Three Things You Can Do To Prioritize Audiences for Your Communications Plan

If you’re developing a strategic communications plan, you’re aiming to drive behaviors. Your goal is to get specific people to do something specific (buy this product, donate to this cause, work safely, etc.).
To do a communications plan right, you need to understand your audiences and know what makes them tick. This insight will give you an idea of what rhetorical levers you can pull — or what persuasive information you can provide — to drive the right behaviors.
Regardless of what you’re communicating, there are usually lots of audiences to choose from — employees, customers, investors, suppliers, channel partners…the list can go on an on. Plus, each audience has different subsets; and you want your strategic communications plan to drive different behaviors in each. (You want something different from current customers vs. prospects; current employees vs. recruits; channel partners vs. end users; managers vs. rank-and-file employees.)
The task of parsing all these various audiences for your communications plan and developing tailored messages to drive the right behaviors in each can seem herculean. It’s enough to make a well-meaning communicator either quit and jump on the next plane to Tibet or, less rashly, lump all the groups together and develop standardized messaging.
Here’s the problem with that approach: it doesn’t work (that’s a big problem). Also, it’s expensive and time consuming, and — unless you’re working in a company that likes to spend indiscriminately on communication (and I’m not positive such a mythical beast exists) — your resources and staff support are limited.
To develop an effective communications plan — and to drive the behaviors that will impact business objectives — you can’t be all things to all people. You need to prioritize your audiences.
Once you do it, you’ll find that not all audiences are created equal, and some audiences might not be worth your time at all.
Here are three questions you can ask to determine if an audience is worth the effort of tailored communication and to prioritize the groups.
How does this audience influence the company’s financial drivers?
Key customers who bring considerable current or potential revenue are clearly prime targets for you strategic communications plan. They need to be engaged early and often with specific, tailored messages. This might not be the case for customer groups that are lower value or that take up an extraordinary amount of resources or time.
Does the audience have a role to play in the company’s future?
In many cases, a company’s commercial, operational or corporate strategies are in flux. Audiences that are important to the company today might be less so in the future (and vice versa). It’s essential that you understand where things are going so you can make decisions about which audiences should receive the most attention in your communications plan — and where you should be planting seeds for the future.
Is the audience important to the entire entity?
To drive the behaviors you want, you need more than memos, newsletters and videos; you need the entire organization working in the same direction.
Company leadership needs to support key customer outreach and employee initiatives; employees need to be on board with community outreach efforts; and if you’re going to address key suppliers, procurement needs to play a major role.
If you’re communications plan includes tailored outreach to a specific audience and you don’t have buy-in from the critical folks internally, think about devoting your energy elsewhere.
Knowing which audiences are most important — and documenting it in your strategic communications plan — will allow you to focus your limited communications resources (time, money and effort) on the things that drive the most important behaviors and impact results.
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