Corporate communication is about so much more than just how a company communicates with customers. It’s about how an organization communicates with external stakeholders. How they communicate with employees, suppliers, and so many others.
Did you know that 60% of companies have no long-term plan for their internal communication strategy? And this doesn’t even touch base on companies and how they plan to communicate externally.
Corporate communication cannot be successful without a strategy. This strategy becomes the driving force behind your tactics and how your brand behaves through all channels. Let’s have a look at how to create a comprehensive communication strategy for your brand.
Defining Corporate Communication
Trying to simplify corporate communication is like trying to work out the meaning of the universe, it cannot be done. However, let’s look at it like this.
Corporate communications covers all the ways in which a company talks to audiences who interact with the brand. The audiences can be described as:
- Customers and prospects
- Employees and staff
- Investors, shareholders, and stakeholders
- Business partners
- Suppliers
- Media houses
- Government and statutory bodies
- The rest of the public
That’s a whole lot of communicating, right?
And that’s where your corporate communication strategy comes in. Take all the various ways in which you need to talk to these people and create a uniform tone and voice for your brand. This, in turn, will help shape the perception of your brand and business by those who engage with it.
The first and most vital step to creating your corporate communication strategy? Ensure that it aligns with your company’s objectives and goals. This means that whoever heads up your corporate communication team has a really big role to play. This guy needs to make sure that your communication efforts are unified. No matter the platform or audience, have a maintained and consistent brand voice and identity.
Two Types Of Corporate Communication
Basically, corporate communication can be split into two distinct categories namely: internal communication and external communication. This further helps us to discern the tactics of the corporate communication plan.
What Is Internal Corporate Communication?
The internal side of corporate communication covers how you engage and communicate with everybody inside your company. This can be employees to management to high-level executives, and even board members.
This type of communication can be anything sent internally. Memorandums sent between departments or email communication from the marketing team to staff. It can even be a change of internal policy communicated to staff by executive management.
Internal communication directly contributes to and affects your company culture.
What Is External Corporate Communication?
External corporate communication is the exact ‘opposite’ of internal communication. It details how your brand engages with every audience outside of your internal resources.
This is often described as the more difficult of the two because it really drives a part of what will ultimately create your public image. Sometimes, one wrong sentence in the public eye can take a long time to recover from as a brand.
External corporate communication isn’t necessarily just about advert wording or issuing press releases like this, especially now in the digital age. It also includes social media communication. It’s about the ability to have informal conversations with customers on platforms like this.
How to Craft Your Strategy
There are some key things to include in your strategy if you want to create a winning one. As mentioned briefly, your corporate communication strategy needs a solid foundation. This foundation is built upon your company’s goals and objectives.
The drive of this comes down from boardroom to management to employees. It cannot be done without the buy-in from all these internal resources.
To craft a corporate communication strategy that’s really going to work for you, try to include the following best practice tips:
- Take the time to identify executive goals and objectives
- Identify all the potential audiences that your company will be communicating with
- Put time aside to start an audit on your current communications. This can be done through surveys and customer satisfaction investigations
- Create core messages that start from your initial objectives and ideas! These core messages will form a consistent messaging line throughout
- Your communication strategy should feed the way in which you graphically display your communications, and not the other way around because logos, fonts, and layouts can either help drive a message home or get it lost in translation or bad design
- Decide on the channels and tools that your business will be using to communicate. Do you need to move away from email and consider more informal messaging platforms?
- Set aside regular intervals where you meet and discuss the effectiveness of your communications and evaluate what needs to adapt and what is working
Remember, that your internal and external communication efforts should not sit in isolation from one another. Rather, they should be integrated to present a unified front for all the ways in which your company communicates.
Communication at the Core of Your Business
Ultimately, corporate communication sits at the very core of your business whether you realize it or not. All the forms of communication, woven together and stitched to perfection. This makes up the very fabric of what makes your business, well, your business.
Placing importance on corporate communication is a step in the right direction. With the right strategy, you’ll be seeing the benefits in no time.
Since communication forms a key part of marketing, head on over to our digital marketing section and get your fill of more great content.