Delivering effective (and award-winning) communications campaigns is a bit like staging Swan Lake: what you see on stage is only a fraction of the work that goes into the final production. By far – by very far – most of the work takes place behind the scenes, centrally managed by a grand vision for success that everyone buys into and all share.
This single, grand vision for excellent comms delivery is the communications strategy.
The days of distinct, siloed strategies for PR, social media, content and digital are long gone. Today, brands that aim for consistency and impact embrace one communications strategy – a single framework that guides all disciplines in the communications and marketing mix.
A centralised communications strategy brings harmony across all platforms and teams: from newsletters to news briefings, from social content to symposium hosting and everything in between.
While strategy never micromanages, it does lay the foundation that informs tactics, providing direction and purpose. Importantly, strategy is audience-centric, leveraging market insights to segment audiences based on what the brand wants them to know, feel and do.
This means no social media post, media briefing or creative concept gets the green light until there’s a clear strategy in place. This approach maximises the impact of all communications work. It obviates inefficiency and ensures everyone – from creative teams to media buyers – is aligned with brand purpose and objectives.
Bring your comms challenges to Flow, and you’ll get a strategy that, at the very least, is:
- Objectives-driven (defining strategic business goals of the campaign with KPIs in place to measure communications effectiveness as the campaign is delivered)
- Audience- and market-centric (with clear audience segmentation to make sure that all communication is relevant, informed by audience insights and centred on securing appropriate brand relationships with each audience segment)
- Focused on the purpose and promise of your brand and business (with clarity on what you offer the market, and putting that offering at the very heart of communications delivery, across all platforms and media types), and
- Messaging-focused (encapsulating the spirit and intent of communications with tailored key messaging per audience segment)
Finally, any comms strategy is only as good as its adoption. Once approved, Flow will ensure it’s shared widely across the communications team so that everyone understands the strategic direction the communications must take. In this way, the strategy will do your brand and business justice. This, after all, is why you invest in communications.