7 Tips to Create an Engaging Internal Communication Strategy

We all know about strategies for marketing, content, and lead nurturing, but have you heard of internal communication strategies? With the ‘new normal’ that’s evolved from 2020, it’s become a big 2021 communication trend. Why? Because poor internal communication leads to a disconnected workforce. Plus, your employees are your best brand advocates. How can you create an internal comms strategy to improve morale and productivity? Read this.

1. Analyse Your Current Internal Comms Strategy

You’re probably communicating with your employees in some way, so Sprout Social recommends starting there. Assess the strengths and weaknesses of where you’re at, how your current approach is working, what you want it to be, how you plan to get there, how long it should take, and who will be involved.

2. Determine the Budget for Your Strategy

Forbes says internal communications should be considered internal branding. And Imaginasium says this means planning for internal comms the same way you would marketing – with a budget. Knowing what your budget is before you compile your plan will help you be more strategic and methodical.

3. Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams

How you communicate with internal staff is something all teams should have a say in. Imaginasium recommends teaming up with 8 to 10 critical stakeholders and influencers across different functions of the business, so you can leverage their different perspectives to build a balanced and effective approach.

4. Create Personas for Your Target Audience

Just like marketing, it helps to understand the internal audience you’re communicating with before sending anything out. Try creating personas for the different audiences within your business. Check out step 2, understand your audience, in our guide to content marketing strategy for detailed tips on how to do this.

5. Define Success & Set SMART Strategy Objectives

If you want to be successful in any endeavour, first you must define success. Is it employee happiness or engagement? How will you know once you’ve attained this? Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound) objectives will help you do this.

Once you know what your SMART goals are, you’ll have a better idea of the kinds of metrics you need to monitor to track your progress. Sprout Social says a few you can consider are social shares, or employee referrals.

6. Choose Communication Tools that Meet Your Needs

There are so many communication options on the market. Email continues to be the standard (Statista forecasts 361.6 emails to be sent daily in 2024) and many organisations partner that with instant-messaging platforms like Slack or something with video, like Microsoft Teams. SMS and voice broadcasting are also great for company broadcasts and notifications. It all depends on your goals and your employees’ channel preferences.

7. Monitor Performance and Adapt Where Necessary

Now that you’ve got your strategy, it’s time to implement it, monitor its performance, and adapt if you need to. If you’re not meeting your objectives, explore where you’re off the mark and see what you can change to get there. Sometimes it’s the channel you’re using, other times, it could be the time you communicate, or the tone. Maybe it’s the content. Tweak and adapt to see what gets the best results and then double down on that.

With post-2020’s ‘new normal’, business communication has changed. What impact will these changes have on your business in 2021?