Product communication strategy template

Many business leaders find it is in their best interest to seek external support to help organize and execute key activities. According to the Corporate Executive Board, the top three challenges that impede a successful product launch include:. Product launch teams are comprised of people from broad disciplines including engineering, marketing, sales, supply chain, and customer support.

Shifting from product development to product launch can complicate who owns what and when. Often the product launch plan is captured in a high-level product development plan; however to get it right, a separate, more detailed launch plan is best. Launch to channel partners if you sell through channels , train, provide sales tools and collateral, and communicate process and support. This is the stage where all your planning and preparation comes together. From press releases and web pages going live to the public unveiling of the product, often at a trade show or other industry event.

Months worth of hard work is set in motion. You're now able to step back and observe, ensuring that everything goes smoothly—and making necessary adjustments if it doesn't. You can also start watching for initial positive or negative reaction to the launch.

And don't forget to enjoy it! Use early customer successes to capture momentum. Gather testimonials to use in marketing initiatives, and encourage positive social media engagement, reviews, and word-of-mouth referrals. T goals. This template helps clarify the five classic S. Once you complete the questionnaire, the answers will help fine-tune your strategy into attainable goals.

You can use it as a tool for the whole team to make sure your goals are realistic, and to form consensus before moving on to the next steps in your strategic communication planning process. Knowing who influences you and who you influence will clarify the impact of the actions you take and the messages you create.

Once you identify your stakeholders, learn how to manage those relationships by reading The Definitive Guide to Stakeholder Management. Track which stakeholders are likely to have the most or least interest and influence in your communications strategy based on your research.

This is a useful template for strategizing and creating an effective plan of action for stakeholder management. Visualizing stakeholders in this way makes it easy to understand which audience needs greater focus and which need less monitoring. You need to align employees and other internal agents to your messages and actions, and clarify who acts as important conduits of information to the outside world.

This simple communications template clarifies stakeholder interest and power, type and frequency of communication for each stakeholder, and provides a space for comments. Take some time to learn what your colleagues know and the strengths they can bring to your communications efforts.

Then use the RACI model Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed to help team members understand their roles and responsibilities to ensure collaboration and project success. This activity is especially important when team sizes are large, when team members are in different geographic areas, or if you need to rely on staff from multiple departments. Roles and Responsibilities Template for Excel.

Use this template to keep tasks organized by team members, save time or eliminate the need for extended status meetings, and ensure that communication strategy plan goals are tracked and met. You should be able to refine your message to three key points, and if necessary to adjust those statements slightly for specific target audiences. Do some team brainstorming and develop a list of topics for your website, social media, and email marketing strategy. You also need to consider key dates for your organization like anniversaries, conferences, or seasonal activities, and build messaging around those.

All of this legwork should also inform upcoming campaigns to support product rollouts or other key events. Once you line up your themes and campaigns, you can put them into your planning documents and templates. A major part of the channel and platform selection process relies on the target audience and stakeholder research.

You can use purchased data or your own research to determine the media your individual audiences use most. Try some testing to get to the most appropriate communication channel mix to promote and encourage the specific behavior or outcome you want. If your budget allows, hire a professional PR, advertising, or media firm to help you determine the most streamlined way to get to the right media mix. These ideas apply to both internal and external communications channel planning:.

Another consideration is to use marketing resource management MRM software. MRMs usually provide planning, budgeting, and tracking capabilities, as well as the means for managing digital brand assets, workflows, and approval processes. You can find extensive coverage on this topic in this Marketing Resource Management article.

As mentioned earlier, you need to set clear, measurable goals to ensure that your communication strategy plan is effective -- or to determine if you need to make some changes to reach those goals. That means you need to not only set metrics, but also measure them over time, and at the conclusion of campaigns. As you develop your communications strategy plan, build-in quantitative measures not just for a final evaluation, but also at interim dates.

That way you can assess if your communications efforts are progressing at the right pace. For example, are you amassing more Twitter followers or requests for more information, and meeting business objectives like total sales. As you write your plan, include:. Raffetto is emphatic about the use of metrics in his plans. We use a heavy dose of quantitative measures — everything from media impact to video views to domain authority to UTM link tag analytics — and then we also look at more qualitative measures such as Are reporters now reaching out to us for a perspective on breaking news?

These are measurable as well and are built into the metrics in the planning phase. The power of the social media ecosystem in reaching consumers and other audiences continues to grow, notes Raffetto. For this reason we do not treat it as a separate program, but rather we layer it into all other programs. Measurement is fairly easy now with all of the analytics tools available. It is fun to see a client's social media program and engagement get supercharged by PR wins like a huge media hit or a keynote address.

They have no strategy. Therefore, they spend a little time here and a little time there on the various platforms, staying virtually invisible on all of them. Social media experts advise that you formulate a strategy to master one or at most two platforms. Then master that platform. Use those one or two platforms to drive traffic to your own website — the one place where you actually have control of the traffic and what they see.

The tactics on social media are all the magnets you use to put buyers into your funnel on this platform and gradually lead them to your website. Finally, know what you want them to do when they get to your site: Read a blog?

Buy a product? Sign up for an ezine? Register for a free webinar? Attend a paid event? The more specific the action you want them to take, the easier to measure your results. Edit this simple spreadsheet to include all of the social channels and metrics you want to track, and update it when you make any shifts in your social media strategy.

This social media marketing plan template and calendar makes the complex planning involved in multiple channels easier. You can gather intelligence about how target audiences respond to content and which sites are sending you the most referrals. Use the data you gather to understand which outlets are most effective, and which days and times to post work best.

Putting all the work and necessary activities in a calendar with key communications tasks, budget, and resources goes a long way in delivery on strategy. Highlight specific projects, events or publications that you know need to happen in a particular timeframe. This detailed calendar template provides a way to track annual plans or in a single month snapshot, and helps you work back from upcoming deadlines.

Call out metrics at the top of the template, while there is a space to note marketing effectiveness data at the bottom of the spreadsheet. This comprehensive template offers sections for social media, online content, press releases, email, advertising, and more. Adapt the fields to make them appropriate for your organization to more effectively track your weekly and monthly progress. There are crisis that come out of the blue and some that you can anticipate based on past history or what you know may be coming up in your organization such as a move, a merger, or layoffs.

This Crisis Communication Strategy Template will help you identify the crisis communication team, set up responsibilities, identify and train spokespersons, determine the potential crisis, and set up a process and response plan, establish systems, and more. How do you put all these different aspects together? The strategic communications plan provided here is a template that you can use to guide your process. There are steps along the way where you should include some of the downloadable templates in this article to lighten the load, and keep communications transparent to team members and management.

It will be a living document, like the templates, that change as you learn and assess the process. Use the template to build your own custom plan. This marketing plan template holds the component pieces that go into your overall strategic communications plans. It has sections for media relations, online marketing, trade shows and events, sales campaigns, and branding efforts. Overall objectives are identified along with costs, target market, and you can schedule activities by the week.

Adjust the template to include whichever elements are essential to your communications strategy. Use this communications and marketing plan template to display itemized categories by type and channel, the estimated costs, subtotals, and grand totals for each item and a space for additional notations. This template can be used for campaigns or for annual plans. Find more templates, books, and professional organizations to start or improve your planning process here.

More Helpful Templates You can always make tasks easier for yourself and your team with easy-to-use templates like these:. Get your team on the same page with a consolidated view of responsibilities across multiple projects and priorities with this comprehensive action tool. Use the template to create transparency as it tracks task progress with Harvey ball symbols, and also flags high-priority items. Check out more templates in this 15 Free Task List Templates article. Communication strategies help you achieve quality service, ensure that your employees know what they are expected to do and also, the opportunity to put across the needs of an organization.

This way, there is constant feedback from various clients to main the normas of a particular business entity. Use the above-mentioned template to have a better idea of how to make the perfect strategy needed. Effective Communication Strategy Template melcrum. You can download this template, and add a summary of your strategy, the statement of purpose and your current situation in the template.

Creating a Communication Strategy Step 1: Decide Your Goal The first thing you need to do is decide what is the main goal for your communication strategy. Social media strategy templates that are available online can be of great help to you in making the needed strategy. It is very crucial that you give a brief, detailed goal description to each group as to what you want them to do and achieve. See if you want to bring about a change in thought and behavior or want to raise awareness, etc.

Step 2: Target Audience Communication plays a very important role and it has to be shaped for each targeted audience base so that they can communicate clearly and effectively. Perform analysis on your audience so that you can determine what information they know and what you can tell them. Step 3: Message and Time Frame Design your message in a respective time frame, so that it can reach your audience on time. This message should be clear while your strategic communication campaign.

Keep it as short as you can, as people do not like to read long articles. This should bring about change in your audience. Keep in mind your budget while you create your message. Step 4: Explore and Implement Choose communication outlets, so that you can reach your target audience at the right time, at the right place.