Sweeten Your Strategic Communication with Your Company’s Brand Values
What is Strategic Communication?
Over the past couple of decades, strategic communication in business has become a popular way to establish brand awareness. Communicating strategically involves candidly disseminating your messages while keeping your brand’s image at the core. Your brand is your unique identity. It tells a story, and customers trust your brand because they identify with it. You can deepen your relationship with customers by capitalizing on the intangible differentiators that create an emotional bond with them.
A highly effective way to capture the attention of customers is to build a strong, recognizable, and credible reputation for your brand through strategic communication, which is often used in financial, human resource/employee, and organizational management communications contexts, some of which are considered below.
How do you deliver a message candidly? Consider your audience, and communicate to your target audience directly through the channels to which they subscribe. Delivering your communication with strategic intent requires formulating a succinct, captivating message to your targeted audience, keeping your brand pure by sprinkling identifiable brand values throughout your messaging, and dovetailing the message with your organization’s specific communication goals. Success is measured through metrics that illustrate whether the message has swimmingly spread throughout the designated communication channels and met your organization’s communication goals.
Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing has worked with clients in project-based arrangements to prepare important strategic communication assignments for their corporation, company, or organization. Many of our projects involve corporate identity, and the corporation’s identifiable brand values, mission, vision, branding, package designs, and all-embracing elements of the brand’s personality are sprinkled throughout its strategic communication, including sales and marketing materials. We are your “go-to” resource for preparing company annual reports (ARs) and your most significant strategic communication.
Many Fortune 500 companies view their company ARs as the best vehicle to promote their most enviable business success. The AR has a dual purpose: it summarizes past successes and lays the groundwork for the future. Therefore, the AR is a forward-looking strategic document that embodies the company’s brand identity; reputation; commitment to corporate social responsibility in the communities they serve, and its well-planned vision for the future. Many companies think the complete AR document can be a justifiable business expense because it champions their company’s future growth aspirations and is teeming with information about its organization, company, or corporation’s legacy of success.
The complete AR, although beautiful in print, is expensive, and it has successfully evolved into an online format. There are also the condensed 10K wrap and company summary report, which are quick reads that can effectively deliver information to build a strong, recognizable, and credible reputation for your brand. Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing can work with you to help you achieve your organization’s communication goals. Contact us at https://savvyswan.com to discuss an affordable package that works best for you.
Strategic Corporate Communication
In the book, The Business Case for Corporate Citizenship, Arthur D. Little explains there are eight areas of business activity that various studies have shown to have a correlation between a company’s reputation and its financial performance. Those areas are investor relations and access to capital, employee recruitment and retention, risk management, reputation management, market positioning and competitive advantage, operational efficiency, learning and innovation, and license to operate. As CEO of your company, corporation, or organization, you want to be sure to emphasize these performance areas in your AR.
In 2002, The Corporate Responsibility Index implemented in the United Kingdom became the framework for what corporate responsibility entails for the four key areas related to the community, marketplace, workplace, and environment. For example, if your company’s clients have a strong inclination toward environmental sustainability, a tangible document such as a case study in the form of a print communication is pictorially beautiful and a strategic way for your company to tout how you put your environmental principles into practice.
Moreover, an online, condensed form of a case study is the perfect strategic communication channel to attract like-minded clients to your website and stimulate more business from an environmentally friendly customer segment. Besides the AR and case study, other company, corporation, or organizational strategic communications through which your company’s story shines in both online and printed forms are brochures, newsletters, e-books, infographics, white papers, and similar resources listed below.
Types of Strategic Communication
FINANCIAL COMMUNICATIONS
- AR
- Board meeting minutes
- Company financial updates
- Company stock news
- Industry news
HR COMMUNICATIONS
- Employee benefit information
- Employee directories
- Employee handbooks
- Employee newsletters
- Employee insurance information
- Employee engagement
- Employee surveys
- Workforce training
ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATIONS
- Brand guidelines
- Change management
- Company private intranets
- Corporate announcements
- Corporate social responsibility
- Crisis management and media relations
- Event management
- New policies or procedures
When you prepare your communications strategically, you sweeten it by adding your company’s most identifiable brand values and intangible differentiators. You should remind your customers of the benefits they can accrue from having a relationship with your company as opposed to the competition, and periodic, strategic communication with your customers helps magnetize your bond with them.
We’ve focused intently on the AR in this blog, but everything in your company’s repertoire must consistently represent your company’s brand. Your communications are not disconnected documents gathering dust; they are engaging pieces of marketing communication meant to transparently spotlight your company’s relatable values. In the above example related to environmental sustainability, demonstrating what you’ve done for environmental causes in video format can be valuably effective because it is the best marketing medium for transparency.
Your company, corporation, or organization isn’t static; it’s reactive and responsive each day. Your communications must convey to readers and business prospects that your business is buzzing with activity and—as part of your strategic plan—that your company is constantly in motion. While your company constantly moves, you must also move to prepare for emergencies that may wreak havoc on your company’s reputation. A crisis communication plan is an important strategic communication document that should be accessible for communicating with your employees and key staff during a workplace emergency. Preparing ahead allows you to speak in an articulate and timely manner with clients and the media, which helps mitigate stories that become convoluted when reported from the wrong perspective. Take control, prepare your crisis communications plan now by contacting Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing.
Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing not only creates new strategic communications but also revises and renews existing ones. We’ll provide a brand audit to ensure everything you’ve published represents the purest form of your brand. Some CEOS fail to notice their brand identity becomes corrupted over time. How does this happen? It’s simple. For example, your original marketing hire may have moved on from the company, and the new marketing hire doesn’t select the same color blue as you’ve previously used. It may be a subtle change, but this change can mutate and compound over time.
Suppose you’ve moved to another location and hired part-time employees to assist the marketing department, or you’ve acquired another company and interspersed these newly acquired employees into your marketing department. Will they use your brand colors and fonts based on an original document, or will they refer to an iteration from several versions later? Can you see how your brand identity can wither over time? It’s your brand, it should remain consistent and pure. Consider reinforcing your brand standards in a brand guideline document.
A brand guideline document is part of strong strategic communication strategy that the talented staff at Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing prepares. Everything from your packaging to logo icons, colors, tone of communication, brand voice, specific fonts, taglines, slogans, and other assets in your brand guideline document are verified.
The brand guideline document is the cornerstone of your company. Whenever a new hire is onboarded, they are trained to use the brand guidelines, which can be accessed from the company’s general drive. From a simple company picnic flier to a more elaborate proposal, your employees will understand your company’s brand guidelines are standardized. No matter how insignificant the communication may be, all forms of communication in the company are strategic communication and must be unambiguous.
Take note of the iconic company Coca-Cola. Companies across the globe have used lessons from Coca-Cola to establish their own brand guidelines. The company has had a recognizable presence for over 130 years, and there’s a reason their brand has endured. They make no bones about their stringent brand guidelines, and you can read about it here. There’s another interesting read about the company’s brand identity here and in Wikipedia,
Secure Your Corporate Identity
In one of my previous blogs, I reflected on our own brand identity, which you can use as a baseline for establishing some brand guidelines of your own. Read that article here: https://savvyswan.com/8-distinctive-essentials-to-make-your-brand-identity-stick/. I highlighted the importance of preserving your company’s brand identity and how brand guidelines help keep your brand consistent, recognizable, and memorable for your target audience.
Contact Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing for all your strategic communications. We prepare financial, human resources, and organizational management strategic communications. We have worked with companies on preparing their Crisis Communication Plan, and we have specific packages that can fit nicely with your budget either on an à la carte basis or in a project-based arrangement.
By Patti Kondel, CEO, Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing , MBA from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and MA from Emerson College, Boston. Patti is a business and marketing specialist, brand booster, lover of the arts, yoga practitioner, content creator, and cookie connoisseur—the sweet variety—and for marketing consumption, Internet cookies too! Let me help you trumpet your business to the world! Contact me today!
Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing is available for business opportunities around the globe. We also welcome related news, contributing article submissions, and helpful blog tip posts from our kindred community. If interested in submitting compatible content, please email info@savvyswan.com.
The swan icon for Savvy Swan Communication and Marketing represents the embodiment of my love for the arts: ballet, music, theater, and other meaningful art forms that I identify with, based on my previous studies of the arts and past profession of operating a performing arts center. The growth characteristic—as in business growth—is a prime reason why entrepreneurs are in business. There’s symbolism in loyalty too, in that swans mate for life! All entrepreneurs strive for customer loyalty—as in repeated purchases, right?
Now that I’ve explained the types of logos and the symbolism of our business logo, let’s consider brand personality traits.