Marketing Communications

Develop a brand statement that summarizes who you are – understand who you are and how you serve your audiences. An easy way to summarize this is by creating a brand statement. Consider Starbucks' brand definition, as an example: "To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time."

Identify your unique selling proposition (USP) – here, you need to explain what makes you unique and why should people care about those traits. Once you've determined this, you can develop your brand statements, tag lines and other messaging that inform your marketing strategy. 

Identify your business objectives – business objectives are goals your company needs to hit to be successful. Every goal your team sets needs to contribute back to these objectives.

Develop customer personas – identify your target audience – the group of people who are most likely to purchase your product or service. To learn more about them, survey current customers, dig into Google Analytics and search through your competitors social media followers to see who they seem to attract. 

Understand other key publics – there might be a need to communicate with people and entities other than your customers, for example, the news media, government agencies and current or prospective partners. 

Determine what the world needs to know about your brand – connect your company and your audience by identifying the high-level messages you need to communicate about your brand. 

Choose your channels – choose the channels that you're going to share your message on. These include: company blog, email marketing, social media, SMS marketing, media relations, print collateral, podcast advertising and traditional advertising.

Plan a messaging matrix – combine the findings from the previous steps into a cohesive messaging matrix – a document that outlines your brand statement, target audience, core problem or issue and key messages. 

Determine your important events and campaign plans – lay out the essential events your team needs to keep track of throughout the year. You'll also want to start formatting the campaign plans for these events. 

Set your communication goals – set goals that your communications team needs to reach. These goals should relate back to the business objectives you identified earlier. 

Schedule content and campaigns on your marketing calendar – schedule and execute your communications strategy with a marketing calendar. This will make it easier to enforce deadlines, deliver organization-wide visibility and help your staff understand what needs to be done and when, the experts say.

Measure your impact – measuring each component of your communications plan will help you understand how well your efforts are progressing.