Five Components of a Successful Strategic Communications

Strategic communication is one of the most used words in business today. Everything from purchasing, logistics, and sailing products or services to hiring employees is done strategically. But its impact is not limited to that. Business communication also revolves around the term “strategic”.

Strategic communication helps you get the most out of your communication with the audience and compel them to take your desired action. There are five components of communication strategy to help you grow your business. Read further to learn what elements communications agency use for businesses.

What is a Communications Strategy Plan?

Strategic communication is a plan for communicating with your current and potential customers. It includes your target audience, why you are talking to them, when and how you will talk to them, what channels are appropriate to use, and what form of communication you choose.

Importance of Strategic Communication

Consistency

Generally, an organization releases the same press updates several times a year to different media outlets. Since we live in a digital information age that leads to highly informed and aware customers, this approach seems old-fashioned.

Optimizing communication strategies for different audiences and choosing different media platforms might be better. But for that, you need sufficient planning and the proper execution of communication campaigns to create coherency in the company’s messages. Organizations can also plan for communication that accurately fits their goals and objectives, despite the diversity of platforms and audiences.

Brand Recognition and Awareness

Strategic communication can help employees, customers, stakeholders, and patrons to understand different aspects of an organization, like products, services, ways of working, and others. This understanding results in brand recognition and awareness in the market.

Note that brand awareness can compel people to refer your business to their friends and family, leading to higher sales and more customer growth. With strategic communication, you can transform from a typical company to a reputable brand. Hence, through communication, brands can promote themselves and reach out to a bigger audience.

Higher Sales

Strategic communication can help you present your brand in a way that can gain the attention of new customers and retain current consumers. It can also help to gain people’s trust, especially if you have a poor image in the market. Choosing the right message and communication channel will help you resolve people’s concerns, persuading them to purchase your services and products. All these things will eventually help you boost sales.

The best part is that strategic communication is affordable and doesn’t need an enormous marketing budget. Also, it’s not difficult to implement if you understand the components of successful strategic communications. If you want to increase sales, it’s better to hire a communications agency with years of experience showing the strong front of companies in the market through effective communication strategies.

Components of Strategic Communication

1.     Audience

Communications agency put great attention to understanding your audience and stakeholders. This is because your target audience will help you choose the right communication strategy to engage and attract people effectively.

So, to create a sound strategy, you must deeply dive into customers’ perceptions and needs. You must also segment your audience to design messages that cater to them. Understanding your audience will help you offer valuable and understandable information to investors, employees, potential or current customers, collaborative partners, and other audiences.

2.     Messenger(s)

Are you the primary messenger of your business communications? If so, you need to consider whether you can be the most effective messenger. When choosing a messenger, consider “Ethos”, which allows you to choose a credible and reliable messenger among the audience. Some factors that effects Ethos are:

• Expertise – Most audiences prefer a messenger with experience and demonstrated knowledge in the subject area.
• Power and Status – Many customers have more confidence in people with authority and big titles, like CRO or a high position in the company.
• Relationship – Prior relationships of a messenger with the customers can benefit the company and improve the messenger’s credibility.

3.     Goals and Objectives

Without knowing your goals and objectives of strategic communication, it’s challenging to create a concrete plan that offers results. You need to dig deeper to understand why your company wants to create a communication plan in the first place.

Do you need to spread awareness of your brand, products, or services? Do you need to achieve visibility with the help of press coverage? Do you want to increase traffic to your website? Whatever the purpose is, you need to determine it for strategic communication.

4.     Measurement

Metrics are essential. Determining whether you have reached your business goals is easy. For instance, your sales rise by 20%. Your goal was to increase sales by 15%. This value shows that you have successfully achieved your goal. Applying metrics for your communication strategies and tactics is essential to gain ultimate success from your strategy.

Without metrics, it is difficult to analyze communication’s role in achieving organizational goals. Therefore, experts have made different methods to capture these data to help companies amend their strategies to gain their desired results. Besides analyzing, you need to choose outcome metrics over output metrics.

5.     Tactical Plan

How will you communicate? Who and when to communicate? Tactical plan act as a blueprint for your strategic communication plan. This plan contains a linear strategy to reach the company’s objectives.

Ground-level tactics and strategies support goals. You need to create an outline indicating how tactics improve strategies and lead you to goals. This helps you make the best brand communication planning that is promising.

Bottom Line

In a nutshell, components of strategic communication are the audience, message, goals, measurement, and tactical plan. Make sure to consider these things to create strategic communication. Or you can hire a communications agency to help you create a strong position and show a powerful face for your company. They will help you change the game of your business by boosting sales and getting new clients.