The goal of every business is to communicate information and services by connecting and engaging with its audience. The key to achieving that is having an effective communications plan. Learn more below about what a communications strategy is and how to create one for your business.
Understanding What a Communications Strategy Is
A communications strategy is your plan for delivering information to clients, consumers, employees and stakeholders. It will identify your audience, the message that you want to share and where you’ll share that message.
With an effective communications plan, you can clarify the purpose of your service or product and officially determine what you want your intended audience to know. Also, you can use a communications strategy to dissipate a crisis that has resulted from a poor decision or message. Not having a communications plan will leave you unprepared.
Steps for Writing an Effective Communications Strategy
It can be tricky to write an effective communications plan. However, using the following guidelines could make it easier.
1. Identify Problem Areas With Your Company’s Communications
Before you can begin writing your strategy, you need to analyze the current state of your company’s communications and identify where to make improvements. For instance, you might find that you rarely highlight a topic that aligns with your products or services. Add it to your plan for your next product or service launch.
2. Choose Smart Goals
With the information from your audit, determine what you want to achieve with your communications strategy, and lay out goals based on your audit results. Your goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based. If your human resources team needs to pitch a new growth matrix, for example, they should identify what they want to achieve with their strategy, such as retaining 10% more employees than the previous year.
3. Determine Your Audience
The only way to effectively communicate with your audience is to understand them. The audience for your new product or service could be employees, customers, media outlets or investors. Then, you can decide the best way to communicate with them. For employees, you may consider creating an internal document that’s easy for them to refer to.
4. Create an Outline and Choose Delivery Channels
With your target audience in mind, use a chart or table to outline the message that you want to promote. Keep in mind that you can promote more than one message. Next, you can choose the best way to communicate with your audience. If you’re communicating with consumers, you might publish a news release, send an email newsletter and post on social media. If you’re targeting employees, though, you could send a companywide email.
5. Decide When to Deliver the Message
Having an estimate of when your business will deliver the message to your audience is essential for avoiding mishaps. For a new product or service launch, you could issue a pre-announcement for when you will launch, or you could issue the announcement on the day of the launch.
By following these five steps, you can create an effective communications strategy for many aspects of your business. As a result, you should reach your goals and see your business grow.
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