Marketing & Sales 
A clear, effective communication strategy can make businesses nearly unsinkable. But without a solid communication plan, you’re setting sail on the Titanic without enough lifeboats — and disaster is almost guaranteed.
It’s not just about getting your message out there — it’s about ensuring you deliver the right message at the right time. Our guide and free communication plan template equips your business with the tools to help you navigate the unpredictable waves of internal and external communication scenarios.
👉 Download the communications plan templates: PDF and Google Sheets
What Is a Communication Plan?
A communication plan is a strategic document outlining how an organization will convey its messages to its target audience.
A strong business communication plan ensures your business delivers cohesive brand messaging to your target audience across various channels. But it’s much more than that.
It provides a clear framework for both internal and external communication, guiding everything from marketing campaigns to public relations crisis management. It helps create and maintain your positive brand reputation and builds stronger customer, investor, and partner relationships. Additionally, in project management, a communication plan outlines protocols to keep team members and stakeholders informed, ensuring clarity and efficiency throughout the project lifecycle.
Writing a Communication Plan in 10 Steps
Your communication plan should cover how you’ll communicate about your products and services and how your business will respond in times of crisis. To ensure your messaging is clear and consistent, follow these steps to write an effective communication plan:
- Review your current communication methods
- Define your business objectives and establish SMART goals
- Identify and understand your target audience
- Develop key messages for each audience segment
- Choose your communication channels
- Assign roles and responsibilities to key stakeholders
- Create a timeline for a communication plan refresh
- Determine what success looks like and how to measure it
- Share your communication plan
- Test and analyze your results
1. Review your current communication methods
The first step in creating a strategic communication plan is to assess your current communication methods and define their usage. From there, decide if you need to add channels to your existing systems or pivot to different channels that better align with your business goals.
Start by identifying the appropriate tools and distinguishing between tools you’ll use for real-time and asynchronous communication methods. This ensures that you handle internal and external communication effectively.
Here are a few examples of communication methods to consider:
- Email: Best for external stakeholders and formal updates.
- Collaboration tools, like Slack: Best for daily internal communication and quick updates.
- Video conferencing, like Zoom or Nextiva: Best for real-time meetings and customer support interactions.
Make sure to tailor each tool’s use to fit your company’s specific communication needs, aligning it with existing strategies and ensuring efficiency, cross-functional collaboration, and consistency across all channels.
Compare your current communication methods to best practices in your industry. This can help identify areas for improvement.
Related: 9 Best Communication Channels for Businesses
2. Define your business objectives and establish SMART goals
The next step in creating a communication plan is identifying what you want to achieve as a company and establishing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals. These objectives go beyond communication efforts, aligning with your overall mission and providing measurable targets, such as increasing profit margins or reducing churn.
For each business objective, define a corresponding communication goal. This makes it easier to track success and gain buy-in from stakeholders. Some examples of business objectives are:
- Increase profit margins by X%
- Reduce churn rate by X%
- Increase customer satisfaction by X%
- X new customers per month
- Grow yearly revenue by $X
Communication goals should be as specific as possible. This way, you can measure them and optimize your communication strategy accordingly. Here are some examples:
- Prospects: Increase close rate by X%
- Customers: Increase recurring purchases by X%
- Churned customers: Win back X% of lapsed customers
- Non-paying supporters: Grow email list by X subscribers
- Investors: Raise $X in funding
- Partners: Sign X new partnerships
- Affiliates: Close X new sales through affiliates
Create a mission statement so that all brand communication is aligned and consistent.
Related: Your Short and Sweet Guide to Business Communication Systems
3. Identify and understand your target audience
Next, define the audiences you’re looking to impact with your communication plan. In addition to potential customers, the list of audience segments you want to reach can include:
- Prospects
- Clients and customers
- Churned clients and customers
- Non-customers that support your organization (event attendees, email subscribers)
- Investors and shareholders
- Partners and sponsors
- Influencers and affiliates
Be sure to gather relevant demographics and contact information for each group to ensure accurate targeting and personalized communication. Pick all groups that apply to your organization and identify the main drivers of connection and support for each of these groups.
Define your USP — your competitive advantage. Lean into what sets your business apart, consistently including it in marketing materials and communications.
4. Develop key messages for each audience segment
This step is where the magic of a communication plan truly comes to life. You’ll now define foundational messages for all of your audience segments. These messages act as reference points for all conversations with external people and organizations. For strong, effective messaging, make sure to follow these best practices:
- Maintain clarity, consistency, and credibility.
- Address the barriers and pain points your primary audience is facing.
- Provide a solution tailored to that specific audience and pain point.
With this in mind, write out a summary of essential messages for each of your audiences. Remember to include your target audience’s pain points (in their own words and phrases) in your project plan.
Determine the maximum time you can go without engaging your audience while still remaining relevant and top-of-mind.
5. Choose your communication channels
The next step is to choose your communication channels. Identify where your audience spends time, both online and offline, and determine what captures their attention. Consider how frequently they visit those platforms and places. The specific answers will vary based on your industry, job roles, and other factors, but you can start with the following list:
- Blogs, case studies, and other resources on your website
- Email marketing, including both one-on-one emails and newsletters
- Live events and conferences
- Social media platforms
- Internal communication platforms
- Press releases
- Print media
By analyzing these factors for each audience segment, you’ll gain insight into where and how often you need to engage to build and nurture key relationships.
Choose channels that align with your target audience’s habits and preferences. For example, younger audiences may prefer social media, while older generations might be more receptive to traditional channels like email or printed materials.
6. Assign roles and responsibilities to key stakeholders
Unique issues for different audience segments require personalized messaging on specific channels. To achieve this, assign key stakeholders to roles and responsibilities in each part of your communication plan.
For example, if your brand is involved in a social media crisis, your public relations manager should take responsibility for the communication plan. They will follow the documented communication strategy that details what to say in their outreach, which audience to address, and on the proper channel.
Other examples include:
- Internal communication: Stakeholders communicate organizational changes and messaging from leadership or key decision-makers.
- External communication: Stakeholders deliver messaging involving customer experience (CX), investor relations, and community relations.
- Crisis communication: Stakeholders handle communications about product recalls, data breaches, or natural disasters.
- Marketing and sales communication: Stakeholders take responsibility for communications involving new product launches, advertising campaigns, and lead generation.
- Project management communication: Stakeholders handle the project communication plan dealing with deliverables, deadlines, and internal collaboration across departments.
- Human resources communication: Stakeholders communicate information internally about employee engagement, performance reviews, employee development, and other HR-related issues.
Plan your messaging and promotions well in advance of key industry events and dates, such as product launches or conferences. Building a calendar of these dates into your communication strategy ensures you’re prepared and aligned with relevant opportunities.
7. Create a timeline for a communication plan refresh
Communication plans must evolve with changing customer preferences and market shifts. Establish a regular schedule — such as quarterly — for reviewing and updating your plan, and adjust the frequency as needed. Additionally, define specific refresh triggers, such as significant market changes, shifts in customer behavior, internal organizational updates, or crises.
Incorporate feedback mechanisms, including customer surveys, employee insights, and market research, to guide these updates. Be sure to allocate resources, such as time and budget, for these refreshes, and implement version control to track updates and ensure all stakeholders are working with the latest version of the plan.
Consider unexpected challenges or changes in circumstances, adding a buffer period to accommodate adjustments.
8. Determine what success looks like and how to measure it
To assess the efficiency and success of your communication plan, refer back to your business objectives and communication goals. Identify the necessary data to gather for comparison against these goals and objectives using quantitative and qualitative data. Here are a few examples:
| Quantitative Data | Qualitative Data |
| 🔹 Revenue 🔹 New customers 🔹 Customer churn rate 🔹 Website metrics 🔹 Social media metrics | 🔹 Customer engagement 🔹 Customer service issues 🔹 Reviews and testimonials 🔹 Brand perception 🔹 Feedback from partners |
Establish current values for all quantitative metrics as your baseline. Finally, define the desired growth trajectory based on your objectives and break it down into monthly and quarterly milestones.
9. Share your communication plan
To deliver your message, you can share your communication plan internally via email, live chat, mobile app, or in-person team meetings. Ensure that all employees, including new hires, are aware of its location and understand how it serves them. This document must live on a shared platform, easily accessible to all staff, whether it’s hosted on Google Drive, your project management tool, or another platform.
Prevent confusion by making sure it’s clear which version is current by including details like:
- Last update date
- Which parts are new or updated from the previous version
Assign a project manager to distribute the communication plan upon its initial rollout and after each update. Team leads or managers are often best suited for this role, as they can also provide support and address any questions or feedback.
Leverage tools and technology that can automate or streamline communication processes, such as email marketing platforms, project management software, or intranet systems.
10. Test and analyze your results
Once your communication plan is live, continuously track, test, and analyze the results to measure its effectiveness. Choose relevant and actionable metrics based on your objectives to track performance and evaluate whether you achieved the communication objectives.
You should create detailed reports for marketing and stakeholders to showcase successes and identify areas for improvement. Regularly refining your strategy helps set more realistic goals for future efforts.
Use conversational analytics software to collect data from customer interactions to deliver meaningful insights in real time.
Communication Plan Example
Explaining a communication plan is one thing, but seeing one in action is another. Check out this example communication plan and create your own using our downloadable template below.
Communication Plan Template
Now that you’re familiar with an effective communication strategy, we’ve made it easy to get started. Download our comms plan template and take the first step on your successful communication action plan journey.
👉 Download the communications plan templates: PDF and Google Sheets
| How to use the communication plan template | |
| Audience | List who will be receiving the communication, such as customers, employees, leads, management, etc. |
| Deliverable | Define the type of communication, such as newsletter, press release, internal meeting announcement, etc. |
| Description | Briefly explain the purpose of the deliverable, such as providing updates, making announcements, or delivering helpful information. |
| Communication channel | List how you will deliver the message, such as email, phone, or social media. |
| Communication frequency | Explain how often the communication will need to go out, such as monthly, weekly, quarterly, etc. |
| Delivery date or time | Define the delivery date or time of the communication, like First day or each month or 8:00 am every Monday. |
| Key points | List any helpful notes to clarify the communication or messaging. |
| Owner | Document the employee who leads the particular communication. |
Where Communications Plans Fall Short
Traditional communication plans often fall short because they’re overly focused on creating and disseminating content instead of the communication strategy and its impact on business goals. This can lead to a disconnect between the plan and the organization’s actual needs, resulting in wasted resources and missed opportunities.
You can fix this.
A communication plan is only as good as its execution. Even the most carefully crafted plan will fail if you don’t implement it effectively. This requires a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved, as well as the necessary resources and support.
Get early stakeholder buy-in throughout the organization to anticipate and overcome objections. This will help to ensure that the communication plan aligns with the company’s strategy and that everyone is committed to its success. Involving stakeholders early on makes identifying and addressing potential risks before they become major problems possible.
Enhance Business Communications With Nextiva
By following our step-by-step communication plan guide, you’ll leave nothing to chance. The result is an action plan that can translate your brand into the right messages for your target audiences.
Let’s quickly recap how to write a good communication plan:
🔎 Review current communication methods
🚀 Set business objectives and SMART goals
🎯 Understand your target audience
💬 Craft key messages per audience
📞 Select communication channels
✏️ Assign roles to stakeholders
📅 Schedule plan refreshes
📈 Define success metrics
📣 Share the plan
📊 Test and analyze results
Download our free template that gives you an incredible strategic communications plan.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of NICE Satmetrix, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
