Stop Making Noise. Start Making an Impact.
If your communications efforts are not tied to business objectives, you don’t have a strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, you’re simply making noise.
Too often, corporate communications are transactional, disconnected tactics used to push out information. Quarterly newsletters or occasional leadership messages when something “big” happens might be well-intentioned, but they’re rarely effective in creating a lasting impact. It's time to shift the perspective and transform your communications team into a strategic tool for driving trust and alignment.
Communications Strategy - What It Is and What It Isn’t
Strategizing your communications doesn’t mean producing more content or pushing more messages. It’s the framework that ensures each and every piece of communication - internal or external - serves a defined purpose. A good communications strategy connects people to business priorities, guides leaders, and creates consistency across all touchpoints.
Building A Business Case for Strategy
Maybe you’re convinced it's time to strategize your communications, but how do you get leadership buy-in? Be ready to answer the age-old question: “What's in it for me?”
A communications strategy supports three critical things:
Alignment: Strategized communications are more effective at helping your employees understand how their work is connected to the company’s goals. This alignment reduces confusion, increases engagement, and turns their focus on making an impact.
Risk Mitigation: During times of transformation or crisis, inconsistent messaging or worse, silence, creates space for rumors to take hold. Having a communications strategy in place keeps leaders prepared to communicate early, clearly, and often.
Strong Culture: Employees look to leadership to see the company values in action. With a solid strategy, you can use communications to ensure those values are demonstrated consistently - not sporadically.
What a Strong Communications Strategy Needs
Clarity
Even when your communications contain a lot of important information, they must be simple and direct. Get to the point, quickly, and make sure any call to action is easy to understand. Every message should be connected to the business’s bigger picture.
Consistency
Consistency is the key to building credibility with your audiences. It is essential to create one voice for your business and ensure that it's used across all functions and geographies. If you establish a communications campaign that requires a regular cadence (such as a monthly or quarterly message), follow through and don’t skip an installment.
Transparency
In times of uncertainty, your organization’s leadership might not have all the answers or be able to share certain information, but staying silent is never a good option. At least not if you want employees to trust you. Transparent communications, even those that simply say, “We don’t know yet,” give your employees confidence that their leaders can navigate the situation.
The Cost of Not Strategizing
You can decide not to strategize your communications - as long as you're okay with the potential consequences. And those consequences are real. Credibility erodes. Employees disengage. Leaders lose direction. Absent or inconsistent communication leaves a vacuum that quickly fills with speculation. A broken system is much harder to rebuild than it would have been to protect with a communications strategy.
Conclusion: Strategy as Infrastructure
Communications strategy is an organizational infrastructure that holds everything together. You wouldn’t build a business without a financial plan or operational processes, so you shouldn’t lead one without a communications strategy. If all you’re doing is making noise, you’re missing your chance to make an impact and move your business forward.
Jennifer Materkoski, M.A., is a global communications executive who helps organizations transform communications from a support function into a critical business partner. She has led strategy through acquisitions, reorganizations, and high-growth environments, specializing in aligning employees to business goals, equipping leaders to build trust, and strengthening culture across global teams.