Creating a strategic plan is crucial for every business. It is the guide that sets up a sense of direction in which the company must travel to achieve its goals and objectives within a set period. However, no matter how much a company works on a strategy, in the end, how you communicate to the target audience determines your success or demise. Furthermore, Without the employees – the key drivers of the strategic plan- knowing about it or how to align with it, it is incredibly difficult or impossible to implement your strategy.
If you make a strategy and no one hears about it, will it make an impact? That’s because the plan is as good as its implementation. With communication being such a critical driver of the success of a strategic plan, you may want to create a strategic communications strategy to get employees engaged from the ground up.
What are Strategic Communications?
Strategic communications entail spreading important messages via various public relations and marketing campaigns. To this end, businesses deploy a wide range of PR, communications, and marketing tactics, but all adhere to a common blueprint known as a strategic communications plan. Templates for this kind of strategic planning tend to look and function in a certain way.
First, the plan ought to include a crystal-clear purpose and well-defined communications goals. Second, it must accurately define the target audience to communicate the message to the appropriate individuals. The next step is to determine how to transmit the message and at what point it will be most effective to deliver it. Finally, who is the most qualified to convey the message, or what are the most effective communication channels?
Organizations can now construct communication activities that effectively reach important audiences with business objectives and marketing plans if they follow this basic template and comparable structures as they design these activities. The communications team of an organization can keep critical messaging on point and rise above all the noise if it focuses its outreach efforts on the organization’s business strategy.
How Strategic Communications Support Strategic Planning
Several positive outcomes can result from incorporating a communication plan into your company, including the following:
Improve the understanding
Developing and implementing a communications strategy gives a clearer understanding of how a business should communicate, whether with its employees or customers. It is a tool that describes numerous components of communication relevant to the audience and the personnel working inside the firm. This is true regardless of the sort of communication strategy you use.
Guide the company’s marketing communications
You might use this as a guide for your company’s marketing communications if your organization decides to build an overarching communication plan. Maintaining consistency throughout the organization is another advantage of using communication techniques in an organization. Maintaining coherence throughout all levels of communication, both internal and external is critical.
Learn More about Strategic Communications at Applied Development
At Applied Development, we strive to ensure you receive and communicate your messages as intended through our strategic communications services, including social media strategy, technical writing, graphic design, and speechwriting. We champion the rights of people of all abilities to communicate effectively through our reasonable accommodations services, including sign language interpretating and Communications Access Real-Time Translation (CART) and ensure websites and digital content is accessible to everyone through our Section 508 compliance services.
Call us today at (410) 571-4016 or contact us online to learn how we can help your business with strategic communications.