Effective communication planning starts with knowing what you are trying to achieve. Defining a clear purpose before choosing your message, audience or channels can help you make better decisions, measure what is working and adapt your approach over time.
“We need a Facebook post, newsletter or email” is a tactic, not the objective.
But how many people in the organisation are communicating with purpose or know WHY they are pushing content out on various channels?
Before you send something out, you should really understand what you are trying to achieve, and every communication action should have a purpose beyond simply informing people.
How to understand WHY you are communicating
With so many factors across communications and marketing at what point do you determine the WHY? I say every time.
Let’s break this down.
We’re not talking about SMART objectives for a campaign. The WHY is simply the reason behind a piece of communication, an overarching strategy or a campaign.
For example:
- An organisation’s overarching strategy
- Keep staff informed about the organisation’s strategic priorities, important updates and achievements
- The intranet
- Maintain an up-to-date, single source of truth for the organisation’s policies, procedures, news and important contacts
- A monthly CEO or staff newsletter
- Provide the CEO with an avenue to update staff and bridge the gap between executive and operational staff.
- Add links to long-form articles and operational updates for staff to read on the intranet for items they should be aware of or information they may have missed
- A marketing campaign
- Provide the audience with an overview of your product or service and how this will solve their problem.
- An awareness campaign (Safety messaging)
- Inform the target audience about how to stay safe and reduce the risk of harm.
- An overarching internal and/or external multi-channel content distribution framework (See what we are doing here)
- To communicate short-form and long-form content to the right audience to increase engagement.
That is why the ‘WHY’ is so important.
Whether you’re planning an overarching strategy, a campaign or a single piece of communication, the principle is the same, know what you’re trying to achieve before deciding what comes next.
You will be able to select the right platform, the right delivery method, the right language or tone and avoid just scatter gunning your message, which will likely be lost in translation or completely missed.
We always focus on step 1 of the Adaptive Approach, regardless of the level of the task at hand.
With a clear WHY, you also have something meaningful to measure against, helping you understand what’s working, what isn’t and what you may need to adapt.
This article is part of The Adaptive Approach insight series.