Last updated on April 10th, 2026 at 01:37 pm

How to create a communication strategy in seven simple steps

A communication strategy is a structured plan that sets out how your organisation will deliver the right messages to the right audiences, through the right channels at the right time.

Whether you’re looking to improve internal engagement, launching a campaign, navigating change or building brand awareness, a strong communication strategy ensures every message has intention, consistency and is aligned to your organisational priorities.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to create a communications strategy in seven simple steps and give you a stripped-back 10-point plan for creating a communications strategy.

What Is a Communication Strategy?

A communication strategy is your blueprint for organisational communication. It can cover internal and external communications – or a mix of the two. It aligns outputs to your mission and vision, defines your goals and audiences and outlines channels, messaging, responsibilities and success metrics.

A communication strategy is not the same as a communications plan.

• Communication strategy = the why and what
• Communications plan = the how and when

Why a Communication Strategy Matters

A well‑crafted communication strategy helps organisations communicate with consistency and clarity.

From this consistency and clarity, you can:

• Support change effectively
• Build trust with stakeholders
• Improve employee engagement
• Strengthen brand perception
• Increase message clarity and reach
• Align communications with business objectives

A clear and concise communications strategy reduces wasted effort, prevents mixed messages and ensures every channel and message is purposeful.

Step 1: define your communication goals and objectives

Before selecting channels or writing messages, you need to establish what you’re trying to achieve.

Your communication objectives should flow directly from organisational goals, your mission and your vision. This could be:

• Improving employee understanding of a new initiative
• Supporting the launch of a new product or service
• Building brand awareness in a new market
• Increase stakeholder confidence during periods of change

Be specific when setting out your goals. Avoid vague targets and parameters like ‘get more followers’ or ‘increase web traffic’. These aren’t strategic priorities, they’re performance metrics.

When you’re establishing these goals and objectives. Use the SMART framework to build out your rationale.

• Specific: what outcome do you want?
• Measurable: how will you track progress?
• Achievable: can you deliver this with available resources?
• Relevant: does it support wider organisational priorities?
• Time‑bound: when should this be achieved?

These become the anchor for the entire strategy.

Step 2: conduct a communications audit

Before planning any future activity, you first need to understand where you sit in your relative landscape. When auditing your existing communication strategy, you need to consider:

• Existing channels: how and where are you communicating with your audiences?
• Current messaging: what are the stories and the narratives you’re telling?
• Content quality and consistency: how often are you issuing comms and are you able to maintain quality and consistency given your cadence?
• Engagement levels: how well is your content being received and engaged with?
• Gaps, overlaps and inefficiencies: are you doubling up on any comms, are there places where your competitors are operating where you are not?
• Internal strengths and weaknesses: are there any internal issues and challenges stopping you from increasing and enhancing your communications
• External risks and opportunities: are there any external issues, risks or challenges stopping you from executing your comms? Or are they places where you could leverage external issues into an opportunity?

Rather than create this assessment in the silo of the C-suite, you should broaden your horizons and consider a much wider approach.

Surveys and interviews with internal teams, stakeholder feedback, channel and performance data, media monitoring, social listening and competitor share‑of‑voice analysis… all of these things are critical aspects to your operations, so you should consider them all when auditing your comms.

The more sources of information and detail you gather, will paint a much more detailed picture than a summary overview.

Step 3: understand your audience

Effective communication is totally dependent on truly knowing and understanding who you are speaking to. Some key considerations and questions to ask are:

• What does this audience care about?
• What motivates them to engage?
• What are their pain points?
• Which channels do they prefer?
• How frequently do they want communication?

The second part of audience research is creating segmentations.

Through segmenting your audience – this could be a sector, title, or location – you can create a much more valuable and purposeful strategy. This allows you to tailor your outputs and offer greater personalisation, message design, relevance and content quality.

Avoid one-size-fits-all communication and create segmentations.

Tailor your messages and channels to fit the needs of varying audience sets and communicate what people actually want, rather than what you want to tell them.

Step 4: Build Your Channel Strategy

Channel planning determines how and where you will reach your audiences. It involves selecting the most viable and potentially effective channels for your audience.

Your audience defines your channel strategy, not the other way round. For example, a B2B SaaS brand targeting IT procurement professionals aged 40+ may rely on email, LinkedIn, webinars and white papers.

Whereas a youth‑focused beauty brand may prioritise TikTok, Instagram Reels and influencer partnerships.

The key principles of building a channel strategy are:

• Don’t use every channel simply because you can.
• Experiment, but set evaluation criteria early
• Review regularly and retire low-performing content and channels
• Ensure channels complement one another rather than duplicate effort.

A channel ecosystem map is a powerful planning tool. Give it the time and effort it deserves and you’ll reap the rewards in the long term.

Step 5: creating your core messages

Your core messages should reflect your organisation’s values, mission, and priorities. They should be consistent across channels while allowing for adaptation by the audience.

This doesn’t mean that you are repeating verbatim the same words and tropes over and over again. Your core messages are more like defining factors. Sure, there may be a couple of words or key phrases used more frequently, but your core messages are there to give shape and direction, rather than a creative straitjacket.

Ask yourself: What do we want people to know? What do we want them to feel and what do we want them to do?

So when you’re creating a specific piece of content, you can call back to these core messages and use them as a thematic checklist, rather than a literal one.

When you’re establishing a messaging framework and designing your language,:

• Use clear, jargon‑free language unless it is appropriate to do so.
• Always be concise, honest and authentic
• Always strive to deliver value and relevance
• Reinforce your brand personality at every step

This will form the backbone of your campaigns, content and all internal/external communication. Taking the time to give shape to the setup will make your actual content strategy and content creation far more effective and manageable.

Step 6: Developing your communications plan

Now it’s time to put all this research and strategy into something more tangible and actionable. A good plan typically includes:

1. Objectives: what are the outcomes you’re aiming for?
2. Audiences: who are you communicating with?
3. Key messages: what are you saying?
4. Channels: how you will deliver the message?
5. Timeline: when communication will happen?
6. Responsibilities: who owns what?
7. Budget and resources: what’s available to you right now?
8. Risks and mitigations: what could impact success and how will you work around this?

Again, use SMART objectives here to break large ambitions into smaller, more achievable stretch goals.

But most importantly, your plan should be flexible.

A good communication strategy outlines all of the above. A great communication strategy does the same, while also recognising that things change. Opportunities arise, instances may occur where a pre-planned approach may no longer be appropriate, and doing so may cause reputational harm.

Great communication strategies are flexible. They’re able to adjust as priorities shift, circumstances change and the goalposts shift.

Step 7: measure and optimise performance

A communication strategy is not a document you “set and forget”.

Review your performance regularly – quarterly at the least – and assess:

• What worked well?
• What didn’t land?
• What feedback did audiences give, if any?
• Which channels performed and which underperformed?
• What needs to change and what can be improved?

Track both qualitative and quantitative data. That is to say, look at information such as engagement rates as statistical barometers of success. But know that numbers alone can be deceiving. Pair this data with an analysis of sentiment in response.

You may have 1,000 comments on a post. That’s great engagement, at face value.

But what if 995 of those comments are all scathingly negative?

Either way, celebrate wins, learn from challenges and use insights to refine future communication.

Communication Strategy 10-Point Plan

Use this simple structure to build your own communication strategy:

1. Executive summary

A brief overview of mission and vision

2. Organisational context

Outline your business goals, challenges and priorities.

3. Communication objectives

SMART goals aligned to organisational needs.

4. Audience profiles

Key segments, motivations and needs.

5. Core messages

Main themes and proof points.

6. Channel mapping

Recommended channels and rationale.

7. Communications plan

Activities, timeline, responsibilities.

8. Measurement framework

KPIs, metrics and reporting rhythm.

9. Risks and mitigation

Factors that could affect delivery.

10. Governance

Roles, responsibilities and sign‑off process.

Final Thoughts

A strong communication strategy helps organisations communicate with clarity, consistency and purpose.

By defining your goals, understanding your audiences, choosing the right channels and measuring your impact, you can create a strategic communication framework that supports business outcomes and strengthens relationships with all engaged parties.

This seven‑step approach gives you everything you need to plan, deliver and optimise communication that truly makes a difference. But, if you’d like to go into more detail, or if you’d like to speak with our expert team about developing and executing your own communication strategy, then we’d love to hear from you…. so get in touch.