How to build a corporate communication strategy
Most communication plans start with a calendar. A newsletter in January, an event in February, a campaign in March. The calendar fills up, the year ends, and when someone asks “What actually changed?”, nobody has a clear answer.
A calendar isn’t a strategy. The strategy is the short document that explains why the calendar looks the way it does. It sets out where you want to get to, what needs to be said to whom to get there, and how you’ll know you’ve arrived.
1. Starting from the organisation’s goals
A communication strategy doesn’t start with communication goals. It starts with the organisation’s goals. Is it entering a new market this year? Struggling to hire good people? Looking for investment? Going through a change at the top?
In the first conversation with leadership, one question opens a lot of doors: “A year from now, what would you like people to think differently about this organisation?” The answer is the first line of the strategy.
2. Finding out how you’re seen today
There’s almost always a gap between how an organisation sees itself and how it’s seen from outside. Measuring that gap, rather than guessing at it, puts the strategy on solid ground.
A year’s worth of press coverage. Short conversations with a few customers and partners. A chat with some new joiners and some long-timers. What people write about the organisation on social media. Put on a single page, it all comes down to three questions: What’s known? What’s known wrongly? What isn’t known at all?
3. Prioritising stakeholders
You can’t speak to everyone at once, with the same weight. Whose thinking most needs to change for the organisation to reach its goal? Without whose support does nothing move?
Two questions help sort them: How much do they influence the organisation, and how much are they affected by it? Those high on both sit at the centre of the strategy. Employees are usually near the top of that list. They’re also the ones most often forgotten.
4. Key messages
Key messages are the few sentences the organisation wants to repeat everywhere. Three is enough. Five is a stretch. Ten, and nobody remembers any of them.
A message gets stronger when the evidence sits right next to it. “We’re close to our customers” isn’t a message, it’s a claim. Without a figure, an example or a story behind it, readers won’t believe it. A message with no evidence has two ways out: find the proof, or drop it from the list.
5. Channels and voices
For each stakeholder group, two questions: Where do these people get their information? Who speaks to them on the organisation’s behalf? Investors listen to the CEO. Employees listen to their own manager. Journalists call the press officer. Customers check the website.
It all fits in a simple table: stakeholder, key message, channel, spokesperson, frequency. That table is where the strategy meets the real world.
6. The calendar comes last
The calendar belongs at the end of the strategy, not the beginning. First come the dates you already know: year-end results, the new season, trade fairs, anniversaries. Then the moments when each key message will show up, several times over the year. A message with no place in the calendar won’t get heard on its own.
7. What you’ll measure
A strategy stays more honest when it’s clear from the start how success will be judged at the end of the year. Press mentions are easy to count but say very little by themselves. More useful questions might be: Do our key messages appear in the coverage? Can employees describe the organisation’s priorities in the same words? Do candidates arrive at interviews with an accurate picture of us?
One or two measures per goal is plenty. Noting the starting point and checking once at mid-year is usually enough to see which way things are going.
How long should the strategy document be?
Short. Leadership won’t read a strategy that runs past two pages, and after a while the team won’t open it either. For most organisations, a one-page core is enough: the goal, where things stand, priority stakeholders, three key messages, the measures. The table and the calendar can live in an appendix.
Filling a calendar is easy. Knowing why you filled it that way is the strategy.
