Quick Hits: Strategic Communication Planning

Whether it’s ensuring employees remain informed throughout a major workplace change, launching a new product or service, or simply regular messaging within your organization, thinking about your communications strategy can be the difference between success or failure.

Our consultants build a variety of strategic communications plans for our clients – from helping a major transportation authority secure employee buy-in for a large-scale workplace move, to assisting the federal government in adopting new cloud service technologies. Today, I’ll cover a few tips on how you might consider incorporating strategic communication best practices into your day-to-day.

5 Ways To Incorporate Strategic Communications Into Everyday Work

Developing strategic communications may sound lofty, but it doesn’t need to be. It comes down to knowing your audience, understanding how best they receive information, and crafting a message that meets their needs.

Key tips for successful strategic communications include:

1. Know Your Audience. Ensure whatever communications channel, platform, or medium you choose is one that makes sense for the end-user audience, and adapt your communications accordingly. If your employees are more comfortable receiving communications via email, for example, use an all-staff communication email. You can also reinforce your key messages in secondary and tertiary ways – such as verbally in all-staff meetings or listed within a weekly newsletter.
2. Brevity is Key. Take a second look at what you’ve written or planned and identify ways to make it shorter and clearer before hitting the send button. Remove passive language. Succinct language is clear, effective, and efficient. It also saves the reader time!
3. Stay on Topic. As the famous author and leadership coach Simon Sinek says, “start with the why.” Confirm that everything you’ve written in your is explicitly related to and contributes toward the clarity of the message – ensure your “why” is baked into your comms. Be thoughtful, purposeful, and clear. Remove extraneous details or off-topic ideas and focus on the main message. You can always include in your message that more details will follow.
4. Encourage Feedback. Encourage feedback and interaction with your audience to establish and build trust. Ensure to add a primary POC in your comms should your audience have follow-up questions, or direct your audience toward additional resources – such as a FAQ section on a website or a future all-staff town hall event.
5. Take Notes. Taking notes sounds simple, but if you find yourself in a position where you need to handle a communications task for a manager or client, taking notes in real-time saves time and decreases the likelihood of error. Hearing what it is that they are hoping to get out of the communications – and then committing those thoughts to paper – will make it much easier for you to elaborate on what they said later. Being able to create clear, concise, effective communications all starts with taking notes.

If you find yourself with a strategic communications (or Marketing!) challenge, I’d love to help you through it. I can be reached anytime at Aubrey.Waldock@dev2021.theclearing.com. I look forward to hearing from you.