One factor marketers can be certain of this year is continued uncertainty. From inflation at a 40-year high to continued layoffs and slowed growth, macroeconomic and market volatility continue to disrupt operations—leaving marketers racing to build efficiency and resilience.

One essential factor is hindering their ability to meet these goals: poor communication.

Effective and consistent communication is pivotal to ensure continuity and instill confidence among employees, customers, and stakeholders.

But communication is often overlooked as an area of investment. Just how much does bad communication costs US businesses? Up to $1.2 trillion every single year in lost productivity. That's approximately $12,506 per employee.

Poor-communication costs have an outsized impact on marketing, where results depend on clear and consistent content and interactions. Marketing organizations that don't communicate well don't perform well—from creating a disjointed brand image, to eroding customer and prospect engagement, to slowing productivity and growth.

First, we'll look at two important ways improving communication will help marketers overcome their toughest challenges this year—and reach new levels of performance. Then, we'll look at five ways to improve organizational communication.

Delivering Frictionless, Authentic Brand and Customer Experiences

As prices rise faster than wages, marketers need to deliver frictionless, authentic experiences to win customers' loyalty and wallets.

Because of ongoing inflation and fluctuations in buying habits, customers and buyers—not surprisingly—expect more from brand experiences to make purchase decisions. Audiences are also engaging more on intimate channels such as text and social, increasing the need for organic interactions.

Heightened consumer and buyer demands will come to a head this year, forcing brands to double-down on creating more natural and compelling connections.

But that feels like an insurmountable challenge: Scale across an ever-expanding number of touchpoints, build deeper engagement across all touchpoints, and do it all in the face of budget and resource constraints.

Brands that identify scalable ways to build more authentic communication will get interactions right the first time, in turn reducing costs and driving growth.

Lifting Productivity and Consistency With a New Workplace Experience

The realities of a global and fragmented workplace have brought new challenges for marketing teams in staying aligned, engaged, and on-brand.

Working across more ways and places creates more opportunities for disjointed interactions that slow down and frustrate employees and customers. In such an environment, it's no wonder that productivity recently reached a historic decline and workplace connections are dwindling.

The problem is that the evolution in how work gets done requires fundamentally rethinking where and how we work—but too few have actually done that rethinking.

Especially with the increase in asynchronous and written communication spurred by flexible work, knowing how and where to best interact with colleagues and customers is exceedingly challenging. The result is inefficient, inconsistent interactions that marketers must address to eliminate costly friction, maintain their brand image, and improve employee and customer experiences.

Leaders who empower teams to communicate clearly and consistently wherever and however they work will ensure that productivity and engagement climb.

Rise to New Challenges With Effective Communication

Most marketers recognize the value of communication, but they often view it as a "soft" skill or an area they cannot improve through dedicated investment.

Fully 74% of executives value professionally written business communications (i.e., clear, concise, and tone-aware), but most of them (54%) have not taken action to operationalize improvements, according to recent IDC research* commissioned by Grammarly.