Is Your Communication Plan Strategic?

Let’s settle on some basic elements of any communication plan before we get too far.

Perhaps, the first item on our list is to itemize the goals of the communication plan. Here are some examples:

• Engage current, past and potential customers
• Solve support issues
• Make new product announcements
• Have customers share stories, photos, and product enhancement ideas
• Build awareness
• Tell our company’s story
• Collect buyer demographics

All laudable goals; some will easier to accomplish than others.

Next, let’s talk about the overall strategy of the communication plan. It might go something like this…In order to begin to build an audience and engagement current, past, and potential customers we are launching this communication effort. Because we anticipate the vast majority of our customers are those that enjoy the outdoors and are online on a regular basis, we are focusing solely on online advertising and social engagement. Our message will be similar on each channel, but tailored.

Sounds like we have a solid, well-defined strategy.

Next, we need to identify our audience. Who is it that we want to communicate with? In our sample case its…Current & past customers, potential buyers, website visitors as well Facebook & Twitter followers.

Any good plan needs a few milestones. Here are ones that make sense for our sample communication effort:

1. Benchmark current website traffic and Facebook & Twitter activity
2. Launch Facebook engagement
3. Build Twitter page and start engagement
4. Use TweetAdder to build a following on Twitter
5. Develop Messaging
6. Develop editorial calendar
7. Build database of current and past customer demographics and contact information
8. Open an Instagram account

So what will we be talking about? What’s going to get people engaged? Your messaging ideas might go this way:

1. Talk about launching a Kickstarter project
2. Talk about fixes
3. Talk about how people are using the product
4. Talk about new products coming down the pipe
5. Share Instagram photos
6. Instigate a customer wish list
7. Start a contest to give away new products

In its simplest form, these are some of the metrics we’ll want to keep an eye on:

1. Gain followers
2. Gain engagement
3. Gain website traffic
4. Gain revenue

Last let’s take a look at some of the tools we’ll use to measure our success rate.

Instagram:

• Statigram
• Simply Measured
• Nitrogram

Facebook:

Twitter:

• Followers
• Following
• Tweets
• Lists

Website:

Share your insight on developing a communication plan, we’d love to hear from you. Did we miss any important point?