My Client

Tusk has two sides to its business: organisational development and HR support. I worked with owner, Peter Rimmer to bring both brands closer together from a marketing point of view, while communicating their respective functions to distinct audience segments.

The Project

Parachute Communication’s content for organisational development starts at the beginning by first understanding the brand. Then we could develop the content, and select the right form of communication activity:

1. Audience and brand mapping
2. Content strategy
3. Channel choice
4. Website planning and content

Audience and brand mapping

Whilst the client definitely knows his audience, this exercise encouraged him to review and document who he really wants to target, and what he knows about them. For example, having strategy for effectively communicating with women, who typically make up the HR workforce in this country. Tusk’s two brands – HR support and organisational development – have distinct offerings so what can each do, where are the cross overs and upselling opportunities? Mapping both audience and brand involved being forensic about both, and pragmatic about what Tusk wanted to achieve. The more we know, the better the content for organisational development.

Visual brand

There was never any desire to change Tusk’s visual branding. The four-coloured ‘t’ is an important part of their identity and in no way did we wish to unsettle the existing client base. Instead, we recommended using the colour palette to aid communication of both brands to their respective target audience.

Content strategy

Tusk’s dual offering is distinct, and Peter is clear about the role he can play in his clients’ growth. My role was demonstrating where the content lies; what and how to say and show it; creating the ‘value narrative’ with individual messages to reach a segmented audience. We also included keywords – not just to help optimise digital communication – but to reflect the personality of the target audience.

Channel choice

Not surprisingly, a predominantly digital presence matters for Tusk: website and social media (eg LinkedIn). The audience mapping exercise also revealed where else Tusk should focus its attention.

Website planning and content

The next stage of creating content for organisational development concentrates on planning and scheduling the content for the chosen channels. Web pages that reflected Tusk as broadly as possible, deep dives on topics in blogs, social media posts driving traffic in the right direction.

Outcomes

Content must engage, give people confidence that you have the skills to understand and deliver what needs to be done – even if they don’t always know themselves. That’s what we did for Tusk.

People sometimes don’t understand HR and can be scathing of it (‘human remains’), accusing it of laziness, kowtowing to the board and sitting on the fence. At the other end of the scale, operational modelling comes under the opaque and expensive mantle of ‘management consultants’, and attracts a huge amount of scepticism and dismissal.

Parachute Communication’s content for organisational development gave Tusk a clear-headed, intelligent voice for both areas of their work, one that also shows the relationship between their two disciplines.

Peter Rimmer says:

“Susanna has been invaluable in helping me gain clarity around how we communicate the 2 distinct areas of Tusk Consulting. She then carried this thinking through to our new website, structuring the content and writing the text. I’m grateful to her for creating the foundation for us to communicate the Tusk brand effectively. I strongly recommend Susanna for her ability to create content for organisational develpopment that really communicates the core and detail of a business.”