Say you’ve got the basics down—your communications are clear, meaningful, and on message. What else can you do to be heard amid the cloud of babble?

We have some ideas—nine favorites, to be precise, detailed in our freshly updated 9 Ways to Make a Powerful Impression Strategy>Shift guide. We put these methods to work every day for our clients, and the guide includes examples of successes from our portfolio and beyond.

The guide—it’s a quick read, we promise—provides a concise description of each approach, along with why you should try it and tips for doing it well. Check it out and consider whether it might be time for you to take a stand, hit a nerve, sell your dream or try some other profile-boosting strategy.

Not all these approaches are appropriate for every occasion or enterprise, but we hope you’ll try something out of your comfort zone. Strategies that challenge you to think differently often have the greatest potential for making your communications more powerful.

Download it now. Then let us know what you think, and if you have any tips of your own or results to share.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but people often focus too much on the creative side of new messaging projects. By too much, I mean exclusively.

Yes, the messaging has to be compelling, flexible, and spot-on for the target audience. But all that development work is wasted if you don’t have a plan for making your messaging live beyond the first website revisions and a carefully crafted guidebook that no one reads. For messaging to succeed, everyone (not just the marketing team) needs to use it—in conversation, emails, presentations, wherever. Based on our experience working with a variety of clients on messaging projects, these are the keys to successful implementation:

Enthusiastic leadership. Driving adoption is not as simple as having the grand pooh-bah say “do it.” Leadership needs to embrace it, use it, model it—internally as well as to external audiences. Otherwise, messaging will be seen as optional.

Communicating the benefits. Good messaging solves problems. It provides easily grasped explanations of difficult concepts, clarifies key goals and values throughout the organization, and provides ready answers (even cut-and-paste options) to common questions. Let people know how the new messaging will help them talk about their work more comfortably, effectively, and consistently.

Training. Walking people through practical exercises for using the messaging in real-life situations is essential. This is especially true for sales teams and customer-facing staff: they’re primary message carriers and they need to feel comfortable with their approach. Facilitated role-playing sessions are ideal. It’s also a good idea to provide a refresher a few months down road.

Using new messaging will feel uncomfortable at first—even if it hits the authenticity mark and rings true to everyone throughout the organization—simply because it’s unfamiliar. Without ample reinforcement, people will revert to the words they’ve always used, even if those words inspire reactions like “Huh?” or “Excuse me, I have to go get another drink now.” Then your messaging platform breaks down—and I hate to see good creative go to waste.

Remember the time before Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest?

There was email.

There still is. For many companies—especially B2B firms—email rightfully remains a primary way to communicate with customers, prospects, partners, and other interested parties. But with the bright, shiny object of social media dangling before our eyes, it’s easy to lose focus on what makes boring old email effective. (Tip #1: don’t be boring.)

Much of getting email right involves getting the basics right, and it’s worth reviewing the following aspects of your email program on a regular basis to be sure you’re hitting the mark.

Sometimes clichés are true:  content really is king

If you don’t consistently give people something they find useful, funny or provocative, and that speaks to the reason they wanted to hear from you in the first place, they will tune out. In a heartbeat. And it has to be engagingly presented, in language your audience understands.

Nobody loves you that much: send selectively

Not even your mother wants to hear about everything you’re doing. (And do you want to tell her?) Segmentation is key to an active, effective email program. We’ve heard the argument that “people want to keep up with what we’re doing,” but it won’t wash. People want to keep up with what you’re doing only if it’s what they’re into. Chances are you’re into a number of things, and they appeal to different audiences. Send too many segment-specific messages to your entire list, and you’ll see people check out.

Garbage in, garbage out: manage your mailing list

It’s a drag. But if you don’t keep your list up-to-date and accurately segmented by target audience, your results will suffer, and it will be hard to figure out why. You won’t be reaching everyone who wants to hear from you, and the percentage of unresponsive addresses will increase. In these circumstances, a clickthrough rate may not tell you much about how effective your content is—a low rate could mean that no one’s interested in your latest missive, or that there’s so much deadwood on your list it only looks like no one’s interested, or that the people who are interested aren’t on your list.

Take a hard, honest look at your email program at regular intervals. This affordable workhorse can continue to serve you well, but only if you keep it fresh.