Overview: Communication Strategy
Communications appears complex. But a good communication strategy shouldn't be.
I generally boil it all down to five simple, interrelated tables, defining:
- Who you’re trying to reach: your audiences, including their needs and information preferences
- What you’re trying to achieve with them: your business goals for each audience
- Why they should pay attention to you: starting with you Unique Value Proposition, craft an Elevator Pitch, and from that derive Editorial Messaging for each audience
- How you will get those messages to those audiences: an integrated, mutually supportive communications portfolio
- When you will monitor and optimise those activities: key metrics, analyses and optimisation processes.
There are many ways to go about this. My favourite option is to spend a few hours a week interviewing diverse members of your team and holding one or two workshops. That way we'll develop buy-in together along the way, and I'll be able to mentor your staff so that they can better implement the strategy.
Because the last thing you need is a Word document gathering dust on a shelf.
Need help? Get in touch.
Related services: Content strategy, Online strategy, Online community management, Social media strategy, Content creation and marketing, Online architecture, Innovation strategy, Digital transformation, Change and project management.
Relevant resources
www.niemanlab.org
Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…
digiday.com
with influencer marketing en vogue and publishers hunting for ways to drive engagement on their properties, the hunt for famous, influential contributors is back on... eg Axios has two people... recruiting, managing subject matter experts to participate in Expert Voices... invite-only contributor network... Find influential people, bring them into…
medium.com
Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…
medium.com
"We get what we measure and we are measuring the wrong things... old, mass-media metrics of reach and frequency — translated into their digital equivalents: unique users and pageviews — turn out to be profoundly corrupting... attention is a much more productive measure of media value than traffic.... There is a richer set of metrics that matter…
www.bbc.co.uk
With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.
www.niemanlab.org
Excellent overview of a complex topic. Makes me think that a lot of EU communications could benefit hugely from reframing itself as "non-profit news", and considering these questions in depth. Alas, the only interesting debate in this field seems to be limited to the US. "The value of online and offline audience engagement is a question that bot…