No matter your industry or subject, creating a plan to reach goals that will help you arrive at your destination also can assist you to better understand the scope of your communications and marketing. A plan will help you stay organized and make adjustments in case you run into unforeseen challenges and obstacles. It also can help you reduce processes into small, achievable chunks for accomplishing tasks that you’ll need to do to overcome challenges.
Here are five steps to help you write a strategic communications plan.
Step 1. Define the Audience at Your Destination
You’ve got a story to tell and you’ve picked where you want to tell it. Now you need an audience to tell it to. Start by defining the audience at your destination.
Defining your audience also means deciding why you want to reach it. Do you need to reach fans (and their friends) of your client’s alt-rock band to tell them about the release of its new album and an upcoming concert schedule? Maybe you need to reach doctors who prescribe a medicine to let them know your client has updated its formula to improve the medicine. Targeting your audiences for the message will help you segment and schedule how and where you will release your communications. Knowing whom you need to reach and why will help you determine how to tweak your main message to get through the clutter to reach micro-audiences within your larger audience. Now write it down.
Step 2. R&D Messages that Build User Personas
Take time to research or create the analytics you need to fully understand whom you will message and what problems each of your audiences faces. Create as many audience “personas” as you need to ensure that each nuance of your message will resonate. Avoid telling a story that your client wants to hear—make sure messages are ones audiences can hear and respond to with the action you desire.
Research tells us that information alone fails to change behavior. What makes your messages effective is whether they are relevant to your audience and easy to understand and engaging. Audience personas tell you what your audience members do, think and feel. Personas also help you determine your audience’s preferred communications channels and formats as well as its influences and motivations.
Step 3. Determine Your Goals, Objectives and Tactics
The goals, objectives and tactics of a strategic communications plan are like the scale, legend and compass of a map: they point you to your destination and help you understand the route that works best for you. Goals, objectives and tactics also assist you in getting the right information into the hands of the right audiences. Correctly identifying goals and objectives and implementing the correct tactics helps to ensure your audiences want to see or hear your message and that they see and hear them. Goals will help focus your written plan on the big picture of the destination. You can break down objectives into short, middle and long-term if needed. Write your objectives using an active voice with verbs such as “increase, measure, partner, etc.” Make your tactics even more specific and bite-sized.
Step 4. Plan a S.M.A.R.T. Trip
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Using S.M.A.R.T. as a guide will help your plan be more tangible.
Specific. Determine where you are going and with whom. Lay out your destination and the audience you want reach.
Measurable. How can you quantify your effort and measure your progress? Can you count the results? Did you structure your route so that you will reach your destination sometime next year? Remember that baseline numbers need to be established to quantify and measure change. If you don’t know how far your destination is from where you are starting and how many people you want to take with you, it will be impossible to reliably say that you reached your destination with the number of passengers your research showed you needed to create change.
Achievable. Can we get it done in the time allotted with the resources we have? The objective needs to be realistic given the constraints. You can’t break land speed records driving a bus. Conversely, you can’t transport an audience if you’re driving a car built to break land speed records.
Relevant. Does the objective have an effect on the desired goal or strategy outcome? Although it may be important in getting to your final destination, does measuring the size of your luggage directly lead to the change you need your audience to make once you to get there?
Time-bound.Are we there yet? When will your objective be accomplished, and/ or when will you know you are there?
Step 5: Map the Route through Evaluation
As you travel along your specific communications highway, take the time to ask yourself and your team: How far have we come, how far do we have to go? How will we know when we’ve reached our destination? How will we know our audiences are still on the bus?
Metrics and evaluation that measure your journey help you track your ascent to your goals. They show the progress of your trip and where you may need to make improvements to make up lost time or ground. Milestones can also serve as a point of reflection. Are you where you want to be during each phase of the journey? Are you still on track to reach your destination on time and with the audience you wanted to take with you?
A strategic plan should also list who is accountable for each task. There can be a team of people working on a task but someone needs to document the progress.
Conclusion
Albert Einstein said, “Things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.” This can apply to great strategic communications planning. Grand planners allow for extenuating circumstances but never use them as an excuse to avoid accountability or taking a bumpy but viable road. Communication leaders who demand great strategic plans must be willing to factor extenuating circumstances into the equation or at least bring them under control before allowing the plan to be derailed.
In the end, a great strategic plan is all about mapping the itinerary before you leave. You may not always need a Rand McNally compendium of roadways, but it’s essential to create a habit of following an outline with audiences, goals, objectives, strategies and tactics clearly defined. Ultimately, as the driver, wouldn’t you prefer passengers so enthusiastic about the trip that they won’t nag, “Are we there yet?”
CONTACT: [email protected]