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.smashingmagazine.com
Some useful ideas for what we call the 'Project Briefing' stage, which may be the first part, or indeed the entirety, of a project's Inception phase: "... we often discussed visual or technical issues without a clear understanding of the business goals... we immediately jumped to design suggestions that were based on personal opinion, assumption …
medium.com
"... is to foster alignment and enthusiasm toward the right goal. I’m thinking of official leaders (and myself) when writing the above, but there are official and unofficial leaders in every organization. " Very short post, very worth reading. Sometimes the simplest insights are the most powerful. - The Job of Leadership — Inside Medium — Medium
qz.com
"We couldn't understand why people without technical knowledge had to tell programmers "what" to do and, furthermore, they had to supervise "how" programmers did it." At last. Someone said it. And also quite a bit more about the timesucks that are meetings, email and commuting. These guys avoid all of them, work 4 days/week and are growing …