6 Ways To Cut Through the Noise

We live in a very noisy world. On any day, you could receive hundreds of emails, dozens of text and chat messages, engage with content across multiple social media platforms, take tens of phone calls, and more.

If that makes you feel exhausted and overwhelmed, you’re not alone! And if you’re feeling that noise, imagine how your audience is feeling too.

We live in an attention economy, where more people and brands are trying to get our attention through more channels than ever before. In short, our attention is stretched thin.

So when you need to cut through the noise and help drive change in your business with strategic communication, what can you do?

The SKILLS Framework (Subject, Knowledge, Ideas, Language, Less, Skimmable) is a useful guide that strategic communicators can use to boost effectiveness, reach and resonate with audiences.

Subject

Who is the subject of your communication, and how will you get their attention? This is all about personalizing your communication for your audience — which also means there’s no one-size-fits-all approach! Some personalization options you can test are:

• Using a person’s first name or the name of their team in the subject line of an email.
• Using a messenger who your audience knows, likes, and trusts (hint: it’s usually someone much closer than the CEO).
• Being very clear about the relevance of the message for each audience segment.

Knowledge

Beware the curse of knowledge! This happens when we forget what it’s like to not have the knowledge or context we do. It occurs in very technical roles, like engineers or academics, but can also happen in situations where you’ve been ensconced in a project for a while and forget nobody else has been that involved.

For example, when an organization launches a new three-year strategy, the C-suite have lived and breathed strategy for months, so they’re all across it. But they forget that everyone else hasn’t been involved, and they can’t understand why people don’t know or care.

The antidote to break the curse is to put on your audience hat, and think about how much they might already know (or not know), and why they should care.

Ideas

Our brains love stories, which means our ideas need to be structured in ways that create a logical flow of information. If our content jumps from one idea to another, it feels disjointed and people tune out.

This is where having a great structure to your communication can really help, as can tapping into the power of storytelling. Our brains are wired for stories; it’s how we passed on information for hundreds of thousands of years before we started using emails! So tap into that natural preference.

Language

Keeping it simple is not dumbing it down; keeping it simple is being smart! How can people see how brilliant your new strategy is or what action they need to take if they can’t understand you?

Using language that is full of jargon or corporate or technical terms helps no one. In fact, it does the opposite — people disengage from your message, which is precisely what we don’t want when trying to cut through the noise.

Instead, most guidelines suggest we communicate at the level of a 14-year-old, so you reach as many people in your audience as possible. Also, tailor your language to different audience segments. For example, it might be okay to keep using scientific terms with scientists, but you’ll need to use very different language for Jo Public.

Less

Keep it short. Long communication, whether written, verbal, or audio/visual, turns people off from the beginning, especially if you’re not hooking them in quickly. Very few people spend more than a few seconds reading an email. Most spend only nine seconds on average, and will only read 50-100 words.

Keeping it short will not only attract and keep attention, but it’s more likely it will be appreciated by your audience.

Skimmable

That beautiful, long narrative you wrote where you agonized over almost every word? Yeah, nobody’s reading it, especially in a digital format. Dozens of eye-tracking studies have found we tend to skim-read most things, looking for signposts to help us quickly make sense of the message.

This is where tools like short subheadings, bullet points, and visuals can be very useful. Your job is to help people navigate the communication quickly, while also consuming the key messages accurately.

Want to learn more from Mel Loy and take your change communication to the next level? Watch the IABC On Demand Master Class recording of Change Communication Mastery, where she explores how communication drives successful change, how to tailor your approach to different audiences, and how to apply brain-based insights to make change stick.