Communication planning made simple
Simple if not easy but if you spend time thinking about these questions first, the words and content will follow more easily.
What is a communication strategy?
In essence, a communication strategy is quite straightforward. Aligned with your organisation strategy, it sets out your principles for communicating with your key audiences. The plan for how you do that including core messages, goals, roles and responsibilities sits beneath it. But before you get carried away and start diving into the detail and safety of a plan, you need to make sure everyone is clear about who you want to communicate and connect with, and why.
Communication strategy
Who
Why
Communication plan
What
Where
When
How
But where do you start?
It’s tempting to dive straight into the ‘what, how and where?’ and take comfort in the tangible stuff like writing social media posts, sharing blogs and newsletters, and analysing likes and open rates. There’s something very satisfying about seeing something you’ve written and created appearing on screen. The tough bit is finding out that you’ve communicated the right thing to the wrong people, the wrong thing to the right people or your messages are too vague and muddled because you're not sure who you want to talk to.
And this is where your brand voice come in too. Because you can be communicating something extraordinary to the right people, but if you don't get the language and voice right, it just won't land. Either way, you never quite hit the mark.
Who and why comes first
Writing for other people and businesses demands a certain amount of contortionism because it’s not about me, it’s a little bit about you and it really is about your audiences. Yes, all your audiences, because it's not just about your customers and clients, you need to think about your suppliers, investors, employees, contractors. You need to think about all your stakeholders.
It takes some hard thinking to get beneath the top layer of persona names and demographics to the juicy stuff where you really get under their skin. As you do this, a picture will start emerging of what you really need to be communicating, and how and there'll be lightbulbs flicking on all over the place.
So, beware putting all your focus on the 'how and what' (the marketing machine if you like), and ignoring the 'who' and 'why', because they're the questions that drive what you should be doing.
They might look like simple questions, but they're anything but, because they go to the root of your business’ existence. And if you're putting time, money and energy into creating a communication plan you need to be sure that it's going to do what you need it to do.