Your comprehensive guide to building a fantastic communications plan

Eliza Scott, 3 min read

An important part of a Yarno rollout (or any tech rollout for that matter) is having a clear concise communications plan in place (how good is alliteration!). Giving visibility to Yarno across an organisation prior to launch is crucial to ensuring immediate engagement with the tool and the realisation of value. The last thing we want is the initial sign up email yielding responses of “what is a Yarno” and “yeah…no”.

Below are some key learnings from my time developing Yarno communications plans:

Understand what success looks like for the customer

Ideally each customer will have a clear and measurable success metric tied to their engagement with Yarno. Visualising an end point will help communicate how the product will move an organisation towards it. Let that be the centre point of the plan and relate all features and benefits back to the ultimate goal.

Understand the audience

Knowing who you are talking to is key in building an effective communications plan. Within organisations there will be different personas of users that will have different objectives and motivations. Identifying these and talking to them with an appropriate medium, language and tone will multiply the effectiveness of your communications around a launch. For example:

Intro email series

An informative and engaging email series is a great way to reach office workers. They typical office worker is often swamped with emails, so injecting a bit of humour can be a great way to hit the top of the inbox.

Posters

Deskless workers are harder to pin down, so getting their attention with some eye catching posters can be a great way to raise awareness and start conversations around Yarno.

Speak to the benefits and anticipate the objections

Make it easy for people to buy in by selling to them with a clear value proposition. No one wants to be arbitrarily told they must do something because their boss says so. Ideally you will be able to point to a broader benefit to the individual and the organisation as a result of engaging with new technology.  Conversely, making sure you are aware of any potential objections and nip them in the bud before show time to multiply your success.

Webinars

A great way to get a bunch of people on the same page at the same time is an interactive webinar!  This can provide a venue to deal with any objections or concerns right upfront.

Think multi channel campaigns and leverage existing comms infrastructureThere's no need to reinvent the wheel with a communications plan. If you were to embark on communicating a new tool, with a bunch of new communications channels, you're likely to cause confusion and take the focus away from the star of the show!That said, making sure Yarno is communicated through as many channels as possible means you’re setting it up to be as successful as possible. Some examples of existing channels might be:

Team talks

Teams will often get together weekly, fortnightly or monthly to chat. If you can insert a section about Yarno into this talk to allow for some exposition and/or a demo of the product and questions, we have found that this can help increase numbers of sign-ups.

Newsletters

A great way to talk about Yarno is to include it in your company's physical or electronic newsletter (if you've got one). The more buzz, the better!Try a multi-tiered approach to inspire advocacyGetting an understanding of the customer organisation structure will help to pinpoint key middle management stakeholders that have the potential to advocate for Yarno. Once they understand how the system could make their lives easier and empower their teams, they can go on to communicate down the line. They can also address the concerns of members of their team and really drive Yarno internally.

1:1 conversations

The most effective way to get late adopters to sign up to Yarno is by having a conversation. If you give that learner the freedom to ask some questions and address some of their concerns around things like “how much time will this take?” and “why are we even doing this?”, you can convert them into a Yarno-er for life. Supporting middle management with the resources to have these conversations is a key part of any good communications plan.

Make it exciting!

At Yarno, our voice rings out brevity. This is a key part of what makes our product engaging and how our learning content gets results. Our comms need to match this. Including Yarno characters and imagery and keeping the tone light will reinforce the concept that Yarno is a fun way to learn and not another performance evaluation tool!

Speak to your Customer Success Manager today about how you can support your usage of Yarno with fantastic communications.

Eliza Scott

Eliza Scott

Eliza is a customer success guru. She loves a good bit of competition, is a Yarno step-challenge winner and came runner-up in the Yarno-Olympics.

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