An effective communications strategy helps you focus on the right things and leave out everything else. Here are five ways to do it – with examples of others who have done it successfully.
A good communications strategy often looks very simple. When someone looks back at the strategy and its results, it seems obvious that it worked – after all, it got everyone to focus on the right things and nothing else.
But the road to that simple, obvious result is often anything but easy. Often the hardest part of developing a communications strategy is choosing what to do – and what not to do.
It's natural to want everything. But when it comes to communications strategies that work in the real world, you can only have what you need to succeed – not everything you want.
Here is how to simplify your communications strategy so you can focus on the right things.
A municipally owned company in communications services needed help staying relevant in competition with private players. It had several audiences and challenges in many areas.
Its existing strategy took all of this into account in a theoretically impressive way – unfortunately with no connection to reality.
Because here and now, the company didn't need theories. It simply needed a website that radiated competence and modernity. Only then could it communicate more actively. As things stood, it was held back because all marketing risked driving traffic to a website that gave the wrong impression of the company.
The solution was a new communications strategy with three important parts:
The key here was the leadership's openness to temporarily putting other challenges on hold in order to focus on what was truly decisive.
A communications strategy isn't about theory or big words. It's about knowing what needs to be done to make things happen in the real world.
“We thought we were at the forefront of communicating sustainability, but that wasn't true.”
The realisation that communication was lagging behind in many areas made the company's CEO want to work on every front at once. But how would the resources stretch that far?
On closer analysis, we discovered that several of the target audiences overlapped, and that if we focused on one of them, we could reach many other audiences at the same time.
This became an important piece of the company's communications strategy. It showed how the company's limited resources could become more effective by using communication with one audience as a lever – instead of directing specific efforts at each audience.
There are several examples of efforts that can act as a lever:
The levers aren't always obvious, but they are often well worth looking for. Finding a lever may also be necessary if resources are limited.
When the City of Stockholm was going to develop and start construction projects in new areas, a large Stockholm construction company risked being overtaken by its competitors. It knew it needed to influence the right people in the city administration to win the right to build important projects, but it didn't know what its communications strategy should look like to get there.
The company came to our meeting with lots of good ideas – events, reports and advertising campaigns – and was open to brainstorming even more. But together we soon realised that what was needed above all was simple, boring, methodical work.
The company already had a good reputation with the city, and now the CEO simply needed to meet the right people at the right time. Not too early in the process, when it wasn't really relevant, but not too late either, when it would be harder to influence the planning in the company's favour.
We mapped all the important construction projects and the people who could influence the process, and made sure the CEO could meet them at the right time and with the right message.
What made the communications strategy so effective was the analysis of reality and what needed to be done to succeed. In this case it wasn't anything advanced or complicated, but something as simple as meeting the right people at the right time.
One thing that can really kill an otherwise good strategy is when some parts of it work against others. It's a tricky problem that is sometimes hidden by complexity and big words. It is also one of the most common reasons why communication isn't as effective as it could be.
A retail company was struggling with inefficiency in its social channels. There were ambitious goals to develop a strong organic presence, but over time it became increasingly clear that success was measured above all by paid reach. That in turn had to do with how the organisation was structured and how results were reported internally.
Once it was clear what success really meant and how it would be measured, we could develop a new strategy. It not only had a clear focus on a few of the right things, but also made it possible to continuously improve and streamline the work in a structured way.
The important thing was that every part of the new communications strategy pulled in the same direction – and that everything that didn't support the strategic goals had been removed.
Whether you are in a leadership role or an expert role, you will receive plenty of exciting suggestions for things to do. It might be salespeople calling about a new tool or advertising placements, potential partners, or colleagues and friends tipping you off about smart new ways of working.
You'll need to say no to almost all of it. Otherwise there'll be lots of work but little impact.
At the same time, you can't wear blinkers and miss the opportunities that all change brings.
So how do you find the right balance?
The head of communications at a government agency in technology and research had got this balance exactly right. Together we continuously evaluated new opportunities. In practice he said maybe to almost everything and was open to exploring – but not out of fear of making decisions.
Because once we had identified a path that fitted the overall communications strategy, he acted quickly.
The winning perspective was the right balance between openness to the new and the ability to hold a steady course. The foundation for that was the clear choices we had made in the communications strategy, which answered questions such as:
Try one or more of these five ways to simplify and streamline your communications strategy. You may be surprised by how much you can – and should – leave out.
Tale är en content- och PR-byrå inom Diplomatgruppen. Vi hjälper företag och organisationer att utveckla sin kommunikation genom content, PR och storytelling.
Vi kommer oftast in när kommunikationen är komplex och det måste bli rätt, till exempel vid strategiska skiften, känsliga frågor eller när något riskerar att bli medialt.
Det gör att ni kan fatta beslut och kommunicera på ett sätt som håller internt och externt.
