Each year, businesses develop strategies around achieving certain business outcomes. Increased sales, increased brand awareness, more website traffic, converting a greater number of leads out of your sales funnel. A solid corporate communications strategy and team can help your company avoid the old “if a tree falls in the woods” argument. If no one heard the tree fall, did it make any noise? A solid corporate communications plan can be the difference between business outcomes that get accomplished and ones that don’t. Let’s make sure your corporate communications plan has all your bases covered and covers these five key things – audience, message, goals, content, and results.

Audience

The first default when you talk about audience is to focus your attention externally – your customers, clients, any relevant media that you try to engage to talk about your brand, social media or influencers, and the more “public” facing part of your key messaging strategy. But don’t ignore your internal audience – your colleagues, employees, executives, and any other key stakeholders who work for or on behalf of the company.

TIP: Review your current audience segments and ensure that you have all your targeted audiences identified.

Message

When it comes to message and audience, it may be a chicken vs. egg argument – which comes first? Is the message or the audience that needs to hear it more important? Really, the answer is both. As you develop your messaging, what you need to say and ensuring you can convey it clearly to your target audience is paramount. Audiences are also expecting companies and brands to be transparent – it builds trust and makes them more likely to purchase from you.

TIP: Solicit feedback from your audience segments. A quick survey can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your message.

Goals

“Plans change. Goals don’t.” We hear this from clients in every industry. Marketing, communications, content, and creative goals don’t change, but how we get there can be a moving target. Throughout the year, it’s important to check in on how your corporate communications strategy aligns with your stated goals and address any needed pivots and changes.

It’s like when a flight attendant on your overbooked flight tells you to use caution when opening the overhead bins as “items may have shifted during your flight.” When it comes to your company’s goals, your plans on how you achieve those goals may need to shift and course correct in order to achieve them.

TIP:  Schedule a meeting to review current performance against business outcomes and identify any tactics that need to be revised for the remainder of this year. For example, Do you need to engage with internal audiences more or be more transparent?

Content

Now that we have our audiences identified and segmented (both internal and external), our messaging crafted, and the goals we’re trying to achieve as a company, we need content to support all those things and a cadence to determine how often we will share that new content. These are the tactics that a corporate communications team can use to convey those messages to the audiences. Internally, that can take the form of everything from staff meetings to internal newsletters. Externally, that’s the content on any of your public-facing channels – your website, your social media, and your PR and social strategies.

Anyone in this business knows that content can be a beast that requires constant care and feeding. Save yourself a lot of trouble and take some time to plan. Create a calendar and use it to determine how often you’re reaching out to internal and external audiences and with what message. And identify who can help you feed that content machine (please don’t try to do this by yourself). Whether that’s hiring an agency to help you, partnering with some influencers or freelancers, or harnessing the talents on your own communications teams, you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

TIP: Have a brainstorming session. Assemble your key content team and spend time harvesting all the ideas from their big, beautiful brains. Create some message maps that you can use as you steer your content strategies for the rest of the year.

Results

As you prepare to implement your plans, identify some KPIs or benchmarks to help you evaluate whether your plans achieved the desired results. Throughout your plan, you should have a channel open for feedback, either from internal or external customers. As Jay Baer says in the book “Hug Your Haters,” anyone taking the time to give you feedback (positive or negative) is giving you valuable (and FREE) information you can use to improve your product or service.

TIP: Do you have any success stories you could highlight? If a tactic didn’t perform as expected, can you do an exercise to diagnose why?

Corporate communications teams, small and large, need to consider how their role impacts brand reputation for both employees and customers. As marketers and communicators, we need opportunities to periodically review our audiences, messages, goals, content strategies, and results to ensure that we are delivering the right messages to the right audiences and measuring the impact of those strategies against the business outcomes we’re tasked to achieve.