This article is written to give a holistic view of communication strategy – not a quick fix. If you need help with understanding any aspect, do not hesitate to contact me. Communication is a process – trust in it.
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Step 1: Ensure you have a solid strategic base
Step 2: Define SMART goals for each stakeholder group
Step 3: Define your core message
Step 4 (optional but useful): Develop an Anchor
Step 5: Define your key messages and from them, individual messages
Step 6: Choosing your communication instruments
Step 7: Define the parameters – Stay on brand
Step 8: Communicate
Step 1: Ensure you have a solid strategic base
Ensure you have clearly defined the positioning of your company.
Your positioning is the core of all your communication.
It represents a target state in the perception of your company, product or service in the consciousness of your stakeholders.
Make sure it is relevant, focused, differentiated, future-oriented, can be broken down into measurable operators, has a long-term focus and, what sounds like a contradiction, has both continuity and flexibility to adapt to the situation.
Your positioning should be independent of one particular stakeholder group but cater to all of them.
You should then check how your company-internal and company-external stakeholders perceive your company, product or service and compare and contrast the views with each other. Don’t forget to include your competitors in the analysis.
Step 2: Define SMART goals for each stakeholder group
Define your stakeholders, identify your main target groups and contrast the stakeholders’ perceptions with your strategic positioning. Identify the largest and most important differences between your strategic positioning and the actual current perception.
After you identified the differences between the wanted and the current perception you can prioritise the differences in how much they affect your business and thus, you should be able to define goals for each target group.
Make sure they are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timed).
Don’t forget you are not only trying to transform people who do not perceive things as you want yet but also to reinforce perceptions that are on or above target.
Most communication goals with regard to stakeholders can be categorised in the following manner:
Cognitive-oriented goals are aimed at controlling the absorption, processing and storage of information. They relate to perception, knowledge and memory. The main focus here usually is on stabilising or increasing brand awareness.
Affection-oriented goals are primarily aimed at arousing certain emotions and building up sympathy for a brand or product.
Conative-oriented goals refer to the behaviour of the target groups. In this way
customers to try out new products, to change brands or to increase the quantity of or to increase the purchased quantity.
Step 3: Define your core message
Developing a hierarchy of messages is crucial to ensure they all pay dividends to your positioning and that your company develops consistency and continuity in messaging.
First of all, you should develop one strong message based on your overarching positioning. This should have a relatively high degree of abstraction.
This is a great place to communicate your core value proposition in a, GET WHO BY WHAT, format. This is a place to put your core (and I mean very core value).
For example, Coca-Cola:
“We want to embody the American way of life with optimism, freedom and the strive for happiness.”
Here a few questions to help define that one very basic message:
What, at its very basic level are you providing to the world?
Unity and belonging?
Self-actualisation and esteem?
Physiological or psychological Safety?
What Monster are you fighting?
Who are you fighting for?
What do you want to induce in your target audience?
What is your role in that transformation?
Step 4 (optional but useful): Develop an Anchor
Is there a character, key visual, key sound or smell you want to be associated with your message? Now is the time to define it.
If you can tie your brand message to a character that can present an extremely powerful tool to use in your communication.
Characters are the strongest. You could use an actual person (a person you want to be associated with your brand), an abstracted person like a fictional person, your own mascot or cartoon character (Father Christmas, Coca Cola or DUO of Duo Lingo or the Michelin Man) or even more abstract an object like the bottle design (Jägermeister Bottle, Coke Bottle) or a sound (Porsche) or a signature smell.
Step 5: Define your key messages and from them, individual messages
Here you can expand on your core company message and break it down to your stakeholder groups. What do you believe and what effect does this have on the overarching desires of the stakeholder groups?
Again it is great to focus on transformation here or on values you want to be associated with.
What value (both physical and psychological) do you provide?
Why? What are you fighting against, what are you fighting for?
Who are you fighting for?
How do you want to achieve that transformation?
After you have broken down your core message into individual stakeholder-specific messages you can go into developing the messages that will end up in your communication.
For example, my current core message is:
“I want to change the perception of marketing as evil by building and promoting value-based love brands with start-ups and SMEs.”
This statement can then be broken down into smaller, more specific messages.
For example:
To the public:
Some marketing has evil intentions – but not all, and I am here to change that, by building and promoting brands that build
To the Startup-World:
Hey there, startups – I want you to succeed by helping you build a value-based brand and finding unique ways of promoting it.
To the SME:
Differentiate yourself from the competition by transforming into a brand that puts and communicates value first.
Every key message to a stakeholder group can then be broken down into individual communication messages.
For example
“Book a free consultation today to see if I can help you transform your business to a more value-based brand”
You have now mastered the message hierarchy and ensured all messages pay dividends to your positioning and core message.
Step 6: Choosing your communication instruments
After you ensured your positioning is rock solid and your messages follow a clear path you should define the relationship between your different communication instruments.
All instruments can be categorised into different channels according to how much influence you have over them.
Owned
All channels where you have a large amount of control over the content and the time you can showcase your content. This could be your Website, social media channels, your stores, the way your staff communicates and many more.
Paid
All channels where you can pay to reach people, with a more restricted amount of control over the content and its distribution. This could be advertisements on TV, Social or online, Influencers, advertorials and many more.
Earned
All channels where others are creating and distributing content about you. Very little control over content and timing of the content. Often you are informed about earned content and asked for interviews or comments. This channel can be steered a little with PR.
Shared
All content distribution happens between groups of people. Often completely without any involvement of your company. Hardly any control over content or distribution. Community management can be one way of influencing this channel type.
So, we figured out that you have the most influence over the content of your owned and paid media channels. This means that you should choose your lead communication instruments in these channels.
Next, we should look at the relationship between communication instruments.
Lead instruments
These Instruments are the strategically most significant. They are the main means of distributing your messages and influence all other communication instruments.
Crystallisation Instruments
These Instruments are heavily influenced by other communication instruments but can in turn also influence other instruments heavily.
Integration Instruments
These instruments tie together the communication between other instruments. They have a low influence on other instruments but play a significant role regardless.
Follow-up Instruments
Heavily influenced by other instruments and can be used t multiply the effect of other instruments.
It heavily depends on what type of company you are, to define which instrument is what to your company. Consumer -goods companies for example often have a focus on Media-advertising as their lead channels whilst B2B companies often use Exhibitions, online marketing and internal communication as their lead instruments.
Here is one idea for an exemplary consumer goods company
Lead Instruments
Long form video podcast on Youtube
Podcast on streaming services
Crystallisation Instruments
Short clips of long-form content on social media, adjusted to the instruments
SEA-Advertising
Integration instrument
Community Management
Event-Marketing
POS Campaign
Follow up instruments
Paid Social from high-performing short snippets
Press release
Step 7: Define the parameters – Stay on brand
In order to communicate in a holistic and integrated way you now need to ensure you have all assets necessary to cater to the different channels.
Create a brand guideline which ensures all your channels can be addressed in a consistent and attractive manner.
Create sets of rules for each channel, assets, templates, personal communication framework etc.
Create a content plan.
Define the process of how each channel is to be managed.
Step 8: Communicate
Voila, you are ready to communicate.
I hope you found value in this article.
If you did I would really appreciate some feedback below!
