First, we must understand the difference between brand, advertising, marketing, and communications.

Brand – this is what people say about you when you are not in the room, says Jeff Bezos. It is who you are, what you do, why you do it, who you do it for and why they care.

Advertising – the act of enticing people to buy your products and services.

Marketing – promoting your brand and differentiating yourself in a crowded marketplace. It is the long tail vs. the immediate gratification that is advertising.

Communications – the thread that ties it all together. It is how you speak to your internal and external world. It is how you make yourself understood by those you want to engage with across mediums and support your brand, culture, mission, and goals. 

With that in mind, communications strategy drives your marketing, advertising, and internal processes by ensuring goals align with your brand, and people understand what you are doing and why they should care.

A communications strategy keeps us from participating in READY, SHOOT, and AIM. 

It enables us to think strategically about how we add value, to whom, why and how to help them understand what we need them to do next.

It forms how we perceive and are perceived, enabling us to create order from chaos.

When we take the time to understand what we want to say and to whom, before we do so, we focus our attention on what and who is important to us. Conversely, we do not spend time, effort, and money focused on conversations, processes and ideas that do not benefit us in the short or long term.

A concise strategy gives us a roadmap that we can follow so that as plans change and opportunities present themselves, we understand the initial plan and how we need to deviate from taking advantage of what has been presented to us.

A concise strategy also enables us to change from within. Seventy percent of change management initiatives fail because they are overly focused on policy, process, and procedure. They do not focus on human beings and their needs to understand and be understood.

Developing a strategy that explains why change is needed, what the goals are, why those are essential, and what achieving them enables us to do. What the ramifications of not achieving them are, we stand a much greater chance of success.

What are you doing within your organization to lay out an effective communication strategy that enables you to let people know what is about to happen, what is happening, what is going to happen, why, and how they are precisely and individually crucial to overall success?

By taking that approach, difficult situations become far more manageable, people become far more engaged, team members and clients become far more loyal, and profitability increases.