit out metrics with no meaning behind them — at least not in the context that you’re comfortable with talking about.

By consulting with a specialist in corporate communications, your marketing reports can be distilled from convoluted data ranges to simple facts and strategic recommendations. Not only is this interpretive power placed in your hands, but a communications-oriented approach to businesswide reporting breaks down the barriers between departments. Before you know it, people will actually understand each other.

Wouldn’t it be dreamy to have a marketing manager who can speak the finance department’s language, and vice versa? That’s how we roll at Perana Viosa. We get it. Our team gets it. And now all of our clients are getting the benefit of everyone in leadership getting it.

What’s your excuse for not reaching out to contact us? Go on. Click here and let’s demystify your reports so that the right people can really understand what’s happening inside your business.

sized businesses. That’s typically between 2-250 employees across the spectrum and, as you can imagine, each tier has a corresponding set of corporate communication requirements. A company of two may only need the basic: customer-facing communication and possibly investor relations, perhaps with an on-call arrangement for any crises or media situations that need to be navigated with care.

A business with 20-50 people will have departments forming. It needs a bit more care and planning in terms of how information flows up and down the business, and from one department to another. When you start reaching a staff complement of 80-200 more layers appear in the business hierarchy, more skilled specialists appear in each of the departments and you begin to see different communication systems appear.

Growing businesses have to invest in communication as a function of business because there are many variables that affect the business’ performance:

Human Connection

Above all else, a corporate communication approach to marketing is going to help you build genuine and sustainable relationships inside and outside your business. Don’t forget that marketing has both internal and external components, and you constantly want to bring people together with genuine belief that your business has a valid place in each of their lives.

Corporate communication specialists think about conflict before it even appears. They think about media law, compliance issues, brand positioning, sensitivity to culture and psychographic profiles. It’s not just about getting an ad live, it’s about starting, continuing and concluding communication episodes appropriately, with purpose and being able to reflect on the progress and outcomes of each campaign.

What kind of marketer are you looking for?

In today’s world, there are surface deep marketers and then there are experts who can dive as deep as they need to, unafraid of what they’ll find in the quest for genuine answers.

Terms like ‘social media management’ get misused by people who want to come across as specialists, but don’t really know how to extract maximum value from the channels they work with. (HINT: this is another reason you need a Fractional CMO — so you don’t get caught out by self-nominated and submission-based award winners and pretty graphics that have no tangible impact on your business profitability).

No matter what warm fuzzy feelings you want, you know deep down that it’s about the ROI.