Your communication strategy demystified: four steps, four tables
Have you been asked to develop your organisation’s communication strategy and don’t know where to start? You’re not alone.
I’ve just launched “4-Step Communication Strategy Framework: demystify communications strategy”, an online course for everyone who’s been asked to develop their organisation’s communication strategy and doesn’t know where to start.
The funny thing is, I’m not a comms strategist, which is perhaps why I think most comms strategy is bullshit: overthought, overcomplex, too theoretical and impossible to actually implement.
boil your strategy down to four tables everyone in your organisation can understand
Developing a comms strategy is not as hard as most strategists would have you believe. Actually implementing communications is a bigger challenge, but without a strategy you’re spinning wheels: lots of activity, no progress.
The 4-Step Communication Strategy Framework boils your strategy down to just four interlinked tables, and clearly distinguishes between what makes up a communications strategy and what are merely communications tactics. As a result, your strategy will be easily understood by everyone in your organisation. And that understanding is critical, because without both the input and buy-in of your colleagues, your strategy won’t have impact.
4 steps and 4 tables at a glance
Four steps to fill out four tables:
A) Identify your audiences
Start with your organisation’s mission, then:
- describe your audiences and their needs
- set your goals for them
- identify your USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) which relate to them.
B) Figure out your messaging
- what to say to them
- that resonates with their needs
- and gets them to act according to your goals.
C) Design your communications portfolio
- the comms products, activities and channels
- suiting your audiences’ preferences
- maximising synergies and content reuse.
D) Set out how to optimise it
- What to measure & Why
- When Who acts on it, and How.
Keep it simple, stupid
But why listen to me? I trained as a theoretical physicist before coming to Brussels as a science journalist in the early 90s, and stayed to become a science writer. I’d been on the internet since the late 1980s, however, and ended up building the first database-driven website for any European institution in 1995. I’ve focused on online comms ever since.
And every time I’ve been asked to build someone a website, I’ve asked for their overall communications strategy, as your website is the one comms tactic which must support, and be supported by, all other comms activities.
And I’ve been disappointed every time. Generally I’m emailed a longwinded document which Sun Tzu would describe as “the noise before defeat”, lovingly listing various communications tactics — “we do press relations and hold events and have a website and a bunch of publications …” — each written by the respective team. But never do I find a clear explanation of the Why or the Who underpinning it all, let alone a coherent comms portfolio backed up by a rigorous, data-driven optimisation process.
a practical approach based on 30 years of solving communications problems
So I had to learn how to swim upstream, “to first properly define some of the other, more fundamental aspects of the communications strategy”, as I put it a few years ago:
So the Communications Strategy Framework is not a theoretical approach based on years of University study — it is a practical approach based on over 30 years of solving communications problems.
What do you get?
There are two versions of the course:
- Executive summary version: A series of short videos, totalling ~30 minutes, walking you through the process of creating your organisation’s “Executive Summary” communication strategy, using the supplied executive summary template.
- Full strategy version: The content of the executive summary version, plus around ~20minutes more video and a much bigger template. Together they guide you through the creation of a far more detailed and complete communication strategy. There’s also a poster template to support internal adoption of your strategy.
The executive summary version is a good place to start if your organisation has little or no insight into its audiences, as it will help create the management consensus you’ll need before you embark on audience research. Moreover, it comes with a 100% discount to the full version — i.e., the price you paid for the executive summary course is deducted from the price of the full strategy course, so you can upgrade easily.
I’ll also add supplementary content in response to questions and feedback received (below).
Followups
Those who take the course will be able to ask specific followup questions via dedicated social posts. Otherwise, reach out to me via social: my accounts are listed on my About page, and subscribe to my newsletter while you’re there.
I also just launched another short course (and wrote this post about it):
More courses will appear over time on https://mathewlowry.gumroad.com/.
Finally, I curate as well as create content — for example, everything I read that (probably) had some bearing on this course can be found in Overview: Communication Strategy on my Hub, which brings together everything I Like, Think or Do.
