A COMMUNICATION PLAN OR STRATEGY

By Bihongoye Erica

A communication plan or strategy: every business, specific brand or project needs one. It doesn’t have to be ultra professional, neither exhaustive nor very detailed. But it should somehow be thought-through. Corporate communication is a discipline often neglected in an organization. The focus lays on other departments that have their direct impact on a company’s health: finances, sales, HR and marketing (although the latter is also cutting budgets). Although these specialties are indeed key for an organization to stay alive, a lack of corporate communication might be as fatal and sudden as a heart attack. A corporate communication strategy has a huge impact on your corporation’s visibility and reputation.

Corporate Communication Strategy

There are many techniques and possibilities for drawing up a corporate communication strategy, and all of them probably prove their effectiveness. The most important thing is to have some kind of communication guidelines in place, and keeping in mind the following key elements in the process of drawing up your strategy.

Identify the purpose of your communication: why do you want to communicate and what do you expect to get out of it for your business?

Identify your target audience: to whom do you want to communicate? Which target audience might benefit the most from your information?

Design your message: what do you want to talk about? What are the content, mood and language of your message?

Identify the channels: reach your audience by placing your message where they will read it.

The basis of corporate communication is all about the above four key elements for getting your message across. But apart of these key elements, there are several other steps to undertake to make sure your company’s corporate communication avoids pitfalls and keeps its positive effect on your reputation.

Check your resources: do you have the budget and the (right) people in place for your communication campaign?

Anticipate issues and obstacles: draft a crisis plan so you’ll know exactly what to do when a crisis occurs. Who takes responsibility for what?

Identify your relations with media, consumers, clients, suppliers and other stakeholders: who will help you spread your message?

Create an action plan: bring all previous steps together, and take action.

Evaluate your corporate communication strategy: make it more effective every time you implement it. What went wrong, what did you overlook and what was effective?

Corporate communication key messages

Step number three in the process above says: design your message. Here are a few tips how to draw them up. Your communication campaign may consist of one important subject; but it includes a handful of points that you want to convey in your corporate communication. Therefore it may be a good idea to draw up a few key messages before the start of your communications campaign.

Write them down in bulleted format, not having more than a sentence or two per key message. These drafted key messages have as objective to be short and comprehensible in order for the ones who will use them (employees, managers, spokespersons, etc.) to easily recall and repeat during conversation with stakeholders (consumers, prospects, clients, media, etc.).

How do you create them? There is one big trick: ask yourself why and how - to reveal the rationale behind your intentions. This will bring up all the relevant information that you know your audience will need to know to understand your corporate communication. Furthermore, take into account the following key characteristics of your key messages. They should be positive, specific, concise and short.

Defining your key messages for your online video project

The drafting of key messages is important for every kind of corporate communication campaign. In order to dynamise your communication you might consider online video. Video is a communication format and channel that is being used more and more. Therefore it is highly recommended to take into account the aforementioned steps before starting on your project, especially regarding the drafting of bulleted key messages. Be sure that you know what you want to communicate about and which messages you would like to convey to the outside (or inside) world. So ask yourself why and how. And the rest will be plain sailing…