Fundamentals of Designing a Communications Strategy
by Tahasin Atar — Jul 2, 2023
Comms Ninja Tahasin Atar lays down the key elements to designing a comms strategy. Scroll below to hone your skills.
Behind every successful brand is a powerful communications and marketing strategy!
And in this day and age where everyone can promote their brand through social media, putting out content without a strategy may well be considered a cardinal sin.
But how can you ensure your marketing gives you your buck’s worth? Well, you start by designing a robust strategy that has your brand, its mission, and last but not least — your audience — at its core.
And just like every building is built upon a foundation, your communications strategy too should be built upon a few fundamental blocks.
Listed below are 7 steps for designing winning strategies in development communications for your organisation.
Step 1: Research, research, and research
I cannot stress this enough, but creating a communications strategy without thoroughly understanding the brand, may not give you the results you are looking for. And this is why we start with research. Study the organisation’s goals, vision, target audience, USP, and its competitors. Talk to the internal stakeholders — founders, CEO, and managers — to get a comprehensive understanding of the brand.
Your research will help you understand the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, it's positioning in the market, your audience’s needs, and how the organisation is faring against its competitors. Your findings can also take the shape of a SWOT analysis report where you make a list of the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Step 2: Identify your communication goals
There would be no strategy if you had no goals to achieve. Your communication goals should always complement the organisational goals, and work towards propelling the brand toward achieving these goals. For e.g., if your organisation’s goal for the next quarter is to hire new talent, the communication goal, in this case, would be to promote your company’s work culture and the available career opportunities. You may then produce content in lieu of this goal, such as a series spotlighting the work life of your current employees, what they like about your organisation, and how it has helped them in their career growth.
Your communication goals will, in essence, lay the foundation for all your messaging and help you draft the right type of content for the right audience.
Step 3: Build your target audience persona
So all that research you did at the very beginning on your target audience will help you build your audience persona at this stage. In case you are wondering what a target audience persona is, it is a fictional profile of a person who represents your target audience group. A persona (although fictional) can be as detailed as you want and includes characteristics such as a person’s age, gender, profession, likes and dislikes, interests, online behaviour, and pain points.
Building target audience personas will help you in creating content that truly resonates with your audience as you now know them so much better, and since an audience is generally made of different groups or people with varying personalities, it is best to create multiple personas to get a clearer picture.
Step 4: Choose your communication channels
Now that you know your communication goals and where you are most likely to find your target audience, it’s time to zero in on the communication channels. As a general rule, if your organisation is in the B2B space, the best way to reach out to your audience would be via emailers and LinkedIn. But if you operate in the B2C space, then social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram would be your best bet. Having said that, every organisation caters to a different niche, and the channels you choose would largely depend on where you think your audience might be the most active.
A word of advice here: Steer away from the temptation of having your organisation’s presence on every single social media channel. This may not really help you convey your message in the most efficient manner, as each channel has a different messaging style and not every platform is the best place for your content. So choose your channels wisely!
Step 5: Draft your key messages
All your communication should ideally revolve around a few key messages that you want to convey to your audience. Going back to our previous example, if your company’s goal is to hire new talent, your key message here could be “XYZ organisation is an ideal place to work for those looking to achieve career growth combined with work-life balance.”
When drafting the key messages, here are a few questions you may ask yourself:
What do you want the audience to know about your organisation/brand?
What do they already know?
What do they don’t know?
Is the message aligned with your communication goals?
Once you have your key messages in place, all the content you create would be aimed at promoting these key messages in different formats (images, carousels, videos, podcasts, email newsletters, etc.) and through different channels.
Step 6: Design your content calendar
Now that you know what you want to communicate and to whom, it’s time to decide how often to communicate. Calendarizing your content gives it structure and helps you plan your communication in advance, which oftentimes also elevates the quality of your content.
Your content calendar should include all the content that goes out in a particular month (if it’s a monthly calendar), including the visuals, copies, hashtags, and links (wherever applicable). And more importantly, it should tell you which content has to be published on which day and via what channels.
You may create your content calendar on a simple Excel spreadsheet or use any of the online scheduling tools.
Step 7: Measure the outcomes
As we all know, “What gets measured, gets managed”. After you’ve executed your communications plan, it’s time to track the results. The metrics you track also depend on your communication goals and the channel. If your goal is to increase brand awareness on social media, then you may want to analyse the impressions and engagement rate on your posts. But if your goal is to get registrations for an event that you’re promoting via email and social media, then you should be tracking the open rate and click rate for your emails besides the engagement and click rate on your online content.
Tracking the outcomes will help you get a clearer picture of what’s working and not working in your communications. You may then revise your strategy accordingly or make changes to your content to ensure it makes a mark.
In the end…
A well-researched and thoughtfully executed communications strategy is your gateway to winning your audience’s attention and eventually converting them into your customers or brand loyalists. How effectively you use this tool is up to you!
Here’s a Brand Strategy template to start you off.
