Recently, we held a training session on communications planning for the City of Parramatta Council, targeted at start-ups and small businesses located in Western Sydney.
The session covered the basics of starting, building and reporting on your communications plan. This might sound like a simple process, but many businesses, large and small, forget to take the right steps in order to get the right plan in place for your communications activities.
Firstly, to get started on your comms plan, there are three main steps to take:
Step 1: Step back
Take some time to sit back and get really clear on what you want to achieve. All of the activities you ultimately build into your plan should work towards achieving that goal. The goal could be to launch a business, build brand awareness, advocate for a government change of policy, generate more sales leads etc. It could be quite broad (build brand awareness) – or quite specific (launch X product on X date).
But most of all, remember to make your goal SMART– Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Bound.
Step 2: Step up
Complete your due diligence. Gather all the insights and resources you can. In particular you want to be really clear on who your customer is and what you want to communicate to them. It might help to ponder these questions:
- Who is my target audience?
- Who influences my target audience?
- What channels do I have access to?
- What are my competitors doing?
- What communications activities have worked well (or not) in the past?
- What connections, events and communications related activities can I build on/ leverage?
Step 3: Step in
You have to be brave enough to actually own your results. Don’t just put things out there in the world and then forget about them, or worse, try to hide from poor results. Right at the start you should be thinking about what success will look like and how you will measure it when the work is complete – finding clear benchmarks and setting achievable KPIs will set you up for success.
Stuck on pulling together your comms plan? Don’t worry, get in touch with us today and we’ll help you on your communications journey – [email protected]
Alex Williams