How to Develop a Comprehensive Strategic Communication Plan That Aligns with Your Company’s Vision

Effective communication is critical to accomplishing the goals of any company – and consistent, effective communication takes planning.

From how your employees work together and perceive the company to how clients and investors feel about collaborating with your firm to how successfully you pull off projects, great communication is at the crux of it all.

With this being the case, developing a strategic communication plan that aligns with – and pushes your company towards – its goals are essential.

Here are the steps you can take to develop your communication strategy.

1. Outline your goals

For many reasons (not just communication), you should have clearly defined company goals and objectives and a clear vision for your company’s future.

This will impact everything from your internal communications with employees to how you communicate with customers and investors and carry out projects.

Outlining these goals will also help you ensure that the messages you convey are consistent and align with your company’s vision and values.

You should also define the purpose and goals of your communication plan more specifically.

Is it important to have a plan in place to mitigate crises? What types of crises do you need to plan for? Is it a top priority to cultivate trust between yourself and your clients/within your team? Is it vital to keep investors interested in your company?

Answering these questions will help you to follow the remaining steps to build a successful strategic communication plan.

2. Define your target audience(s)

Before you decide what to say, you must know who you’re saying it to. After all, the right message to send to one stakeholder might not be appropriate (or relevant) to send to another.

So, it’s important to list the audiences you intend to communicate with; giving them a rating in terms of priority is also good practice. If your clients/customers are your number one concern, it’s a good idea to put them at the top of the list.

If you’re more concerned about your company’s reputation as an employer – maybe your top concern is attracting the best talent into your company – then employees and the media might be higher on your list.

3. Conduct audience analysis

Once you’ve identified key stakeholders, it’s time to learn more about them. This will enable you to tailor messages that are appropriate and relevant and will achieve your most important communication and company goals.

There are many ways to conduct audience analysis, including distributing surveys, using customer/client feedback, conducting sentiment analysis, and using online analytics, among others.

You can use several tools to gather and manipulate quantitative and qualitative data to identify patterns and trends. From here, you can find out what kind of people comprise your audiences, including information about their preferences, values, and the communication channels they typically use.

4. Craft key messages

Now that you’ve defined your target audiences and gotten to know these stakeholders better with audience analysis, you can craft key messages that appeal to – and are appropriate for – your audiences.

You should tailor key messages to each stakeholder group and for the situations that warrant crafting specific messages. For example, in a crisis, you must prepare unique key messages to disseminate internally to your employees, the media, investors, customers, and more.

If one of your company goals is to improve transparency and build trust with your employees, this will require different messaging. If one of your goals is to keep investors engaged, you’ll want to decide on the kind of information you want to share with them and how often.

Not only do you need to decide on the content of your key messages, but when these messages should be distributed and in which situations.

5. Identify appropriate communication channels

Now that you know what your messages will be, you need to decide where they should go.

As we’ve alluded to, different audiences are likely to spend more time on – and be more receptive to – different communication channels. Based on your audience analysis research, you should decide which channels to disseminate the right messages to your target audiences.

These channels might include:

• Email
• Social media
• Collaborative work platforms
• In-person and/or online meetings
• Online news outlets
• Mainstream media like TV, newspapers

6. Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns

The only way to know if your strategic communication plan is working is to measure the effectiveness of your communication campaigns using KPIs.

Make sure you decide on each communication goal’s most significant key performance indicators. These can range significantly from the number of new clients you attract to the number of views on blog posts and media articles you receive to the sentiment held by the public about your company.

Of course, to do this, you also need to employ the right tools. These might include:

• Sentiment analysis software
• Social media listening tools
• Online analytics tools
• Surveys/client feedback

7. Assign owners

A comprehensive strategic communication plan needs more than one person to disseminate and monitor each communication campaign.

For this reason, it’s good practice to assign owners to each campaign – a person (or team) to oversee the distribution of these messages, monitor their performance, and report back on their findings.

8. Adjust and improve

After monitoring the effectiveness of your communication campaigns, you’ll be able to see which of your communication campaigns were most successful and what components contributed to their success.

These might include the communication channels that reached your audience most effectively, the messages that generated the most positive engagement, and other elements of your communication strategy that impacted your KPIs.

From here, you can hone future campaigns using the most successful elements from previous ones to push your company closer to its goals.