In this article we will cover what communication strategy is, the main benefits of a well-balanced communication strategy, and tips that will help you quickly access and improve communication strategy in your company or teams.
Let’s dive in!
What Is A Communication Strategy?
A communication strategy is a combination of tools, guidelines, and habits that shape how effectively information is exchanged within an organization, both internally and externally.
Effective communication strategy facilitates long-standing positive benefits at different levels of organizations, e.g. marketing performance, employee productivity, team morale, resource management, and more.
Here’s a list of questions that can help you quickly assess the level of communication strategy development in a company:
- How clear is your organization’s messaging across different channels (internal and external)?
- Do you have specific communication objectives tied to overall business goals?
- How often do you review and update your communication strategy?
- Who is responsible for communication strategy within the organization?
- What tools and platforms do you use to facilitate communication, and how effective are they?
If you answer “No” at least two times, then it’s a sign your communication strategy can (and should) be improved.
Below you’ll find effective tips to develop your communication strategy and reap benefits of having a clear, established communication strategy in place.
1. Identify Your Audience Needs
“Identify your audience” is where most of the advice on communication strategy starts and ends. Although good enough, identifying your audience is not enough. What matters even more is that you understand your audience needs and coin your communication strategy accordingly.
Here are a few examples.
Example 1:
A group of developers who need to communicate progress on current tasks and exchange experience, yet struggles with finding time for meetings or experience meeting fatigue and reduced productivity due to distractive, overwhelming in-person meetings. Solution would be to replace all in-person meetings with asynchronous standups, freeing time while satisfying needs of this segment.
Example 2:
You are communicating the benefits of your product to a younger audience via social media channels. Instead of long, education style videos you can try communicating aspects of products as lifestyle changes, for example, helping younger adults to save money on travels through a series of short practical tips from a travel blogger.
Always prioritize the needs of your audience when establishing your communication strategy and you will most likely develop strong communication protocols to achieve your own goals as a company or brand.
2. Find Your Core Message
In their bestselling book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”, authors Chip and Dan Heath emphasize that finding a clear, core message helps people retain and act on information.
In other words, finding a core message is paramount to crafting a successful communication strategy. We want people to act on the information we share and we want them to remember it.
It’s very possible to write a thousand word memo without ever arriving at any conclusion, confusing and bewildering your target audience simply because you did not define your core message. It’s equally possible to deliver the essence of your message in just one word.
Whether you’re communicating to a group of colleagues or writing a post for social media, always define your core message and try to convey it in as few words as possible.
Make sure to properly define and convey a core message at any level of your communication strategy.
3. Utilize Personas in Communication
Personas are often used in marketing and product development, serving both as anchors for strategic decisions and as a way to condense knowledge about your audience into simple, actionable archetypes.
Why not use them to improve your communication strategy?
Here are the most prominent qualities to develop actionable communication personas:
For external communications:
- Age (e.g. 20-29, 30 – 39)
- Preferred social media platforms
- Preferred communication channels (email, SMS, social media direct messages etc.)
- How frequently would prefer to receive updates
- How many notifications per month is acceptable
- Preferred tone of communications (formal, informal, mixed)
- Communication needs
For internal communications:
- Average number of meetings per month
- Desired number of meetings per month
- Preferred communication channels (intranet, email, Slack, Teams, etc.)
- Communication needs
- Communication frustrations (e.g. too many meetings per week)
Don’t try to create exhaustively detailed communication personas – before adding new details to the persona, ask yourself if this new piece of information is actionable & helps you better cater to the needs of your audience.
4. Remove Duplicate Communication Channels
It often happens that we have a myriad of communication channels at our disposal, especially so in a corporate environment.
To deliver the same message, you can use email, messengers, comments, project management tools, groups chats, and many other channels to communicate with your colleagues or clients.
For external communication, you can use blogs, social media pages, newsletters, SMS, and so on.
But more communication channels doesn’t necessarily translate into better communication. If people employ too many communication channels, the chances of important messages being unnoticed or buried among others multiply tenfold.People tend to stick to one or two communication channels and largely ignore others.
That has interesting and different repercussions for external and internal communication.
For internal communication, keep the number of communication channels as low as possible. If you use several group chats, remove all but one. If you use intranet communication platforms and project management tools, disable commenting options. Make sure people in your company use more or less the same tools.
For external communications, the situation is different. You often want to spread the same message to as many different clients as possible, because some of your audience will be using social media to communicate with your company, other people chatbots, and so on.
In this case, make sure you streamline the same message, and preferably within the same time period, to avoid any confusion.
5. Gather Actionable Feedback About Your Communications
In our day and age there are, likely, plenty of tools to help you gather feedback on how people communicate with your company or the impact of your external communications.
Here are few ways to learn more about your communications and improve:
- Conduct employee or customer surveys to understand communication preferences, pain points, and needs
- Run recurring polls in Slack and MS Teams
- Analyze metrics like email volume, meeting frequency, response times, unsubscribe rates
- Track engagement data on communication channels like intranet sites, social media, newsletters to see what content resonates most with your employees
- Analyze social media engagement metrics (comments, likes, subscriptions, direct messages)
Important: never access and gather actual contents of messages, as it is highly unethical and might be illegal.
6. Create Communication and Brand Voice Guidelines
This advice has most to do with external communications.
In most scenarios, the only people who would be talking to clients are the front line of your company such as marketing professionals, support operators, public speakers. These people are usually trained to convey communication in a certain manner or have ready-to-go scripts.
But that doesn’t mean everyone else should be shy about learning your company brand voice and uisng this knowledge in their communication. Common examples include when company experts present technical capabilities of your product to potential customers or communication in trade shows and industry hubs.
For that reason, it’s a great idea to establish brand guidelines for both internal and external communications and make sure every person in your company at least has access to these guidelines. Those guidelines can also be shared during onboarding and with interns.
Here is what your company communication guidelines can include:
- Preferable company tone and style during external communications
- Contacts of company spokespeople to help or take over during external communications
- Examples of stop words, conflict resolution scenarios, and de-escalation protocols in communication
- Schedule of (optional) monthly of yearly seminars on company communication policies
7. Use The Power of Storytelling
Storytelling has always been one of the most powerful ways of sharing information as we’re programmed as people to remember and exchange information better when it comes in the form of stories.
What we can do to improve communication strategy is to inject storytelling aspects in as many communication scenarios as possible.
Engineers and developers can learn storytelling techniques to better present progress on their tasks and exchange crucial development information.
Marketers can use storytelling techniques to hook customers and create memorable, user-driven stories that also promote your products or services your company offers.
Managers can learn storytelling to motivate subordinates and conduct more efficient meetings, such as one-on-one sessions with employees.