Ensuring that you are well positioned to address the needs of the market, your customers, is a key element of business that your company to should continuously focusing on. Like it or not, technology is accelerating the continuous shift of customer preferences and expectations – even if you aren’t in a technology-based industry.

With the fast paced nature of today’s business world, how can you make sure that your team is aligned with the market? Thankfully, there are some basic fundamentals that can be easily implemented to ensure that you are always staying current with your customers’ demands.

List your assumptions - The best startups from Silicon Valley often list their biggest assumptions about the market to ensure that everyone is one the same page. These assumptions can be about the size of the market, potential customer segments, the nature of the problem that they are solving for these customers and how they can best reach them. It is important to get your team together regularly for straight-forward dialogues to surface and discuss the assumptions that your company as a whole holds about the customers you are serving.

Test your assumptions - Once you have listed your assumptions it is important to test them with real customers. While the tests do not have to be applied to the entire customer base of your company, take a statistically significant sample (usually 30 or more) and begin to verify whether or not your assumptions are tractable. The point is to find areas of adjustment in product offering or business processes to better serve your customers and keep an edge over your competition.

Create cheap experiments - Remember the scientific method from grade school? Your tests above should be following that outline to ensure an assumption can be verified as true or false. The point of testing assumptions with real customers is to create feedback loops about how the market behaves. Specifically, how it reacts to your brand and the solutions that you offer.

As mentioned before, the market is always shifting and if a company gets stuck in its ways for too long, it may find itself losing ground to new competitors. We recommend that you work with your team to engage in these types of activities regularly (monthly) to ensure that your “normal” business processes are actually making an impact for your bottom line.

Creating a healthy corporate image is important. Yet, the process requires more than just writing a mission statement, listing a dozen “corporate values” and pasting this content on your company’s website.

Creating an effective communications strategy to convey a  powerful corporate image involves tightly articulating the synthesis of what your company accomplishes for its customers, how it accomplishes this and why you are doing it. Think about it, of all the businesses that you could have started, why did you start this one? The answer to this question is not easily arrived at, but once you get there you’ll find the core of your corporate image and an idea of how to communicate it.

Once you are ready to create a full communications, there’s a lot more to think about. You want the communications to be consistent and flexible so that anyone in your organization would be able to repeat it to a client or partner. Even better, this corporate image can ensure that your people are armed with the right perspective to make difficult judgment calls on their own.

The process of creating durable communications strategies – and communications plans – is an involved effort and will go through many different versions as you revise and hone your message.

We recommend taking a look at the Rethinking Business Communications blog as they have a thorough blog post on creating an end-to-end communications strategy for shaping a healthy corporate image. We’ve highlighted some key points below:

Write for everyone - Given that a communications strategy is both an internal and external document it is important to write with clarity and in plain english, leaving out jargon and statements that are hard to understand.

Have a “Worse case scenario” communications plan - Accidents and public mishaps will happen, so it is important to have a well thought out communications plan in place before the chaos starts. Obviously this plan should not be shared as much as the “regular” communications plan but it is important to have everyone within the organization familiar with it so that they can effectively uphold a healthy corporate identity as they engage with their own respective personal and professional communities.

Enable feedback loops to continuously improve - As the blog author puts it, the best communications plans are the ones that are “living”. This stress the importance of not writing a plan, crossing it off the list and putting it on the shelf to be pointed to conveniently in the future. It needs to be lived, both in the actions and behaviors of the company’s actors and updated through feedback as the company encounters new, unforeseen situations where its identity may be redefined or updated.

Read more about creating an effective communication strategy here.