Build your strategic communications plan in four steps
(Five minute read)
FYI this post was originally written for the brill Cousin Branding blog. It aims to give a broad brush intro for comms teams looking to establish a strategic communications approach for the first time. Enjoy!
First things first, what does Strategic Communications mean?
Well, I’m glad you asked.
Strategic communications means making sure all your comms activity has a clear and shared purpose, is based on insight and can be measured.
The benefits to this approach can be huge. It can reduce duplication, save time, limit organisational tension and ensure everyone is working towards the same goals.
Most importantly, it should ensure your comms has the impact you want.
This sounds sensible - what’s the catch?
Strategic comms is a holistic approach that brings together multi-disciplinary activity. Working in this way means compromising across ideas, channels and disciplines to deliver together for shared goals. For existing teams in particular, taking this approach for the first time can be challenging.
The only way to solve this puzzle is by true collaboration from the outset and ongoing. But meaningful collaboration is time consuming. You will need someone to take the lead who not only knows comms inside out, but also has the people skills to facilitate positive collaboration.
If you don’t have a full time Strategic Communications Team or individual, you have a few options, including:
assigning a strategic lead from within an existing team who has the comms, people skills and time needed
if you are a lone communication function, carving out regular time and head space to take on strategic communications yourself
bringing in external support to guide the development of your new strategic approach, to then be brought in and out as needed, or handing the reins to a cross-team group
Developing your strategic communications approach
These four steps give an overview of strategic communications activity to set your overarching plan. The same stages could be applied to development of any resulting strategic campaigns too.
1.Building the foundation
Your strategic comms foundation should be based on finding that sweet spot between what you want to achieve as a business or organisation and what your audience wants or needs.
So, step one is to revisit and refine (or craft if they don’t exist) your vision, mission, values and business or corporate objectives. Make sure they really do define who you are, what you do, how you do it and what you want to achieve.
Under each you can then interpret the objective through a comms lens. Put simply – how will my comms deliver for each objective?
A similar analysis needs to be undertaken with your audience: who are they? what do they want? How do they feel about you or your product now? How do you want them to feel in the future? Where do they get their information? And so on…
2. Collaborative Development
A collaborative session (or ideally several) run with comms colleagues is critical. These sessions should bring people on board, gather ideas and air any challenges. Cast your net wide. Anyone who is speaking with your voice should be considered comms and will have a stake. Consider inviting other stakeholders or outside eyes, particularly if you are a small team or individual comms lead.
Workshops can be run across one day or split up into one or two hour long sessions and should explore the details of importance to you. They could cover:
Sense checking your objectives and audiences together
Aligning audiences to your objectives (who do you want to think/feel and do what?)
Exploring your competitors to identify learnings
Developing key messages by audience and objective
Developing core campaigns and how each team/channel will deliver
Agreeing how you may work differently together in the future
3. Production (this is where the detail comes in)
It’s only at this point that the strategy lead (whatever form that has taken), can really hunker down to produce a clear strategic plan. This could be a written document, set of infographics, a video or all of the above.
The plan should be based on all that’s been gathered and will become the reference point on which decisions will be based.
The scope and scale of the critical product will depend on the organisation’s size and complexity, but at its simplest it should include: your shared objectives; an overview of audience insight and targets; key messaging or a more complex messaging framework; channels, teams and campaigns delivering for each objective; how you will measure success.
Throughout this production period, checking in with your team and stakeholders to sense check direction, as well as testing ideas with audiences makes sure you keep on track.
4. Bringing your strategy to life
You’ve now established your strategic framework for holistic communications. You’ve based it on insight and developed how it will be measured. But it mustn’t end with a product. Time to go back once again to the people.
Make time to have a celebratory launch with all those involved. This gives the chance to bring all parties back together, thank everyone for their support, highlight what each person or team will deliver and set the scene for the importance of strategic communications going forward.
It’s time to take a breath now, right? Of course not!
Your strategy team, lead (or your strategic time put aside) will always need to be developing new insight to drive your work; evaluating delivery and sharing learnings; ensuring iterative development of your plan takes place; triaging new ideas; supporting campaign development and horizon scanning for the next big thing.
And whether it’s through cross-channel planning grids, monthly learning sessions, pulse surveys or embedding comms objectives into annual appraisals, teams will need to work together to do anything and everything needed to keep your strategy alive.
But that’s for another blog…
If this intro overview has whet your appetite, get in touch to talk more about setting your strategic direction and how I may be able to help.