Ask employees what they would like to change about internal communication, and one factor always makes the top of the list: timing.

According to employees, companies get timing wrong in two ways. First, some information is shared too early. For example, employees say:

• "Information Technology informs me about a systems change months before the change occurs. When communication is too early, I just ignore it."
• "It's great to get a heads up, but quite frankly, I'm much more likely to pay attention if something is coming up next week, not next year."

The second timing mistake that companies make is communicating too late. Employees say:

• "Tell us about things as they happen, not days or weeks later."
• "Provide information in a timelier manner. Many we hear it through the grapevine before leaders share the news."
• "If it's information that impacts employees, share it with us earlier, so that we have a base of knowledge before the news goes public. That way, we sound more knowledgeable when talking with customers."

Of course, employees pay attention to what and how you communicate. But in this information-overloaded world, increasingly employees care about when they receive critical information. Their preference? Information that's delivered "just in time"--right when they need to act and before hearing it from external sources.

Here are five simple ways to improve the timing of internal communication:

1. Set guidelines that govern timing. It's exhausting (and unproductive) if you have to figure out timing every time you need to share information. Best-practice companies set guidelines for how to manage timing. For example, if information is simply FYI, and if the news doesn't affect anyone's job for months, then the communication waits until later. Or here's another guideline: When the news has a significant impact on employees, the message is shared right before or at the same time as external communication.
2. Plan ahead. It's true that surprises come up, but 80% of what you need to communicate is expected. So there's no excuse not to communicate with enough time for people to take action--but not too early that they file it for later and forget about it. Be sure to keep holidays and weekends in mind.
3. Focus on what employees need to do--and when they need to do it. Make sure you understand how employees will experience information--and when they need to take action. When do employees need a heads up? When do they really need to start paying attention? When are deadlines they need to meet?
4. Emphasize dates and deadlines. When it's time for employees to do something, let them know! Be sure to include a deadline and enough time for them to complete it.
5. Provide updates. Create and follow a communication timeline to notify employees when more information will be available--even if it's an estimate (e.g., "shortly" or "within a few weeks"). Try sending a series of short, targeted messages just in time.

These small changes will make a big impact on how satisfied employees are with communication.

In customer-based businesses, the "customer" is not just an abstract idea; they are living, breathing beings that come to the marketplace with all their "stuff". Understanding exactly who they are becomes imperative when discussing a marketing plan that will reach and connect with them.

Building detailed Personas and Journey Maps are the best way to identify exactly who your customers are, what they need, and how they can engage with your business across the board. The feedback you gain from this type of customer mapping will be essential to helping you build buy-in and assist the teams responsible for creating the most optimal customer experience.

As is always the case with life, one must crawl before one can walk. In the marketing world, that simply means one must have a full understanding of concepts before they can move forward with a plan to execute them.

So, what is a customer? Too remedial? Fine, but understanding exactly what a customer persona entails, why it's important to you, and what the necessary ingredients are to making a good one are essential. And once you've mastered that recipe, you're ready for the second course of journey mapping, which allows you to simulate the consumer's experience. But... first things first.

Personas

What, exactly, is a customer persona? Simply put, personas are fictionalized models you create to represent your target customer. But they must be believable which means you must believe it. Remember what it was like to be a 5-year-old? Well go there, and create fully realized imaginary "friends" for your business. Give them names, personal backgrounds, and behavioral identifiers like motives, attitude, and negative trigger points. Go as deep as you can with this, as long as you don't begin blaming them for writing on the walls with crayons.

The Importance Of Creating Personas

Personas have recently come to the forefront as a great tool to help enterprises target and develop a brand design that is user-centric. As the focus has shifted to the customer experience, personas become wildly useful to achieving that goal. The sales, customer service, operations and HR departments all benefit from the knowledge gained by using them.

Personas cultivate relationships

When developing a user-centric design, personas act as a guide for your business in several ways. Who is the most important person in a business relationship? Everyone all together, "the customer!' Exactly.

By building detailed personas, you cultivate empathy for your customers and empathy leads to a stronger understanding of what your customers desire from you. If the goal is to target them, knowing their goals, motivations, and behaviors only make the road easier to see.

Personas focus design plans

Since our focus is clearly now on the needs of the customer, developing a design that has them at its core only makes sense. Personas give you invaluable information. Learning how your customers engage with your brand through its lifecycle is profitable. Does your design reflect accurately the customer's experience or rather company operations? Clearly, focused persona designs highlight the road your customers will travel within your business and give you the chance to improve upon them.

Personas get everyone on board

Determining an organization's future is key. Stakeholder buy-in, if used optimally, helps determine what the final picture will look like. The support personas provide when building a company-wide customer experience can't be overstated. When backed by statistics and facts, customer personas help describe where your company is headed and stakeholder buy-in become easier to achieve.

Suggestions For Creating Successful Personas

There are a few points every business endeavoring to create good, useful personas should attempt to hit.

First, you must align with your business objectives. Your personas should be a helpful tool for all the teams in your enterprise, and they should ultimately be unified under the common goal of your business. Get input from all the top players on the goals of the company. Diverse perspectives on the company's strengths and weaknesses will only help your persona generating process.

Research fortifies your personas and helps make accurate identifications about who your customers are. Use all the resources you have. Market segmentation, surveys, polls, interviews, and social media driven insights are all fair game. This expansive research will be great in helping you understand your customers "whys" as it relates to how they interact with you. This specificity will only serve your efforts to create truly dimensional personas.

Breathe life into your personas

This is when you must let your creative inclinations rip. Create an engaging first person narrative that really focuses on the kind of customer you have targeted. Your representations for this customer should be so rich and detailed that it feels like it might leap from the page and spring to life. If they can really see it, they will believe it. Specificity, specificity, specificity. Did I mention to be specific? Names and pictures help visualize the customer so every persona should have them, along with the following detailed information:

1. Demographics: Their age, location, education, income, household or family size

2. Personal Histories: Their goals, needs, and interests when they interact with your company

3. Expectations: How their needs differ from various avenues and touch points, and how those needs change over time

How to make them pop

Leaving the right impression is key when creating these personas. For whoever sees them, the goal should be to make sure they don't forget them. Using high-quality photos with layouts and formats that are easy to follow but also catch the eye. Have a clear plan for how to incorporate these personas throughout the company. That, combined with your efforts to create extremely realistic ones, will ensure your teams engage with personas they relate to; thus, responding in a way that ultimately helps the company build the best customer experience.

As you create these personas, understand that you can never know your customer too well. Once you have a true and very vivid idea of your targets, you can apply that to product creation, marketing, and business development. You'll start making products FOR these characters and creating content that is tailored to them . This hyper-focus will cause your marketing to truly resonate with your personas' real life counterparts, leading to increased engagement.

So go ahead and let your imagination run wild!

Social media marketing is a top marketing tactic for many CMOs for many reasons: It's relatively easy, it's inexpensive, and it can be done in-house. As a business owner, however, you can't exclusively post texts and photos as your social media content. If you want to truly increase traffic via social media, you must create, publish, and promote high-quality content from your brand.

Like most successful endeavors, successful content marketing (aka brand journalism) begins with planning. Start by determining your audience. Do you want to reach customers, employees, or investors? Maybe all three? With your audience in mind, you can consider your voice. You can be friendly, knowledgeable, quirky, or any number of other adjectives -- just be consistent.

Then, with a few publishing tips in mind, you can produce engaging content that works to your advantage on social media and beyond.

1. Create a blog, and post daily.

Timely written content that incorporates SEO and SEM strategies drives traffic to your site. As a result, the conversations around your brand can take place on your website, not just on social media.

But simply creating a blog with the intention of driving traffic isn't all it takes to actually achieve that goal. It's crucial that you actively maintain your blog, and the more blog posts you publish, the better. In fact, a 2015 study of HubSpot's more than 13,500 customers showed companies that published 16 or more posts monthly saw nearly 3.5 times the traffic of those that published up to four posts each month.

2. Craft visually engaging pieces.

To keep readers interested in your content, you need eye-catching visual elements. There are multiple types, but infographics are among the most compelling. They are easy to read and are, therefore, popular across social media. In fact, infographics receive likes and are shared on social media three times more than any other type of content.

Likewise, product demos and other videos make for powerful, engaging content and a strong return on investment -- shoppers who view videos are nearly twice as likely to purchase than their counterparts, according to Adobe.

3. Mix up your written content.

There's no shortage of listicles on the internet, so take advantage of the diverse written content formats you can produce for your business. Expert Q&As and book reviews are two simple, effective forms of written content that you can use to break up your standard articles.

The latter is one of the best, as someone is willingly recommending your book and encouraging others to read it. Plus, if you're an avid reader, you can share your own recommendations with others in your field to help them gain more knowledge of their industry.

And don't shy away from long-form content. "Smart long-form content is rare because of the deep research it requires, but companies are catching on. According to Orbit Media Studios, the average blog post today is 19 percent longer than it was a year ago," says Dan Curran, the founder, and CEO of PowerPost, a publishing platform that focuses on brand journalism.

Those long-form pieces can also be repurposed into other formats for distribution, according to Curran: "By taking advantage of modern technology, marketers can personalize and track their meatier content to repurpose it and reduce it to smaller portions, providing easier access to more laypeople without sacrificing the attention to detail that interests more educated audiences."

Daily blog posts, along with diverse visual and written content that appeals to your audience, are the foundation of a great content strategy. In some ways, however, they're just a jumping-off point. Once you've gotten things off the ground, you should monitor the blog on a regular basis to determine which posts generate the most page views. From there, you can hone your brand's content to ensure continued success -- on social media and everywhere else you engage with your audience.