Corporate Communications Strategy: Stop Measuring the Wrong Things

Corporate communications strategy is the framework that determines how an organisation speaks to every audience that matters: employees, investors, customers, regulators, media, and the public. Done well, it aligns message, channel, and timing so that every communication reinforces the same commercial and reputational objectives. Done poorly, it produces a lot of activity that looks productive and moves nothing.

Most organisations have communications activity. Far fewer have communications strategy. The difference shows up not in the volume of output but in whether the business is better positioned, better understood, and better trusted because of it.

Why Most Corporate Communications Strategies Underperform

I spent years sitting across from marketing and communications directors who could tell me exactly how many press releases went out, how many media placements were secured, and what the total reach of their last campaign was. Very few of them could tell me whether any of it changed how their target audience thought or behaved. The measurement frameworks were built to justify activity, not to evaluate impact.

This is the central problem in corporate communications. The industry has spent decades perfecting the art of looking busy. AVE calculations, share of voice reports, media monitoring dashboards. All of it measures the wrong thing. The question is not how many people saw your message. The question is whether the right people now think or act differently because of it.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, the entries that stood out were never the ones with the biggest reach numbers. They were the ones where the team could draw a clear line from communications activity to a business outcome. That line is harder to draw than most communications teams admit, and the difficulty of drawing it is not a reason to stop trying. It is a reason to build your strategy around it from the start.

If you are building or auditing your wider content operation, the Content Strategy & Editorial hub covers the broader framework that sits around communications planning, from content architecture to editorial governance.

The Audience Problem Nobody Talks About Honestly

Corporate communications fails most visibly when organisations treat their audiences as a single group. The investor relations message and the employee engagement message and the customer-facing message all require different framing, different channels, and different success metrics. When they are collapsed into a single communications programme, each audience gets a version of the message that was not designed for them.

I have seen this play out in highly regulated industries particularly sharply. In life science content marketing, for example, the audience segmentation challenge is acute. You are simultaneously communicating with clinicians who need clinical evidence, patients who need plain-language reassurance, investors who need commercial confidence, and regulators who need compliance signals. A single communications programme cannot serve all of those audiences without compromising each of them.

The solution is not to produce four times as much content. It is to build a message architecture that has a clear core, then adapts that core for each audience without losing coherence. The core message should answer three questions: what does this organisation stand for, why does that matter, and why should this specific audience care. Everything else is adaptation.

This is more disciplined than it sounds. Most organisations have a core message that is either too vague to be useful (“we are committed to excellence”) or too specific to travel across audiences (“our Q3 EBITDA margin improvement reflects operational leverage”). Neither works. The former says nothing. The latter speaks to one audience and alienates everyone else.

Building a Communications Architecture That Actually Holds

A communications architecture is the structural layer beneath your messaging. It defines the hierarchy of messages, which audiences receive which versions, which channels carry which content, and how the pieces connect. Without it, communications programmes tend to drift over time, with different teams producing content that contradicts each other or duplicates effort without knowing it.

The architecture should start with the business strategy, not the communications brief. What is the organisation trying to achieve commercially in the next 12 to 36 months? What beliefs or perceptions in the market are currently working against that? What would need to be true for those beliefs to change? Those questions produce a communications brief that is grounded in something real, rather than one that is built around what the communications team finds interesting to produce.

When I was running agencies and managing communications programmes across 30 industries, the briefs that produced the best work were always the ones where the client had done this thinking before they arrived. They knew the gap between where their reputation was and where it needed to be. They had a view on which audiences were most critical to shift. They understood the timeline. The briefs that produced mediocre work were the ones that started with “we need to raise awareness.” Awareness of what, among whom, to what end, within what timeframe. Those questions need answers before the strategy can start.

For organisations operating in highly specialised or regulated sectors, the architecture question is even more pressing. Content marketing for life sciences requires a message architecture that can hold across clinical, commercial, and regulatory contexts simultaneously. The same discipline applies to any sector where the audience is fragmented and the stakes of miscommunication are high.

Channel Strategy: Where Most Organisations Get It Wrong

Channel decisions in corporate communications are frequently driven by habit rather than strategy. Organisations issue press releases because they have always issued press releases. They hold annual conferences because they held one last year. They maintain a LinkedIn page because someone set one up in 2015. None of these are wrong in themselves, but none of them are right by default either.

The channel should follow the audience. Where does this specific audience consume information? What format do they trust? What level of depth do they expect? A financial analyst covering your sector reads differently from a hospital procurement manager. A regulator reviewing compliance documentation reads differently from a journalist looking for a story angle. The channel strategy needs to reflect those differences.

Video is one channel that consistently underperforms its potential in corporate communications because it is treated as a production exercise rather than a communications one. The question is not whether the video looks professional. The question is whether it says something specific to a specific audience in a format they will actually watch. Wistia’s thinking on video within content strategy is worth reading if you are trying to make the case internally for a more deliberate approach to video in your communications mix.

Analyst relations is a channel that many organisations either neglect entirely or approach without a clear strategy. The analyst community shapes how your sector is understood by investors, procurement teams, and journalists. If your organisation is not actively managing those relationships, someone else is shaping the narrative for you. An analyst relations agency can help structure that programme if it is not currently something your in-house team has the bandwidth or expertise to run properly.

The Benchmarking Problem: Are You Measuring Against the Right Bar?

One of the most persistent problems I see in communications measurement is benchmarking against an internal baseline rather than an external one. An organisation improves its media coverage by 15% year on year and calls it a success. But if the category grew by 40% in terms of media attention, that 15% improvement is actually a loss of share of voice. The apparent success is a failure when you put it in context.

I have had this conversation more times than I can count. The numbers look fine until you ask what they look like relative to the market. Then the picture changes entirely. This is not a problem unique to communications. It runs through marketing measurement broadly. But it is particularly acute in communications because the metrics are already soft. When you are measuring sentiment or share of voice or media impressions, the temptation to find a benchmark that makes the numbers look good is significant.

The honest approach is to set benchmarks before the programme starts, not after the results come in. Agree on what good looks like relative to competitors, relative to the category, and relative to the specific business outcome you are trying to influence. Then measure against those benchmarks without adjusting them when the results are inconvenient.

This applies equally to content-led communications programmes. If you are running a content audit for a SaaS business, for example, the audit should be benchmarked against competitive content performance and category search demand, not just against your own historical metrics. The same principle applies to any communications audit: internal improvement against a weak baseline is not the same as competitive strength.

Crisis Communications Is Not a Separate Strategy

Most organisations treat crisis communications as a separate discipline, something to be prepared for in a drawer somewhere and activated when something goes wrong. That framing is a mistake. Crisis communications is not a separate strategy. It is the stress test of your existing one.

If your normal communications programme has a clear message architecture, defined audience segments, and established channel relationships, a crisis is manageable. You know what you stand for, you know who you need to reach, and you have the relationships in place to reach them quickly. If your normal programme is vague, inconsistent, and relationship-light, a crisis will expose every one of those weaknesses simultaneously.

The organisations that handle crises well are almost always the ones that have done the foundational work in advance. They have a clear point of view. They have spokespeople who are credible and prepared. They have media relationships that are not purely transactional. They have internal communications that are strong enough that employees hear the organisational response before they read it in the news. None of that happens in a crisis. It is built before one.

For organisations in sectors where reputation risk is structurally high, this preparation is not optional. OB-GYN content marketing is a useful example of a space where communications missteps carry significant reputational and regulatory consequences. The communications architecture in those environments has to be built to withstand scrutiny, not just to perform well in normal conditions.

Internal Communications: The Part Most Strategies Underinvest In

External communications gets the budget and the attention. Internal communications gets the intranet and the all-hands meeting. That imbalance is a strategic error, particularly for organisations going through change, whether that is a rebrand, a restructure, a merger, or a shift in strategic direction.

Employees are not a secondary audience. They are often the primary channel through which an organisation’s reputation is built or damaged. What employees say about their employer to clients, to candidates, to journalists, and to their own networks shapes external perception more than most communications teams acknowledge. If the internal story and the external story are not aligned, the gap will show up eventually, and it will show up in the worst possible way.

The internal communications programme should be designed with the same rigour as the external one. It should have a clear objective, a defined audience (because “all employees” is not a useful audience definition), a channel strategy that reflects how different parts of the organisation actually consume information, and a measurement framework that goes beyond email open rates.

The Content Marketing Institute’s framework for content strategy development is a useful reference point here, not because internal communications is the same as content marketing, but because the structural discipline it requires is similar. You need to know what you are trying to achieve, who you are trying to reach, what you want them to think or do differently, and how you will know if it worked.

Government and Public Sector Communications: A Different Set of Rules

Corporate communications strategy in a government or public sector context operates under constraints that do not apply in commercial settings. Procurement processes, transparency obligations, political sensitivities, and multi-stakeholder accountability structures all shape what can be said, how, and through which channels.

Organisations that communicate with government audiences, whether as suppliers, partners, or regulated entities, need a communications approach that reflects those constraints rather than working around them. The instinct to apply commercial communications tactics in a government context often backfires. The audiences are different, the decision-making timelines are different, and the trust signals that matter are different.

B2G content marketing covers the specific dynamics of communicating with government buyers in more detail. The principles that apply to content in that context, credibility, evidence, clarity, and patience, are the same ones that should underpin corporate communications in any high-scrutiny environment.

The B2B nurturing framework from MarketingProfs is worth revisiting in this context. The long sales cycles and multi-stakeholder decision processes in B2G communications share structural similarities with complex B2B environments, and the communications discipline required is comparable.

Making the Strategy Operational: From Framework to Execution

The gap between a communications strategy document and a communications programme that actually runs is where most organisations lose momentum. The strategy gets signed off, the document gets filed, and the team reverts to doing what they were doing before because the operational translation was never completed.

Making a communications strategy operational requires three things. First, a clear editorial calendar that maps communications activity to business milestones, not just to arbitrary publishing cadences. Second, defined ownership for each audience and each channel, with accountability that sits with a named person rather than a team. Third, a measurement framework that is agreed before the programme starts and reviewed at regular intervals against the benchmarks set at the outset.

The Moz piece on adjusting content strategy for AI-driven search environments is a useful prompt for thinking about how the operational layer of communications strategy needs to adapt as the channels through which audiences discover and consume information continue to shift. The structural discipline remains the same, but the channel assumptions need regular review.

For organisations that want to go deeper on the content and editorial dimensions of their communications programme, the Content Strategy & Editorial hub covers the full range of planning, governance, and measurement frameworks that sit beneath a well-run communications operation. Communications strategy does not exist in isolation from content strategy. They are the same discipline approached from different angles.

The case for diversifying your content strategy, covered well by Moz, applies directly here. Organisations that rely on a single channel or a single format for their communications are structurally fragile. When that channel underperforms or the format loses relevance, there is no fallback. Diversification is not about doing more. It is about not being dependent on any single point of failure.

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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