You’re managing a team in strategic communications. How can you ensure they stay on message?

To define goals and key messages for strategic communications, follow it: -Identify Your Goals: Clearly outline what you want to achieve through your communication efforts, such as increasing sales, or changing perception. -Understand Your Audience: Identify your target audience and their needs, interests, and preferences. -Craft Key Messages: Develop concise, consistent, and credible messages that reflect your brand's identity, value proposition, and competitive advantage. -Ensure Relevance and Timeliness: Make sure your objectives and messages are relevant to the current market or industry landscape. -Use the SMART Criteria: Ensure that your objectives and messages are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

When starting a communications project, two brains are better than one! Collaboration is a powerful tool that can take a project and its content ideation to the next level. Get your team into one room, a big whiteboard, colourful markers and let the ideas run free. This type of approach often leads to innovative and out-of-the-box ideas and solutions.

When you outline your communications plan, make sure to ask for input. When the team has bought into the concept and feels like their ideas were heard they will more likely be invested in the work. Also, make sure there is a clear project brief or other written guidelines that they can refer back to.

When starting a communication project, it is important that the project expectation(s) is aligned across the team. This will ensure that everyone is on the same wavelength to complete the project successfully. In my career experience, either my HOD takes the lead or appoints one member in the department to communicate the project expectations to the team. Often, we are always reminded to keep the organisation's brand and value proposition in mind when brainstorming for ideas and strategies.

Developing a communication plan is neither a one-time nor a one-person effort. Bring multiple voices to the table for your first discussion, ensuring someone is present with the founding vision of the organization. Employee, client, or community surveys can also be really helpful in clarifying the perception of the brand. These are foundational prior to laying out the tasks and content calendar. Create a buddy system and change up partners frequently so you can cross-check content for each other. Over time the messaging will be refined and unified.