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Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show. It is a delight to have your ears listening into my voice, even if it is not the most dulcet of tones. So I really [00:01:00] appreciate that. I can't believe we're at episode 14 already. How time does fly? I still have a huge list of episode topics I'm working my way through, but I'll happily prioritise anything you are really keen on learning about. So as always, shoot me a message and let me know what's of interest.

So today's episode ties in with episode five, which was about how to write a comms plan. If you missed that head to heymelcomms.training/005, and you'll be able to catch up. Now that was very much a step by step in how to develop a comms plan template and how to use it.

So in that episode, I mentioned how in our plan we include a brief comms strategy. I realise that some people use those words plan and strategy interchangeably, especially when thinking about comms. So today I want to break down exactly what is a comms strategy and what is a comms plan, and what types of [00:02:00] strategies you could be developing.

So giving you some ideas here. If you are new to comms, it's really important that you know this because simply jumping to a plan is jumping to tactics without an overarching strategic direction, and when you can show strategic thinking to your client or a leader, you'll be able to start building up a bank of credibility.

If you stay in the land of tactics, you'll only ever be asked to create and execute tactics, and I want you to be able to elevate yourself to a strategic level. Also helping people to understand the differences between a strategy and a plan is something I've had to coach quite a few people on over the years.

Often it's because they're quite new to comms or they've been in other roles and never really had to think about comms plans and strategies before so they've just communicated in the way they always have. Except now they might be in a position where they need to communicate [00:03:00] more broadly rather than just to a few people, for example.

So when we think about strategy versus plan, I think the easiest way to think about it is how versus what, or the approach versus the activities. If that makes a little bit more sense. So the communication strategy is where you'll think about what you are trying to achieve, so your know, feel, and do objectives, and then design a communication approach to help you achieve those objectives.

The tactics or the comms plan will fall out of that approach. So, for example, let's say you're creating a strategy for communicating a new product you're going to offer. Firstly, you'd start with identifying your audiences, so perhaps your staff and potential and current customers, and then designing your know, feel and do objectives as we've talked about many times before. So let's say one of your know objectives is for [00:04:00] your current customers to know about the new product and why it's relevant for them. It might also be that you need to know your staff to know about the new product, why you're introducing it, the benefits and how they need to support the launch of it. And then thinking about your audiences and the way they prefer to communicate, and the outcomes you want to achieve, you can then design this comms strategy or the approach, right? So for example, if your customers largely interact with you online, then one of your strategies might be to put ad spent behind social media marketing and use multiple digital touchpoints to reach them.

It might also be that one strategy is you'll leverage your existing database to spread word about the new product. A strategy for your team could be, you'll provide two-way communication opportunities so they can ask questions and feel well informed about the product as well. Notice that I haven't said anything yet that's tactical.

Ie, [00:05:00] for staff, I haven't said that we'll send messages via email and hold an online briefing session, yada, yada, yada, for example, because those are tactics. They're what we'll do, our strategy is our approach or how we'll do this comms work. In this case, we're going to provide two-way communication opportunities.

Your strategy is where you can really showcase your creativity and your understanding of your audiences. So for example, you might know that, uh, team members all attend weekly team meetings and are highly engaged in this channel while others have a really active Yammer group. So your strategic approach would be to leverage existing, well-used channels to reach your staff.

If you have a really geographically dispersed team, so some close to home, others in other parts of the country or even overseas, you'll need a strategic approach to reach them. So that might be something like ensuring live events are offered at various times to meet various time zones. [00:06:00] Um, having multiple channels with the same information people can access from their own devices.

Again, those are strategic ideas. They're not tactics yet. And like I said, this is your opportunity to showcase strategic creative thinking. So for example, you might come up with an idea for an event or a virtual channel that hasn't been used yet or optimised yet. You know, you've got this channel sitting there, but you're not doing the most with it, and that could be a really great fit for this piece of work.

So that's really creative thinking, right? Maybe you'll consider a highly visual approach to help people understand complex ideas. So hopefully you're now starting to see what I mean by strategic thinking. It's lifting you up out of the tactics and the channels and the what into creating experiences and journeys that help your comms to resonate with your audiences based on your knowledge and your expertise.

And once you start to think strategically with a [00:07:00] comms plan, you can start to think strategically in other areas. It's a really great skill to have, especially as you progress your career, and you might move into leadership roles or start running a business. You need to have a strategic mindset in order to make sure what you're doing is contributing to your goal, that you're always heading in the right direction, and that you've considered all those stakeholders and what you're trying to achieve.

Okay, so you've set your comms strategy and now it's time to map out your plan. So this is a sequence of activities. It's a line by line list of what you'll communicate, how, when, to who, through what channel, at what time, et cetera, et cetera. So it might be things like you're gonna, at 9:00 AM you're going to hold a virtual briefing with your team, and then you'll follow that up with an email and a Slack message so that to reinforce some of those key messages and the information that was delivered verbally is also delivered in a written way.

Then you might send an [00:08:00] EDM to your current customers with a special offer before you start to use social media to tap into potential customers. So this is where you start to bring in your knowledge of your channels, the governance around them, and provide that logical sequence of comms events and tactics that will bring your work to life.

And it should obviously reflect what you've said in your strategy. So for example, if you said you were going to brief your team leaders first to help drive their buy-in and engagement, then you should reflect that in your plan by detailing how that briefing will take place, what the key points will be, who will be leading it and so on.

Then show that after that event, at a certain time, you'll start communicating with other groups, right? It should also, uh, Oh, let's say for example, in your strategy, you've said you're taking a predominantly digital approach, and then the tactics obviously would reflect that as well. So we would expect to see things like [00:09:00] emails, website updates, um, maybe chatbot updates, who knows?

Social media content, podcast episodes, all of those sorts of things showing up in your plan. Being able to set a strategy is super important for projects or initiatives that carry a lot of risk. Things like big transformational change, mergers and acquisitions, crisis, those things need a strategic mindset to help manage risk.

If you just become reactive and jump in with tactics, there's a very good chance you'll miss something vital. Or, that none of the pieces of the puzzle will actually match up down the track, and you also risk causing confusion with all of your different audience groups as well. The other thing about setting a comms strategy, the other positive thing is that it sets some guidelines and principles about what you will do and what you won't do.

They, these are the strategic ideas that you're going to work by. [00:10:00] So for example, when we say we're going to take a visual approach, then that means we're going to avoid predominantly auditory or written communication potentially. If we're saying we're going, if one of our strategies is to use a digital first approach, it means we're going to deprioritise or even avoid things like posters, flyers, um, even meetings, right?

It helps you focus your effort to the tactics that will be the most effective and help you be more successful with your communication. That's why a strategy is just so important.

So here's your episode recap for today. Number one, knowing the difference between a strategy and a plan will help you elevate your thinking out of tactics and showcase your expertise and creative thinking.

Number two, setting a strategy helps you achieve your goals or your communication goals by providing really clear focus points for your work. Number [00:11:00] three, your comms plan is just that list of tactics or sequence of activity that brings the strategy to life. It is not the strategy, it is the tactical execution of the strategy.

Number four, like all things in comms, both the strategy and the plan rely on your understanding of your audiences. There is no point suggesting a digital strategy if your audience is primarily older people, for example, who prefer reading newsletters and physical mail, right? There's no point using a whole bunch of social media channels.

It just won't work. So it comes back to who always starting with who. And in short, the strategy is the how or the approach. The plan is, the what or the tactics that you're going to use. So what I'd love for you to do right now is think about any comms you have coming up, or even something you've done in the past.

How can you make sure your approach is strategic and not [00:12:00] tactical? What might you need to do to find out, or find out in order to really inform that strategy. So what research might you need to do and why would you take one approach over another? Now, I'm hopeful there's been some really helpful information in there today.

I know this stuff can be a bit, I guess, technical, but as I said at the top of the episode, your ability to showcase strategic thinking will take you a long way in comms, but also in progressing your career. And I really want that for you. As always, please feel free to get in touch, ask me all the things.

You can also get free learning from me, from our HMC blog that's updated every week on our website and my fortnightly email, which only ever includes three things, but I promise you there are always three good things and you can sign up to that via the link in the show notes or on the website or the link in my Instagram bio.

In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your week and keep doing amazing things. Bye for [00:13:00] now.