You work for months on your company’s communications strategy. You want it to be complete and accurate. You spend weeks researching your audience, defining your communication goals, carefully tailoring key messages and choosing channels. You present it to management, they have a ton of comments and than back to the drawing board for another few weeks until everyone has signed it off and you can finally start. And then, after months of barely any communicating and only strategising, you finally get to put your vision in action and…..
Well… it doesn’t work.
Or if you are lucky and it works, it’s so rigid that any changes and adjustments cost so much down the line and need to be approved by so many people that you just don’t want to bother.
Or by the time you finish it, new trends became hot and you are already late and can’t implement them.
Personally, I hate when this happens. But this is the traditional approach to comms: You do a lot of planning up front designing the perfect communication plan, and only then you start executing and see how the audience reacts to your tactics.
Many of my clients have limited budgets and if they don’t already have a set strategy, they won’t accept to stop all comms activities and build a strategy for months on end. And some desperately need it.
For this reason, I talked to them and entertained a simple idea: What if we don’t need to take months to create a strategy? If we can build the strategy over an extended period in increments and implement it one step at a time?
Even more, what if we design it so that we can get fast feedback from our audience on which parts work and which ones don’t? The parts that don’t work, we reject and focus on what works.
That’s how a Lean Communication Strategy is built.
Over the past years, my work with startups taught me that new ideas and unknown waters need feedback and fast. And while you can read all about Agile Management and Lean Startup and visit us at Lean Coffee next time you are in Gent, the concept is not well known among communications experts and the go-to strategy is still the one I mentioned above.
Through my work with startups, I became a practitioner and promoter of agile practices in communications. I’m aware it sounds obscure and before I lose you with a “what the geek,” I’ll share 4 points on how you can try to design your communications strategy next time and try to go agile. And if it works, than yey, if not you can label it ‘another buzzword’ and move on. Fair? Ok, here it is:
To be able to strategize and implement, I suggest working on your comms strategy in short sprints.
For example, block a few hours a week in your agenda and work only on the strategy. This does not mean to rush it or to skip steps. Work on the segments the way you would if you had ample time. Look at your audience closely, make assumptions, link your communications and your business goals. What’s important is to work on one segment at a time and once completed, start testing.
Once you develop a segment, put it into action as well as you can. Rather than waiting for your comms plan to be finished and perfectly polished, agile means to test and see the results. This is the only way to see what works and what doesn’t.
Let’s say we are drawing up a strategy where your assumption is that, looking at your audience, a spokesperson account on Linkedin will give a face to our communication and amplify your reach. In a lean strategy, we would test this assumption straight away as it enters the strategy. We get the channel, we start using it. Now what?
When we start testing, we need to set up a feedback loop, which will enable us to learn if our assumptions were correct and if our strategy is working or not.
Going back to our example, are people reacting to our posts on Linkedin? Is this idea bringing the result we wanted to see? Even more, can you observe what is performing unexpectedly well and was not even a part of your initial assumption? Note these learnings, as they will be valuable in your next strategy session. Give some time to gain insights, but watch out to not get carried away expecting results from an assumption that was incorrect. There is no gain holding on to an approach if it gives no results, be ready to kill your idea if it’s not effective.
Once we understand what works and what doesn’t, we can tweak our strategy and make adjustments. Having the flexibility to do this is absolutely key in a lean strategy, so make sure you don’t get locked into long term commitments or expensive tests before the effectiveness of the approach is confirmed.
In our example above, this would mean not to get a 1 year commitment of an expensive LinkedIn sales plan before an initial free or short term plan to test the approach.
A lean approach, be it in comms or other business segments, means moving fast and reducing waste. How do you approach your strategies to make them better fit the clients’ needs? Let me know in the comments, or send me an email at bisera@savionray.com.