Your communication strategy defines how you’re going to deliver your business plan from a marcomms perspective. It defines what you’re going to say, to whom and when you’re going to say it and – importantly – it’s supported by robust evidence.
So why do you need a B2B communication Strategy?
If you want to increase your brand awareness, strengthen your competitive position, command share of voice and accelerate sales – you need a communication strategy.
A communication strategy forms the foundation of every marketing, branding or public relations brief – without which, you’re likely to be wielding a blunt instrument and wasting a fair amount of money.
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READ MORE: Why your business needs a communication strategy
What are the key components of a Communication Strategy?
All five elements of the communication strategy are of equal importance and are reliant upon each other to be effective.
Value proposition
Sector priorities
Target personas
Positioning statements
Messaging (for each stage of the buying cycle)
If one or more of the elements is poorly developed, you will not have a workable strategy!
So, what are the 8 essential steps to creating a business communication strategy?
There’s a lot that goes into developing a communication strategy. This section will walk you through the detailed process of producing a communication strategy for your technology business.
1. Form ‘The dream team’:
First and foremost, recruit your expert task force from across the business. Ensure you get the right people on board, so that your communication strategy will have the insight, expertise and gravitas that it needs. Your project will also require a board level champion.
2. Objective setting:
Document your sales lead requirements and determine what success will look like. What should marketing deliver for the company to achieve its strategic goals? Whatever your objectives are, they must be SMART and there should be a communication objective against each business objective.
For example: such as: To generate #X qualified leads for bespoke vessel design from shipyards servicing the renewables industry.
3. Value proposition:
Spend time articulating your value proposition and purpose. Your value proposition is a simple statement to summarise your promise to your customers. It encapsulates the benefits of buying from you, rather than your competitors and should capture why you exist and why your customers should care. Once crafted, it should guide everything the company says, does and develops, keeping your communications focused and relevant.
Craft your target personas and give them a name. A target persona is a representation of your ideal customer. They’re not real people, but they should be brought to life as much as possible. The sweet spot exercise should have helped to shine a light on who you should be targeting and why. The next step is to put some flesh on the bones of these decision makers.
It’s likely that you’ll start with more personas than you end up with, but this is normal. Three or four are likely to be the number of personas to focus on, to help you deliver on the commercial sales requirement detailed above. Remember, focus equals funds.
6. Positioning statements:
Craft and tailor a positioning statement for each persona you end up with. A positioning statement is a subset of your value proposition but speaks directly to the heart of your individual personas. It defines the target audience, your product and category, a specific benefit and, most importantly, it differentiates you from your nearest competitor.
The four key stages of the buying cycle (or customer journey) are well documented, with the most common being represented in the acronym AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action). It’s imperative that your messaging considers your customers’ journey through these stages, and is specific, relevant and compelling – to tailor to each stage of that journey. The first two stages build trust, whilst the latter two account for the customer’s consideration and desire. These four key stages of messaging need to work in harmony to inspire interest and help convert prospects into customers.
8. Validation:
Validate your assumptions amongst your trusted customers and advisors. Share your first draft of your communication strategy with a small group of trusted customers, to get their input – ensuring there’s a good mix of your different personas included. You’re not seeking to present it in its entirety for their ‘agreement’, it’s more of an opportunity to validate any assumptions you’ve made. Use their feedback to refine and create your final communication strategy.
Once you have your complete communication strategy, written and approved, all that’s left is for you to implement it! Review your existing brand assets, ensure every message is current and accessible to your target audience, and then start planning your campaigns.
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Phase one: The Messaging Lab
Communication strategy development
The tangible outcome of the Messaging Lab is a fully-validated communication strategy which is aligned to your sales requirements including: a value proposition, segment prioritisation, target personas, positioning statements and messaging.
The Messaging Lab comprises a series of structured workshops and consultancy engagements that deliver actionable insights comprising:
Messaging Lab1
– focuses on developing and evidencing your value proposition, segmentation priorities and target personas.
This process hones your understanding of potential target segments in order to decide which ones to proactively address. It ensures we know who we are engaging with and why; better targeting reduces waste and promotes marketing/sales collaboration.
Messaging Lab2
– concentrates on forming and refining your positioning statements and messaging.
This helps you to save time and money by providing focus and specificity, rigour protects reputation against false or loose claims and elevates the communication.
It ensures that compelling messaging is developed for every stage of the buying cycle for each persona with whom you wish to engage.
Validation
– Comms strategy research with external stakeholders
This ensures the strategy is the best it can be, peer feedback is considered and on-boarded or actively rejected. Several iterations of the comms strategy may follow to ensure the strategy fits and resonates both with external stakeholders and sales and marketing stakeholders.
The Bee Hive is all about creativity and delivery, intelligently and proactively performing. There are no new whiz bang tools – just careful, consistent and disciplined delivery, including:
Brilliant Ideas Bank – we create an engaging, on-strategy content calendar, ideas for thought leadership, white papers, comment & insights
Media relations – we build relationships on your behalf to identify, develop and place your stories
Event support – we deliver a structured package of activities to make your 2-day event last six months
Technical authorship – our writing is second to none. We will develop, place, interview experts, draft and gain approvals as part of the deal.
Press interviews – we develop, secure, brief experts, facilitate and follow up opportunities
All editorial writing – whether it’s releases, features, white papers, blogs or ad hoc content, we’ve got it covered.
Project management – meetings, admin, monthly ROI reporting. We’re methodical and love a good project report!
Evaluation – in order to improve campaign design and performance.
We take great pride in delivering CEOs and CMOs of tech companies with certainty through accountable, effective and thought-provoking PR consultancy, underpinned by a proven phased approach and a performance guarantee. Let’s engage.
Once you have your strategy, we need to activate it by introducing it to the wider team, embedding it amongst stakeholders and making sure the available Marcomms tools are updated and aligned. There are six key tools in The Forge, which can be selected according to individual client needs:
An engagement programme ensures internal stakeholders understand and buy-in to new comms strategy by demonstrating how it will make their jobs easier/better/more productive
An audit of all Marcomms materials to make sure all the tools required to communicate with your target personas are updated or created and fully aligned.
Develop a messaging matrix to ensure that all Personas have collateral serving appropriate messages at each stages of the buying cycle.
Collaborate to design individual campaigns to achieve specific business objectives amongst target personas such as cross-sell, upsell, customer acquisition etc.
PESO modelling delivers integrated marcomms, extends reach and optimises investment. This helps to determine internal marketing team and external agency campaign deliverables.
Tailored media training ensures your spokespeople are equipped to engage effectively with the media and conduct themselves with confidence.
…and to complete the package here’s a summary of our PR delivery process – The Bee Hive.