Strategic communications is more than just PR or marketing; it's a disciplined approach that aligns communication with an organization's goals and objectives. It's about understanding your audience, crafting compelling messages, and selecting the most effective channels to deliver those messages.

As every landscape and marketplace becomes more populated and noisy, strategic communications have become increasingly critical, whether this is for external or internal communication. Recognizing the significant impact that effective internal communication has on employee engagement, productivity, and overall culture, organizations are increasingly embracing strategic approaches to reaching and engaging with employees. 

In this article, we'll explore strategic communication, its role in achieving organizational goals, common challenges, and the steps involved in creating and implementing a successful communication strategy. 

What is Strategic Communications?

Strategic communication is a planned and intentional approach to communication that aligns all messages with an organization's overall goals and objectives. Ideally, strategic communication should always promote achieving specific goals and objectives, ensuring any internal or external communications fit the company's purpose. As a whole, strategic communication integrates all a company's forms of communication, internal and external, from PR to marketing and advertising, to promote a consistent, coherent identity and meet goals.

Core elements of strategic communication include:

• Understanding and analysing your target audience: Who are you trying to reach? What are their needs, interests, and communication preferences? Once you've analysed your audience, segment them based on sensible groupings, e.g. internal, external, and stakeholder groups, so you can tailor your messaging.
• Crafting key messages: Strategic messages must be clear, concise, and impactful, ensuring consistency and alignment across all channels. What are the most important messages you want to convey to your audience? Messages should not just reach but effectively engage your target audience, which includes dynamically engaging with, getting feedback from and flexing your strategy to meet your target audience's needs and wants.
• Selecting the right channels: Select the most appropriate, effective ways to reach your target audience, whether social media, email, websites, press releases, events, etc. Highly impactful strategic communications integrate traditional and digital channels to remain consistent.
• Measuring and evaluating results: Setting measurable goals, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and analysing communication data to assess effectiveness and identify improvement areas.

What is a Communication Strategy?

A communication strategy is a detailed plan that outlines how an organization will communicate with its target audience/s. The roadmap guides all communication efforts, ensuring they align with the organization's goals and objectives. A communication strategy can be created for external or internal communications. Key elements of a communication strategy include:

• Target audience identification: Defining specific groups of people the organization wants to reach.
• Key message development: Crafting clear, concise, and impactful messages that resonate with the target audience.
• Channel selection: Choosing the most effective communication channels to reach the target audience (e.g., social media, email, website, events).
• Budget allocation: Determining the resources needed to implement the communication plan.
• Timeline and milestones: Setting deadlines and tracking progress towards achieving communication goals.
• Measurement and evaluation: Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the effectiveness of the communication efforts and make necessary adjustments.

Strategic Communications Help Achieve Business Goals

Strong and well-planned communications can help businesses achieve wider company goals, such as improving internal culture or overall business growth. Strategic internal messages help to build and sustain strong relationships with employees, reducing the number of irrelevant messages they receive daily while creating a trusted single source of truth.

• Build Brand Reputation: Sticking to consistent messaging enhances brand awareness, credibility, and trust. Good strategic communication ensures your internal brand becomes a trusted and recognisable source of information.
• Improve Internal Communication: Enhancing employee engagement, motivation, and productivity.
• Foster Strong Stakeholder Relationships: Effective communication strategies help you deepen relationships with investors, third-party partners and employees.
• Manage Change: By clearly communicating what's coming, you keep everyone informed and aligned, even when changing directions.
• Reduce Resources: Narrowing down communication to only the most effective tactics and channels for your audience saves resources while improving impact.

Implementing a Strategic Communications Plan

It's vital to have a clear communication strategy, enabling you to focus on the objectives, monitor progress and get feedback on the right areas. There are several steps you should take to create a communications strategy, and then implement strategic communications from this:

1. Conduct a Situational Analysis: Identify your organization's goals and objectives. Analyze your internal and external environment to identify key challenges and opportunities.
    
   • Reverse-engineer your current strategy or process for communications - why do things need to change? Find the areas of need to understand your challenges, identify your ideal outcome/s, and draw on your strengths and what's going well already.
2. Set Clear Objectives: Define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) communication goals. What are you trying to accomplish, and how will you impact company goals with a strategic communications plan?
3. Develop a Communication Strategy: In a communications calendar, outline your key messages, target audiences, channels, and timelines for comms campaigns throughout the year.
    
   • Audience is often most important here - you need to know who they are, where they are being communicated to, and other preferences. Do needs change by department or team? Who really needs to hear your message to bring you closer to the company’s goal? Think about their own objectives, requirements, concerns, needs and wants. Speaking directly to your target audience for insights and feedback is crucial here. Remember that each audience will likely need their own plan.
   • Choose appropriate channels where your target audience is most active, but try to ensure you have a mix of offline and online channels to reach everyone. If you're not sure which channels are best based on the data you have available, consider creating timelines to test channels throughout the year so you can understand which channels are best for your audience.
4. Implement Your Plan: Be clear about responsibilities, timelines, and processes. While planning is crucial, proper communication activity execution is needed to bring your plan to life and actively roll out your strategy across your chosen channels.
5. Monitor and Evaluate: Track progress and analyze results to monitor your communications' performance. Once you know what is working and what isn't, you can adjust. Continuous improvement is key; revising strategies in response to feedback ensures that your communications remain effective and relevant in the long term.

Common Challenges in Strategic Communication

While strategic communications offers numerous benefits, it also presents several significant challenges:

• Crisis Communications: Crises, whether natural disasters, public health emergencies, or reputation scandals, demand swift, decisive, and transparent communication. This will test and likely break your day-to-day communication plan, so it's important to think ahead and create a crisis communications plan for different emergency situations.
• Measuring ROI of Communications: Demonstrating communication efforts' return on investment (ROI) can be challenging. While some metrics, such as website traffic or social media engagement, are relatively easy to track, quantifying the impact of communication on brand reputation, employee retention, or revenue generation can be more difficult. By setting clear objectives and metrics to measure these at the start of creating a communications strategy.
• Keeping Up With Emerging Trends: It is crucial to stay on top of the latest tech and trends to keep your communication fresh and engaging. Embracing new tools ensures your strategies remain effective and meet your audience where they are.
• Internal Challenges:
  • Ineffective Top-Down Communication: A significant challenge is ensuring that key messages and strategic priorities are effectively communicated from leadership to employees at all levels.
  • Insufficient Integration: Lack of integration between internal and external communication efforts can lead to inconsistencies and missed opportunities. Effective strategic communication requires a holistic approach that considers all internal and external stakeholders.  
  • Cross-functional Collaboration: Internal Comms teams are the main heavy lifters behind strategic communications, but you will undoubtedly need to work with other departments to create effective content and messages to promote across channels.

Addressing these challenges requires a proactive and strategic approach. Organizations must invest in robust crisis communication plans, develop sophisticated measurement and evaluation frameworks, and foster strong internal communication channels to ensure effective information flow and alignment.

The Role of an Internal Communications Platform in Supporting Strategic Communications

An effective internal communications platform is crucial in supporting strategic communication efforts. By leveraging a robust platform, organizations can:

• Create a Centralized Hub for Information: Share important news, announcements, and updates with employees efficiently and seamlessly. Launch company-wide campaigns and initiatives, ensuring consistent messaging across all departments.
• Effectively Engage Employees: Foster two-way communication between employees and management, enabling open dialogue and feedback. Gather valuable employee insights to inform strategic decisions and improve employee engagement. Facilitate social interactions and knowledge sharing to build a strong sense of community and belonging among employees.
• Support Strategic Communications: Effectively disseminate key messages to internal audiences, ensuring they reach the right employees at the right time. Track employee engagement with internal communication initiatives, providing valuable data to measure the effectiveness of communication efforts and refine the internal communication strategy.

Akumina creates an effective internal communications platform tailored to your organization's needs. Our expert team can guide you through the entire process, from design and set-up to training, implementation, and optimization. To learn more about how Akumina can help you take your internal communications to the next level book a demo today and speak to our experts.