Speaker 1: A communication strategy is an important tool for managing our engagement with others. We always communicate with a purpose or intent. Hello and thank you for tuning in. My name is Catherine Gahu. I'm an entrepreneur and I've been in the business of research and training for many years. Let's talk about how to develop communication strategy. Planning is important for ensuring success in achieving communication goals. Let's talk about how to develop a communication strategy. Communication planning is important for ensuring success in achieving our communication goals. A communication strategy is a roadmap that shows how communication will be used to meet certain objectives. It helps to share information, to inform, to sensitize, and to persuade in a structured and controlled manner. A clear strategy details how information will flow to achieve the intended objective. How the right message will get to the right people at the right time in the right manner. Why do we need a communication strategy? We need a communication strategy for the same reason a football team would need a defense layout. When you have a strategy for your communication, you become more focused on the goal or agenda. A communication strategy guides you so that you stay focused on target audience and objective. It guides on message development and in the selection of the delivery channels to ensure that what you want to communicate is actually what gets communicated. This results in the message reaching the right people in the right way and at the right time. The strategy provides clarity and simplifies the work of message development. It helps create messages that are relevant and motivating to the target audience. A good communication strategy can improve interaction and help you receive information from your audience. Let's talk about the 5 steps in developing a communication strategy. 1. Determine your objectives. That is clarify your intent. What exactly do you want to communicate? What exactly do you want out of that communication? You start with what you want to achieve because that helps you to know who to direct your communication to. Possible communication objectives could be to create awareness, to persuade someone or to motivate people to take a particular action, shift attitude, or change behavior. At work, the objective of communication could be to influence your boss to promote you. Or it could be to get support from your colleagues. In marketing, it could be to influence consumers to buy a product that you have offered. Or it could be to change how they use your product. In personal relationships, the objective of communication could be to get someone to handle a task for you. Or it could mean you want to influence someone to give you something of value. It could also be to change someone's feelings towards you. Or even to accompany you to an event. In politics, it could be to influence people to support you or support a cause that you value. It could also mean you want them to support a political party that you are supporting or to vote for you. In church, it could be to get people to give a generous offering or donation. Or even to heed the call to action. Communication objectives should be smart, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. This makes it possible for you to be focused and achieve the objective that you set in mind. The second step is to identify your target audience. You need to clearly define your target audience. Who do you want to reach with your message? In some cases, it's only after you clarify your objective that it becomes clear who to direct the communication to. If your objective is to increase sales, then you focus on customers. In personal relationships, the target audience could be your family, your friends. At work, it could be your colleagues or your boss. In politics, it could be voters or the party leader or even other party members. In church, it could be the church members or choir members or members of the small communities in the church or the pastor or other church leaders. The third step is to develop a creative message. What is the message you want to pass? What exactly do you want to say to the target audience? The message is the idea or information you want to convey to your target audience. To create a powerful message, you need to consider the person or people you want to talk to and also the purpose of that communication. So you look at the objective and the target audience. A persuasive message should be able to get the attention of the target audience, get interest, inspire desire, and get action. If you want to persuade or motivate people to take a particular action, then the type of message you need to use should be engaging, it should be aligned to what matters to the people, and it should be expressed in a compelling manner. The fourth step is to select the channels of communication. You need to select the channels you will use to communicate. This depends again on your audience, objective, and message. So you go back to your other steps and clarify if it's so-and-so, if it's objective, if that's a message which is the right channel to use. You could use face-to-face communication, telephone, email, internet, or social media platforms, or even broadcast media. It depends who are you trying to communicate with, why do you want to communicate with them, what is the message, and that helps you to solidify the best platform to use to send that message. The channel or the media is influenced by the other factors. You could also have a meeting either face-to-face or online using Zoom or other meeting platforms. When selecting channels, you consider what you want in terms of reach and frequency, you consider the message focus and the target group, as well as the cost-effectiveness. Each channel has different strengths, and therefore, you need to use multiple channels to reinforce the message. Some of the modes of delivery include presentations, public notices, briefs, exhibitions, road shows, telephone, SMS, social media, email, and the like. You could use radio, TV, whatever, depending on your target audience and objective and the nature of the message. Evaluation. It's important to decide how you will assess the effectiveness of communication. Evaluation is important as it helps you to determine the success of the message conveyed in achieving the objective that you set in the first place. Feedback is crucial in helping you understand if your message was understood the right way. Was it accepted? How was it received? Was it believed? Did your target audience believe your message? Furthermore, it helps you to know the extent to which your communication objective has been met. To sum it up, five steps in developing a communication strategy are 1. Determine your objectives. 2. Define the target audience. 3. Create the message. 4. Select the channels. 5. Do evaluation. Before I close, I have a question for you. What action will you take in the next few days to improve your communication strategy? Thank you for watching this video. Remember to subscribe, like it, and comment on this topic. Let me know what other areas of communication you'd like me to handle. Thank you and best wishes. Keep watching. We all need to elevate our mindsets at this time.