Ask yourself: How much information can you comprehend each day? How many media channels do you consume? And how much of it really sticks? — It’s hard to tell. And it’s getting even complex each day with social media channels, bots and automated communication. What can you trust? And what is really important. Frankly, it’s easy to get lost. Strategic communication helps in getting messages of strategic significance to the right audience. Long-term agenda setting at its best. Find out more about this important field.
Strategic communication has lately seen a push as it helps organizations in planning, structuring and communicating strategic messages that make a strategic position or agenda of an organization clearer. Hallahan and colleagues found in 2007 that “in today’s increasingly complex world, organizations vie for the attention, admiration, affinity, alignment, and allegiance of constituents of all sorts—customers, employees, investors and donors, government officials, special interest group leaders, and the public at large”. So a major question is how can communication support a strategic position of organizations of all sort now and in the future?
Strategic Communication is linked to the sustained success of an organization
Strategic communication is all kind of informational, persuasive, discursive and relational communication with regard to the mission of an organization. It combines several traditional communication disciplines such as marketing communication, public relations, technical communication, political communication or information/social marketing campaigns in a multidisciplinary perspective. It needs a good communication plan with objectives, resources and monitoring. It should be planned by communication professionals together with strategy affiliates of an organization. By paring these two disciplines it can unfold its impact as defined in 2018 by Ansgar Zerfass and colleagues:
“Strategic communication encompasses all communication that is substantial for the survival and sustained success of an entity. Specifically, strategic communication is the purposeful use of communication by an organization or other entity to engage in conversations of strategic significance to its goals.” – Ansgar Zerfass and colleagues, 2018
This understanding of strategic communication is closely linked to the strategic process of an organization. The authors point out that communication plays a role in all three steps of a strategy process: (1) strategy formulation and revision, (2) strategy presentation and strategy execution and (3) implementation and operationalization. Strategy formulation refers to the fact that communication gives sense to actions stipulated in a strategy that would remain otherwise only ‘silent’ resource allocations. Strategy presentation means that stakeholders are made aware of the strategy with communicative actions. Strategy execution is the part where an organization puts strategic directions of thrust into effect. Here, it is important that stakeholders are informed about these activities and the organization uses listening activities to detect signals for strategy monitoring and realignment. In this regard, strategic communication should be an agile management process.
Strategic communication is, therefore, a very good anchor for the communication of future paths. Once an organization knows what future path it wants to take, it can invest in strategic communication. And this regards to all kind of organizations. Imagine, for instance, an enterprise that wants to communicate it’s foresight and innovation activities. In times of multiple channels, information overload and attention scarcity at the side of its (potential) customers, the communication department of that corporation needs to not only find a good narrative about the new product, but must also think about target groups, the right channels, define communication targets, messages and allocate a communication budget.
A good starting point for future-oriented communication
The same applies for governmental foresight activities. The government may be interested in communicating its foresight activities, its motivation for engaging in this, and consequently adjusts its strategic actions like new legislation, funding or resource allocation. Again, for such a communication of foresight activities a communication strategy is well-needed with regard to defining audience, channels, objectives, resources and communication activities.
If done properly (analyze your future path, plan, coordinate, and monitor your communication activities with target groups and channels), it helps you in getting your strategic future messages across in a well-structured way. It should be planned by communication professionals together with strategy affiliates of an organization
To sum up, its worthwhile to consider strategic communication for your organization, or even for your individual future paths. If done properly (analyze your future path, plan, coordinate, and monitor your communication activities with target groups and channels), it helps you in getting your strategic future messages across in a well-structured way. Give it a shot and you will see how it works.
Further Reading: Check out my article on how strategic communication and strategic foresight can be combined for a systematic future-oriented communication in organizations.