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.

How to Facilitate Effective Communication with Stakeholders to Maximize Project Success

Engaging effectively with stakeholders throughout a project is critical to project success.

A stakeholder is anyone who impacts – and will be impacted by – your project and its outcome. For example, your project team, the client(s), the contractors you use, and the top management within your company.

The most influential stakeholders within your project are your project team and your client, who play the biggest role in the project. Here’s how to facilitate effective communication to engage key stakeholders and achieve project success.

1. Create a communication plan
   The key to good communication is planning for it. Here, you can read about facilitating communication and boosting employee engagement with the project management process.
   
   In addition to fostering great communication within your team, it’s just as important to create a plan for how you’ll engage with clients throughout the project process. After all, the project is for them. If you don’t check in with your client at various points throughout the project, the finished product may be wrong for them.
   
   

   Even if you check in, but infrequently, the client may have to request backtracking and significant changes that alter the project timeline and budget. This, in turn, can decrease the satisfaction of your customers with your work. By predetermining points in the project timeline in which you’ll engage with the client and how you can avoid greater delays.

   So, create a communication plan specific to your client, starting with a kick-off meeting to iron out the details of the project and include plans to re-engage with the client in the project timeline to minimize backtracking. You can also check out how to manage change requests here and implement this into your communication plan.

2. Decide on your communication channels
   Depending on the nature of the project and who you’ll be communicating with throughout, you should decide on the communication channels you’ll use and when.
   
   For example, it might be best to hold in-person meetings with your team and clients at key points in the project. At more regular intervals – and when you just need to check something small with the client or your team – you might use email, social media, or a collaborative working platform to keep the project running smoothly.

3. Plan for the eventuality of conflict
   A key element of successful communication is being able to navigate conflict effectively. To do this, you should assume conflict as inevitable and develop a conflict-resolution plan to combat problems peacefully.
   
   Make sure to come up with a plan to navigate conflicts both with clients and with your team. Each plan should include a list of potential conflicts that may arise and a standardized approach to dealing with them.
   
   That way, you can act in the way you and your team have predetermined is best rather than exacerbate any problem by acting in the heat of the moment.

4. Manage expectations
   A good way to reduce conflict in the first place is to set expectations early with your client. If you think there are any misalignments between the suggested project scope and their timeline and budget, be upfront about this from the start so you don’t disappoint your client later.
   
   Take them through the change management process and ensure they know that significant project scope changes will likely affect the timeline and budget. Lastly, agree on a communication protocol that suits both parties and ensures your client feels informed enough at important milestones along the project.
   
   That way, no one is uncertain about how the project process will go, and your client is less likely to be surprised (in a bad way) by anything that happens along the way.

5. Foster strong relationships
   Project management is a people-driven process; the project’s relative success depends on the people, including how well they communicate and work together.
   
   So, make it a priority to foster strong relationships between team members, perhaps including opportunities for bonding outside of work and to build a strong culture of respect, transparency, and communication.
   
   With your clients, communicate respectfully and work with your client’s best interests to build trust and strengthen your professional relationship. Like with your team, you can also try to build a relationship outside of the office with a client you hope to work with on a longer-term basis, with activities like coffee meetings or even a round of golf.