TL;DR
A communication plan is a strategic document guiding a company’s messaging. It helps define what to communicate, to whom, and how. Key objectives include formalizing brand messaging, measuring results, improving brand positioning and awareness, building reputation, and generating clients. Creating one involves defining targets, analyzing competitors, choosing channels, setting SMART objectives, budgeting, crafting messages, and finally, documenting the strategy in a plan. This plan should be dynamic and regularly updated.
In business, communication is a step that is as delicate as it is necessary. Indeed, it is the vector for many challenges for the company: notoriety, brand image, marketing positioning, sales, loyalty, …
To gain clarity, the standard is to develop a communication plan that will guide all operations related to your brand’s messaging.
What is a communication plan? What is it for? And how to implement it effectively?
This guide will help you better understand communication plans, what they entail, and some examples of how they can be used in your business. By the end of this guide, you will be able to create a sales plan that will help you communicate better with your team, your clients, and your partners. So, let’s get started!
What is a Communication Plan?
By definition, a communication plan is a strategic document that details all the actions necessary to achieve a desired communication outcome.
In other words, it is a tool, a roadmap that will help you determine what you want to communicate, to whom, and how to do it.
The main objective of a communication plan is therefore to structure and optimize how your company communicates. It should be noted that this planning must be done in line with your business objectives… but not only!
In the next section, we will look at all the objectives that a well-established communication plan can serve.
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What are the Objectives of a Communication Plan?
There are several reasons in favor of creating a communication plan. Among the main challenges, we can cite the following:
Objective 1: Formalize Your Brand’s Messaging
The first objective of a communication plan is to establish a process for your brand’s messaging.
This implies that you determine in advance the substance of the messages you will send to your recipient (your target in marketing and commercial terms), but also – and above all – the form!
These processes must be adopted by all individuals interacting directly with the company’s environment, namely:
- salespeople;
- human resources;
- the marketing department;
- company leaders;
- etc…
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The communication plan also allows you to be more consistent in your external interactions and avoid any risk of discrepancy between what you say and what you do.
Objective 2: Measure the Results of Your Communication
The second objective of the communication plan is to help you measure the results of your actions.
This means you must specify in advance the indicators you will use to determine whether the actions taken were successful or not.
Thus, for each sequence, campaign, or action, you must be able to measure:
- the number of contacts established;
- the number of leads generated;
- traffic on your website or blog;
- etc…
Measuring results also allows you to optimize your future communication campaigns by learning from your mistakes and successes.
Objective 3: Improve Your Brand Positioning
The third objective of the communication plan is to help you with your digital prospecting and improve your brand’s positioning.
This means determining, based on your target audience, the emotions and perceptions you want them to have of your company. This work must be done in advance with marketing to influence how these individuals will position your brand in their minds.
For example, if you want your target audience to perceive your company as innovative, you will need to develop a communication strategy that highlights this aspect of your business.
Objective 4: Boost Your Brand Awareness
The fourth objective of the communication plan is to help you improve your brand awareness.
This involves targeting a wider audience and/or making your target audience aware of your brand.
To do this, you need to identify the channels through which you can reach your target audience most effectively.
For example, if you want to reach young parents, television will probably not be the most effective channel… whereas Facebook might be!
Objective 5: Create or Consolidate Your Reputation
The fifth objective of the communication plan is to help you create or consolidate your image, or your reputation in a market.
Distinct from marketing positioning, which aims to map your products or services among competitors through a comparison system, a company’s image relates to the brand’s values.
Also known as “Brand Awareness,” a company’s reputation has become an increasingly important issue in recent years, with the rise of topics related to ecology or society, for example. We also talk about brand ethics.
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It is important to note that reputation is built over time and that it is essential to have a short, medium, and long-term vision to succeed in communication!
Objective 6: Generate More Clients
Ultimately, the main objective lies in acquiring new clients driven by your communication actions, which are themselves driven by your communication plan.
This is why the communication department is closely linked to the sales and marketing departments. It is not uncommon for the latter to take over all communication-related actions and leverage them in a Growth Marketing strategy.
How to Create a Good Communication Plan?
Now that you know the definition of a communication plan and understand its various benefits, we will explain how to build an effective communication plan in 7 steps. Our checklist below!
Step 1: Define Your Target Audiences
The first step is to identify your target audiences in a commercial sense. To do this, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are my target customers?
- Who are my target prospects?
- Who are my opinion leaders?
- What are the behaviors of my target audience?
- What is the average age of my target audience?
- What are the values of my target audience?
- What media does my target audience consume?
This list is not exhaustive, but you can already draw inspiration from these questions to create a marketing persona and know who you will be addressing through your communication actions.
Step 2: Define Your Competitors
The second step is to identify your competitors in the communication field. This will allow you to better understand their commercial strategy and find the right way to stand out from the competition.
To do this, we recommend answering the following questions:
- Who are my main competitors?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What is their communication strategy?
- What tools do they use for their communication?
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Quick tip: there is a dual benefit to studying the competition. The first is that you can better understand the pros and cons of their offer and communication strategy, which helps you better understand the market. The second is that you can draw inspiration from the processes they have implemented that work, to adapt and improve them. In jargon, this is called doing a benchmark.
Step 3: Choose Your Communication Channels
The third step is to identify the communication channels that will allow you to reach your target audiences. These are also referred to as communication levers.
Among the main online and offline channels, you will find:
- Traditional advertising (on television, radio, billboards, etc.);
- Content marketing & SEO (blog posts, ebooks, guides, infographics, etc.), which are primarily effective long-term inbound strategies;
- Emailing – or email marketing;
- Event organization;
- Influencer marketing via social networks;
- Online Ads (Social Ads, Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, etc.);
- Press relations;
- Social media reach strategies (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.).
Among these channels, there are infinite variations and strategies that will allow you to make the most of them and maximize your communication efforts to achieve the objectives you will set in the next step.
Step 4: Define Your Objectives
The second step is to define your objectives. This means you must be able to answer the following question: what is the purpose of my communication campaigns? What objective(s) do I want to achieve through these actions?
This is when you will be able to define your KPIs, i.e., a set of statistical data that will allow you to track the project’s progress:
- conversion rate;
- bounce rate;
- customer acquisition cost;
- audience reached;
- etc…
A methodological tip to get started: your objectives can be established using the SMART method. What is the SMART method, you might ask?
It is an acronym for 5 key aspects to consider when setting your objectives. These must be:
- Specific;
- Measurable;
- Achievable;
- Relevant;
- Time-bound.
For example, a good SMART objective could be: “Generate 50 qualified leads by the end of the quarter through our website.”.
Step 5: Develop Your Budget
Based on all the information above, you can now propose a detailed budget and allocate it across the various communication channels you have selected in step 3.
For example, you can plan to allocate 30% of your budget to Google ads, 20% to social ads, and 50% to content marketing. Some expenditure items can also be dedicated to a specific medium, a platform, prospecting tools, promotion, software like Hubspot, etc…
The important thing is not to be too restrictive when developing your budget. It should be a working document that evolves over time as you gain experience and learn from your successes or failures.
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A good way to start is to use the 10-20-30 rule proposed by Guy Kawasaki, which consists of allocating 10% of your budget to experimentation, 20% to branding, and 30% to support.
Step 6: Define the Substance and Form of Your Message
The sixth and penultimate step is to define the content and form of your pitch. This involves identifying the key messages you want to communicate to the companies or professionals you will interact with, your communication angle, your visual identity, etc…
Your message should be able to answer 3 questions: who are you, what do you do, and why should I care?
You can also use the AIDA model, which corresponds to 4 stages that must be considered when writing your pitch:
- Attention: make your product or service known;
- Interest: arouse the interest of your target audience;
- Desire: create the desire to purchase your product or service;
- Action: encourage your target audience to take action.
This step allows you to know what you can say and what you cannot say, but also how you will say it. In short, it sets the boundaries for the substance and form of your messages.
Once again, it is imperative that all company departments in contact with the outside world are aware of this process. Here too, it is up to the communication department to ensure that everyone has been briefed through internal communication actions.
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If these actions are not carried out correctly, mistakes can be made and lead to misunderstandings or even scandals, which will then be handled as crisis communication. You don’t want to get to that point!
Step 7: Write Your Communication Strategy
Now that you have all the necessary information to imagine and implement an effective communication strategy, it’s time to gather all this information into a single document: the communication plan.
Finally, the communication plan will define a schedule – for example, a LinkedIn posting schedule – which will dictate the frequency, timing, and content of your messages (substance + form), as well as the channels you will use to disseminate them. This schedule is also called a “roadmap,” which is a document that explains the strategy’s operation and objectives over time.
Creating a communication plan involves summarizing and condensing the content of the previous steps to facilitate reading and understanding. Ideally, this document should be transparent and accessible to all members of the company.
It should be noted that the communication plan is not a static document; on the contrary, it must be regularly updated based on the results obtained, the objectives pursued, and the context in which the company operates.
Conclusion
In conclusion, remember that effective communication is essential to the success of any business. By following these 7 steps, you will be able to implement an effective and structured communication strategy tailored to your needs. And if you need help, don’t hesitate to contact a professional!