Perspective is everything, especially when it comes to creating and implementing a communications plan for your organization. Communications does not have a beginning or an end — ideally it’s a journey that requires a well-planned road map that can navigate you successfully through the on-roads and off-ramps that come at any stage in a company’s lifecycle.
Take for example the journey of a startup company. Communications touches every pathway of building credibility and visibility with your stakeholders. How are you going to position yourself in the marketplace? Will your brand effectively differentiate who you are and what you do? Is your company culture intrinsically aligned with your brand values? Are your advertising and marketing programs reaching your target audience through the channels you’ve selected? How will you reach your audience at different touchpoints? And once you have reached your target audience, how will they become loyal customers and advocates of your brand? To be truly engaged with your target audience you need to have something worthwhile to say.
Where Strategy and Communications Intersect
At the intersection of every communications journey is strategy. It’s a foolproof plan for ensuring that your brand voice carries the same tonality and consistency across all of your channels. A ‘one-off’ contest on your facebook page is just that unless it ties back to the values and benefit promise you have established with your audience. While communications can at times be savvy and innovative, it always has to be strategic.
So how to know if your company’s communication is strategic? A simple question companies can ask themselves is how embedded and aligned is communications within the current stage of their life cycle. Is communications always a first step when considering marketing a new product, rolling out a public relations campaign or implementing an employee engagement initiative? It should be. Where companies take a detour is when they use one initiative to determine how they will communicate about their entire business. Short-term results may be achievable yet won’t be sustainable and often times are not linked back to any of the core messages, values, positioning, and brand reputation a company has worked hard to achieve.
This is where having a well-thought-out roadmap is essential. To build, it takes a good deal of digging deep into the core of an organization through research, analysis and insights. Understanding where the challenges and opportunities lurk throughout a company’s lifecycle involves a continuous process of identifying competitive advantages, evaluating internal strengths and weakness, and marrying data with insights to deliver a holistic communications strategy.
Companies that build a communications strategy into their lifecycle — think of both communications strategy and the lifecycle as a continuous circle — will have far more success and ensure their brand voice remains true across all channels. And just as importantly, such companies will be well prepared to take advantage of opportunities, better mitigate challenges and risks, and build a stronger and sustainable brand.
How ModKaf can help
Helping companies talk to their world is at the forefront of ModKaf’s commitment to every client.
Utilizing an agnostic approach, ModKaf digs deep to understand every aspect of your business. We offer customized solutions to ensure your brand is engaging the right audiences through effective, memorable and cohesive messaging.
Blending internal and external communications with decades of expertise in the newsroom and on Wall Street, ModKaf offers a distinctive approach called R.A.C.E., which delivers research, analysis, insights and measurement tools to every strategic communications plan. This four-step approach creates roadmaps that are evidence-based, customized and easy to implement.
Our unique perspective helps clients to overcome challenges big and small and uncover new and innovative opportunities.