Writing a communications plan outlines your approach to reaching a bigger goal.
Your communications plan is a working, dynamic document that helps you stay on task, track milestones and plan your next steps. You will tie your plan to an overall goal, such as a product sales goal or corporate reputation goal, and include segmented targeted audiences and key messages to convey to each audience. Throughout the course of your career, you may need to create several communications plans, for both external audiences, such as customers and media, and internal audiences, such as employees.
Instructions
Create a Communications Plan
1. Current and prospective customers are examples of target audiences.
Segment your target audiences. You need to identify the make-up of each target audience, the people to whom you will be communicating. Are they current customers, who may already be invested in a product and looking for a newer version? Are they users of a competing product, who may be looking for a reason to change? Are they early adopters, such as techno-geeks who are always on the lookout for the next, new, great device? Other examples of segmented target audiences include media, financial analysts and prospective employees.
2. Determine key messages. Your key messages are the main points you need to convey about a product, service, or your company. You will incorporate these messages into each communications piece as appropriate. Try to limit your key messages to three per audience, issue or product, as that will increase chances of retention. An example of a key message is "XYZ company recycles 60 percent of its office products, eliminating 250 pounds of landfill a day."
3. Increasing requests from media for interviews may be one communications objective.
Write your objectives. Your objectives name what you want to accomplish with your communications. Examples of communications objectives may be "Build awareness of our company's volunteer efforts," or, "Increase media calls to our CEO requesting interviews." Remember that each objective should be tied to an overall goal of the company, otherwise your communications is working in a vacuum.
4. Write your strategies. You need at least one, and perhaps several, strategies for each objective. For example, if improved media relations is included as one of your communications objectives, a strategy might be, "create a media plan targeted toward business media." If you are trying to increase employee participation in community volunteer efforts, a strategy might be, "Create internal procedures to foster increased volunteer participation throughout the company."
5. Holding a press conference is a communications tactic.
Write your tactics. The tactics are the "work orders" of the plan, the detailed and specific activities that you flush from your strategy to meet your objectives. For example, setting up a media tour on the East coast is a tactic, as is holding a press conference. Developing an internal work group to create employee incentives for volunteering is also a tactic. When creating tactics you need to keep in mind costs and your manpower to gauge how realistic your tactics are.
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