Four steps to a powerful communication strategy
In these challenging economic times, organizations are focusing on those few things that are truly critical to success and most likely to impact the bottom line. To support these objectives, many communications departments are ensuring their priorities align with the current focus of the business.
An effective way to accomplish this is by developing a strategic plan to help you pinpoint your priorities, develop a roadmap for achieving your goals, and measure your results. To achieve this, there are four key steps that should be addressed.
1. Assess the landscape
The first step is to ensure you have all the information you need to develop the strategy. Take a look at what’s happening externally in your industry, as well as in the economic, cultural, and technological arenas that could impact your strategy. Then, conduct an internal needs assessment to ensure that you understand the overall business strategy and objectives for the next 12 to 18 months.
After reviewing these areas, take a look at your own department and determine how best to leverage your strengths, seize opportunities and address weaknesses and threats. All of this information will help you determine your path forward and identify one to three broad areas of focus.
2. Develop the roadmap
Based on the data you’ve gathered, you can now create your end state for the next 12 to 18 months, conduct a gap analysis to determine the distance between where you are now and the desired state, and develop your communication objectives for the year. Test each objective to ensure that it’s realistic, relevant, and measurable.
Next, define your tactics and activities for each objective. You may find that your list of activities is too large for the resources you have. One global hospitality organization we worked with addressed this by mapping each of its activities against two criteria: the level of business impact it would have, and the number of resources required to accomplish it. Activities that would have greater business impact with fewer resources became the organization’s top priorities, while activities with lesser business impact and/or required greater resources were eliminated from the list.
It’s also critical to identify any potential obstacles to achieving your strategy and ensure that your plan addresses each of them. Finally, develop a metrics strategy that identifies how you will measure success.
3. Align leaders
Obtaining leadership support and buy-in is critical for your strategy to gain traction. You may want to identify executive sponsors who can help you champion the strategy. Clearly define the role you want them to play in the strategy, and develop a plan to ensure that all leaders are aligned with your strategy.
4. Execute the strategy
We will devote a future article to strategy execution, so we’ll just touch on it briefly here. This step includes conducting a stakeholder analysis to address the needs of those groups who will be impact or be impacted by your strategy. You’ll also want to create a detailed project plan, and develop a communication and/or engagement strategy to help stakeholders achieve the strategy.
Keep in mind that developing a strategic plan is a process, and you will likely need to make adjustments as internal and external factors shift. But investing the time and effort up front to develop a sound strategic plan will pay off tremendously as you measure your success going forward.
Have your say
Have you revisited your communication strategy as a result of the recession and is it more aligned with wider business objectives as a result? What approach have you taken? What have you cut back on and what's been pushed up the priority list?
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