Company Communications Strategy: Why Most Businesses Get It Wrong

A company communications strategy is a structured plan that defines what an organisation says, to whom, through which channels, and why. Done well, it aligns every message, from investor updates to customer emails, behind a coherent commercial purpose. Done poorly, it becomes a collection of disconnected outputs that confuse audiences and dilute whatever brand equity you have managed to build.

Most businesses have communications activity. Very few have a communications strategy. The difference is not semantic.

What Does a Company Communications Strategy Actually Include?

There is a version of this question that gets answered with a list of channels: website, email, social, PR, internal comms. That is not a communications strategy. That is a channel inventory. A real strategy answers harder questions: What does this company stand for, and is that position commercially defensible? Who are we talking to, and what do they actually care about? What do we want people to think, feel, or do differently after encountering our communications?

The components of a functioning communications strategy typically include a core narrative, audience segmentation with specific message maps for each segment, channel selection based on where those audiences actually pay attention, a governance model that determines who approves what and how often messaging is reviewed, and a measurement framework tied to something other than vanity metrics.

I have seen companies spend serious money on brand campaigns while their sales team was pitching a completely different value proposition to prospects. I have seen PR teams securing coverage in publications their target customers never read. I have seen internal all-hands presentations that contradicted the external positioning the marketing team had spent months building. These are not edge cases. They are the norm in companies that have communications activity without communications strategy.

If you are thinking about how your communications strategy fits into your broader commercial plan, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider landscape of decisions that should be sitting above and around your messaging work.

Why Do Most Company Communications Strategies Fail?

They fail for three reasons, and the first one is the most uncomfortable: the company does not actually have a clear point of view worth communicating. Communications strategy cannot rescue a business that has not done the harder strategic work of defining what it is, who it serves, and why it is meaningfully different from the alternatives. Marketing, including communications, is often deployed as a blunt instrument to paper over more fundamental business problems. I have seen it happen repeatedly across industries, and it never ends well. You can amplify a clear message. You cannot amplify ambiguity and expect coherence on the other side.

The second reason is organisational. Communications is treated as a function rather than a capability. It sits in a silo, usually under marketing or HR depending on whether you are talking about external or internal comms, and it operates without a shared framework. The result is that different parts of the business say different things about the same company, often in the same week. BCG has written about the alignment challenge between marketing and HR in the context of brand building, and the tension they describe maps directly onto communications failures I have witnessed across agency and client-side work.

The third reason is measurement. Companies measure what is easy to measure: impressions, open rates, follower counts, media coverage volume. These metrics are not useless, but they are not proxies for strategic communications effectiveness. If your communications strategy is working, you should see evidence of it in commercial outcomes: shorter sales cycles, higher close rates, better quality inbound leads, improved retention, or reduced cost of acquisition. If you cannot draw a line, even an approximate one, between your communications activity and any of those outcomes, your strategy is not doing what a strategy is supposed to do.

How Should You Build a Core Narrative That Holds Together?

The core narrative is the foundation everything else sits on. It is not a tagline and it is not a mission statement. It is the answer to a simple question: what is the story this company tells about itself, and is it true?

Building that narrative requires input from more than the marketing team. It requires understanding what customers actually value about you, which is often not the same as what you think they value. It requires honesty about where you are genuinely strong and where you are not. And it requires a level of specificity that most corporate communications avoid because specificity feels limiting. It is not. Specificity is what makes a narrative credible and memorable.

Early in my career, I was in a brainstorm for a Guinness brief at Cybercom. The founder had to leave mid-session and handed me the whiteboard pen. The room went quiet in a way that told me exactly what everyone was thinking. I kept going. What I learned from that session, and from many like it since, is that the best narratives come from genuine tension: what the brand believes versus what the market assumes. Guinness had that tension in abundance. Most B2B companies have it too, but they smooth it out in the pursuit of appearing professional. The smoothing is where the meaning gets lost.

Once you have a core narrative, it needs to be stress-tested against every major audience segment. The narrative itself should not change, but the emphasis and the language will shift. What you say to a prospect in the consideration phase is different from what you say to a customer who has been with you for three years. What you say to an investor is different from what you say to a new hire on day one. A good message map makes those differences explicit and keeps them consistent with the core.

What Is the Right Relationship Between Internal and External Communications?

They are not separate disciplines. They are two expressions of the same strategy, and the gap between them is one of the most reliable indicators of an organisation in trouble.

When I was running agencies through periods of significant growth, the internal communications challenge was as demanding as any external campaign. Growing a team from 20 to 100 people means the informal communication structures that worked at 20 stop working somewhere around 40. You can no longer assume that context travels. You have to build systems for it. The same is true in any organisation going through change, whether that is a rebrand, a restructure, a merger, or a shift in strategic direction.

The practical implication is that your internal communications should be built from the same narrative framework as your external communications. Your employees should be able to articulate what the company stands for in roughly the same terms your best customers would use. If there is a significant gap between those two descriptions, you have a communications problem that no amount of external media spend will fix. Customers eventually interact with your people, and the experience of that interaction either confirms or contradicts everything your marketing has said about you.

This is not a soft HR point. It is a commercial one. Companies that genuinely delight customers at every touchpoint, including the human ones, grow more efficiently than companies that rely on marketing to compensate for operational or cultural shortfalls. Communications strategy, properly constructed, is part of the mechanism that keeps those touchpoints consistent.

How Do You Choose the Right Channels Without Spreading Too Thin?

Channel selection is where communications strategies most visibly go wrong, because it is the most visible part of the work. Everyone can see that you are on LinkedIn or that you have a newsletter or that your PR team placed a piece in a trade publication. The strategic question, which channels are actually reaching the audiences that matter and shifting their thinking in the direction you want, is harder to answer and therefore often not asked.

The starting point is not the channel. It is the audience behaviour. Where do your specific audience segments actually consume information relevant to buying decisions in your category? That question has different answers for different businesses. For some, it is a handful of specialist publications and a conference circuit. For others, it is LinkedIn and a well-maintained email list. For others still, it is word of mouth and peer networks that no media buy can reach directly. Understanding how your target market actually processes information is a prerequisite for channel selection, not an afterthought.

Once you know where your audiences pay attention, the discipline is in saying no to everything else. Every channel you add to your communications mix requires content, governance, measurement, and maintenance. Most organisations underestimate this overhead and end up with a presence across six channels that is thin and inconsistent rather than a strong, reliable presence across two or three that actually reach the people who matter. Consistency on fewer channels outperforms inconsistency across many, almost every time.

Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models makes a related point about resource allocation in go-to-market strategy: the companies that grow most efficiently are the ones that concentrate resources on the highest-value activities rather than spreading investment to cover all bases. Channel strategy in communications is the same problem.

How Do You Govern Communications Across a Large Organisation?

Governance is the unsexy part of communications strategy that determines whether any of the strategic work actually holds up in practice. Without it, the best narrative framework in the world degrades within months as different teams, agencies, and individuals make local decisions that seem reasonable in isolation but erode the coherence of the whole.

Effective communications governance does not mean central control of every word. That model does not scale and it creates bottlenecks that slow the organisation down. What it does mean is a clear framework: who owns the core narrative and has authority to protect it, what decisions can be made locally and what require sign-off, how often the strategy is reviewed and on what basis, and what happens when something goes wrong.

In practice, the governance model needs to match the size and structure of the organisation. A 50-person business with a single marketing lead can operate with relatively informal governance. A 2,000-person business with regional teams, multiple product lines, and a mix of in-house and agency resource needs something more structured. The mistake is applying the wrong model for the scale, either over-engineering governance for a small business or under-engineering it for a large one.

One practical tool that works at most scales is a message hierarchy document: a single reference that captures the core narrative, the key messages for each major audience segment, the approved language for describing products and services, and the things the company does not say. It sounds basic. In my experience, fewer than one in five organisations has one that is current and actually used. The ones that do have it consistently produce more coherent communications with less effort.

How Do You Measure Whether Your Communications Strategy Is Working?

This is where the honest answer diverges from the comfortable one. The comfortable answer is a dashboard of reach, engagement, and sentiment metrics that shows a lot of activity and is easy to produce. The honest answer is that measuring communications effectiveness is genuinely difficult, and most of the metrics that are easy to track are not the ones that tell you whether your strategy is working.

The approach I have found most useful is to define, before any communications activity begins, what you would expect to see if the strategy were working. Not just channel metrics, but commercial signals: Are qualified leads citing brand familiarity as a factor in their decision to engage? Are sales cycles shortening in segments where communications investment has been concentrated? Are retention rates improving in cohorts who have had more structured communications touchpoints? Are new hires arriving with a more accurate picture of what the company does?

None of these are perfect measures. Attribution in communications is messy and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. But the discipline of defining expected outcomes before the work starts forces a level of strategic clarity that most communications planning skips. It also makes it much harder to declare success based on metrics that were never connected to the strategy’s purpose in the first place.

Having judged the Effie Awards, I have seen what genuinely effective marketing communications looks like when it is held to account for commercial outcomes. The entries that stand up are the ones where the team can trace a clear line from the strategic objective through the communications choices to a measurable business result. That rigour is not just for awards entries. It is the standard every communications strategy should be built to.

BCG’s analysis of pricing and go-to-market strategy in B2B markets is a useful reminder that commercial strategy and communications strategy are not parallel tracks. The way you price, position, and sell your product should be reflected in how you communicate about it. Misalignment between commercial strategy and communications is a measurement problem before it is anything else: you cannot tell whether your communications are working if you have not defined what working means in commercial terms.

Communications strategy does not sit in isolation from the broader commercial decisions a business makes. If you want to see how the most effective go-to-market teams integrate messaging, positioning, and growth planning, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture.

What Does a Communications Strategy Review Look Like in Practice?

Most companies review their communications strategy when something goes wrong: a rebrand falls flat, a campaign gets ignored, a competitor starts eating into their position, or a new leadership team arrives and wants to put their stamp on things. Reactive review is better than no review, but it is not a substitute for a structured, periodic reassessment of whether your communications strategy is still fit for purpose.

A useful review covers four areas. First, the external environment: has the competitive landscape shifted, have your target audiences changed how they consume information, has anything happened in the market that makes your current positioning less relevant or less credible? Second, the internal environment: has the business changed in ways that affect what it can credibly claim, are there new products, capabilities, or customer successes that the current narrative does not reflect? Third, the execution: is the strategy actually being followed, and where is the gap between the intended approach and what is happening in practice? Fourth, the results: what evidence do you have that the strategy is producing the commercial outcomes it was designed to support?

The frequency of review depends on the pace of change in your business and market. For most organisations, an annual strategic review with a lighter quarterly check on execution and results is a reasonable starting point. The point is not to change the strategy constantly. Consistency is a competitive advantage in communications, and most strategies are abandoned before they have had enough time to work. The point is to have a structured process for deciding when change is genuinely warranted, rather than making that decision reactively or based on internal politics.

For companies operating in complex or rapidly shifting markets, Forrester’s perspective on go-to-market challenges in specific sectors illustrates how external market dynamics can force a reassessment of communications approach even when the underlying strategy is sound. The lesson is not that strategy should change with every market shift, but that the review process should be sensitive to the signals that indicate a more fundamental rethink is needed.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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