SparkNotes ·
Your brand needs a comms strategy: five signs
If you’re reading this, at least one of these probably applies to you.
You’re not short of effort. You post, you publish, you show up at events. But it feels like talking to a brick wall. People aren’t engaging, enquiries aren’t coming in, and you can’t quite say why.
The problem usually isn’t how hard you’re working. It’s that you’re working without a communications strategy.
Here are five signs, and what each one is telling you.
1. Your social media posts get crickets
You post regularly, but the likes, comments and shares never come. That usually means you’re talking about what matters to you, not what matters to your audience.
The fix: Define who you’re talking to and what they care about. Then make every post useful, relevant or worth sharing for that person.
2. You can’t explain what you do in one sentence
If it takes you a paragraph, your audience has stopped listening halfway. Confusion is the fastest way to lose a partner, a client or a funder.
The fix: Write a single clear positioning line: who you serve, what you do for them and why you’re different. Every message you send should grow from it.
3. You have a great product but no one knows about it
Quality doesn’t market itself. The best product in the room still loses to the one people have heard of.
The fix: Plan how people will find out about you, through which channels, and how often. Visibility has to be designed, not hoped for.
4. Your content looks different every week
New colours, new tone, new style, depending on who made it. Your audience can’t recognise you, so they can’t remember you.
The fix: Set brand guidelines and a consistent voice, then stick to them. Recognition is built through repetition.
5. You’re reactive, not proactive
You only communicate when something happens: a launch, a crisis, a deadline. In between there’s silence, and someone else is shaping how people see you.
The fix: Plan your communications in advance with a content calendar. Then you’re ready for the moments you can’t predict as well as the ones you can.
What a communications strategy actually does
A communications strategy answers four questions before you write a single post:
- Who are we trying to reach?
- What do we want them to know, feel and do?
- Where do they spend their time?
- How often will we show up, and how will we measure what’s working?
Answer those, and every post, campaign and press release starts working towards the same goal instead of pulling in different directions.
Seen or invisible
A communications strategy isn’t a luxury for big brands. It’s the difference between being seen and being invisible.
If you ticked even one of these five signs, it’s time to stop talking to the wall.
Ready to be heard? Sparkpoint builds communications strategies for organisations across Africa, from positioning and messaging to content plans you can actually keep up with. Let’s talk.
