The Questions Empowering Strategic Communications: Adding Value and Driving Impact through Investigation and Planning

The Questions Empowering Strategic Communications: Adding Value and Driving Impact through Investigation and Planning

July 2024

By Michael Rinaman, Global Practice Lead and Managing Director, Strategy, Sandpiper. Based in Hong Kong, Michael brings a new suite of intelligence-backed strategy offerings to clients across consumer brands, energy, financial services, healthcare, government, and technology.

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For those that own the responsibility of communications for an organisation, from posting on social to defining reputation strategy, there are a number of stakeholders to appease. There’s the end audience you’re hoping to persuade, the executive team running the organisation, the brand team that manages corporate image, the products and sales teams, marketing, legal, and the list goes on. What’s more, each audience has different views of what makes for effective strategy.

With this diversity of stakeholders, and often significant feedback loops (or worse, echo-chambers) it’s no wonder that some well-meaning communications can go astray. 

Prioritise your brand or sales too much? Your audience might get burnt out or tune out. Prioritise what your audience wants to hear over what you can deliver? We’ve all seen the rampant takedowns over greenwashing, wokewashing, and more. Prioritise mitigating risk? You might lose the opportunity to excite or compel new audiences creatively. Prioritise bold ideas? You risk losing brand consistency and alienating your current audience.

Needing to be aligned with so many stakeholders, the obvious question to ask is “what can I say?”. If you can find an answer that none of your stakeholders objects to, it checks all the boxes and likely avoids most pitfalls.

While it may help with efficiency, this question sacrifices the audacity to truly represent an organisation and drive its reputation.

In its place, strategic communicators think in more open-ended, more challenging terms. They ask “what should I say?”.

Why strategic communications must start with strategic questions

Once you’ve asked “What should I say?”, you very quickly run into a new set of questions. Should… in order to… Do what? For whom? When?

These questions are the basis upon which strategic communications are built.

• What is the organisational objective that I am supporting in my communication?
• Who are the stakeholders I need to persuade?
• When and where will my audience be most receptive to the message?

These questions go a long way in ensuring that the content of communications is additive to reputational or brand value and is well targeted. But there is another layer of questions that needs to be asked to truly create value with communications. They are:

• Is what I am saying truthful and representative of what makes my organisation unique?
• Do the people I want to talk to care what I have to say?
• Am I adding value to the general discourse or simply creating noise?

Answering these questions can help communicators become more precise in what they are saying, and often calibrate whether communications are necessary. While the answers may take more time, the potential impacts are worth the investment.

All communications are strategic communications

Through this lens it’s apparent that all communications, no matter how big or small, are worthy of the term strategic communications. Communicators need to consistently ask “what should I say?”.

This questioning should also be universally applicable, happening at both the micro and the macro levels.

At the micro level – whether an individual post or a media pitch – asking these questions ensures a constant reflection back to the central objectives, verify the approach to an audience is correct and checking the execution to ensure it’s compelling. This empowers everyone who supports comms – from copywriters, to designers, to media relations professionals – to be connected to and responsible for the organisational mission.

At the macro level, these questions serve as the basis for a deeper investment in supporting planning with robust, strategic support.

Strategic support includes the full arsenal of communications disciplines, the research and insights to inform us about our audience, the landscape, and potential opportunity areas; the executional knowledge to know where and how to place content to make sure it reaches audiences in a meaningful way, often digitally; and the creative firepower to emotionally resonate and compel audiences.

• Building communications on research & insights. Context is essential in positioning communications that are informed, meaningful, and resonant. The right research can ensure that the content that you communicate is well placed within the environment in which you’re communicating. Essential components of research for strategic communications include:
  • Understanding who your audience is and who the most impactful segments are.Distilling these audiences wants and needs, and understanding what problem you’re helping them solve for or overcome.Mapping the information journey of the audience across channels to ensure that content you serve them is seamlessly integrated into their existing channel usage.Assessing the ecosystem around the topic that you want to communicate to understand which areas are covered, and where there are gaps and opportunities.
  • Cross-mapping the opportunity areas with your organisational mission and strengths to best represent your organisation and its value.

• Selecting the right strategy, tactics & messages to drive impact. Communications strategy, tactics and messages should flow naturally from the insights delivered by research. The strategy will be informed by all research components and serve as the blueprint for engaging stakeholders; the tactics should evolve from the channel analysis and audience journey; and the messages are defined both by the unique positioning of the organisation, but also by the opportunities that can be leveraged in the external landscape. Three specific activities can elevate the delivery of these plans:
  • Strategy planning workshop: Beginning with a read-out of relevant research, these workshops focus on ideating ways to connect the brand mission & vision to the opportunities present in the landscape.Message development workshop: Whether starting from a blank slate, or optimising existing messages, a workshop can aid in breathing fresh life into the way an organisation tells its story.
  • Channel activation plan: A visual map of where and when communications will be activated across all online and offline channels. By visualising the ecosystem, we can optimise the interplay between communications streams to amplify our audience touchpoints.

• Driving human connection through creative. From words and images on a page, to video shared via social, to the design of in-person events – the visual representation of communications have a major impact on the way an audiences experience the organisation. Strong creative adds to the strategic direction of communications by:
  • Developing human connection that is essential for resonance and engagement with audiences. If communications can appeal to the wants and desires of an audience they are more likely to be seen as relevant.Enhancing understanding of what you want to communicate and why it matters to your audience. Creative content can help take concepts and make them more personal, which leads to your audiences better understanding and remembering what you have to say.
  • Sparking emotional responses that drive shifts in awareness, perceptions, and behaviours. In a landscape of always on communications, creating an emotional response can help break through the noise.

No one size fits all

Depending on the organization, business objectives, communications channels and more, communicators often have widely divergent needs. By asking the right questions, though, communicators can uplevel their content and drive deeper impacts. This will look different in each application: sometimes it’s simply asking the right questions to flesh-out their thinking, in other cases it will involve some or all of the elements of the strategic planning process. In all these scenarios, enhanced planning can help to drive better outcomes, including better targeting of your audiences or stakeholders, deeper engagement with content, higher levels of influence to shift perceptions, active reputation promotion and more robust risk mitigation

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