Every business and organisation has audiences and stakeholders. These are individuals, groups or other organisations that have a vested interest in your business and its activities – from employees, unions and suppliers to customers, investors and regulators.

This is why taking the time to go through the process of audience and stakeholder mapping is important for any organisation. Look at internal and external stakeholders who have a financial or emotional interest in your company. Each has different requirements and needs from you.

Audience and stakeholder mapping

The role of stakeholder management within a communications plan is to inform and influence stakeholders’ attitudes and actions. And that starts with audience definition – understanding who your business needs to connect with and why.

Stakeholders can include current customers and users, industries and markets, suppliers and investors. There is also potential to identify new customers, suppliers and investors who could be your next key stakeholders.

There are a number of effective tools and methods that we use for stakeholder mapping. Essentially the stakeholder mapping process is creating groups of stakeholders/audiences according to things they have in common, share or think. The investment in robust stakeholder maps helps your business to identify and understand how to connect to and through different audience groups, who to prioritise and how best to engage them.

We can create a stakeholder matrix, a visual representation that is a map of your stakeholders. By organizing each stakeholder according to their influence and interest, you can determine what actions you need to take. Use it to identify key players who have a positive or negative impact on your business. See where you have successful relationships with stakeholders already and where you can develop new ones. With possible stakeholders, it’s important to take a look at stakeholder roles so that you can map the stakeholders correctly. Who has the most influence?

Feed your stakeholder map into your communication plan to reinforce your existing relationships and engage with potential stakeholders.

Our audience and stakeholder mapping services include:

• Stakeholder analysis
• Map stakeholders
• Competitor analysis
• Channel audit
• Stakeholder engagement strategy
• Messaging and positioning
• Content creation for stakeholder audiences
• Stakeholder map template
• Identify relevant stakeholders
• Creation of stakeholder groups
• Development of stakeholder communications
• Developing key criteria