Jessica Smith, co-founder and chief experience officer at SomX, shares her advice for getting the most out of your corporate communications strategy.

From global organisations to seed-stage startups, every business stands to benefit from cultivating strong relationships to, and within, their unique community of stakeholders.

Your community can be the powerhouse that inspires your progress, champions your mission and amplifies your message, but it’s also an organism that requires careful and considered effort to create, scale and maintain.

A well-crafted communications strategy is your greatest asset here. With the right intentions and creative comms execution, dynamic and sustainable communities can rapidly be established and supported - here is my advice on how you can get started.

Define your stakeholders and their needs

The richest communities are diverse and inclusive, with intersecting interests. Make space for your employees, customers and clients, partners, investors, shareholders, advisors and everyone who cares about what your business cares about.

As a first action, spend time mapping out how the needs of the different groups within your community differ and intersect, and how you are positioned in meeting these needs. This will help you understand what activations and messages will engage your stakeholders, which can be fed into the planning of your communications strategy.

Establish what value your business can deliver or create for those stakeholders

Delivering value to your stakeholders should be the foundation that any community is built upon. This value is what will draw people in and create a shared energy. There are generally three ways to deliver value: inspire, entertain, educate. You can do this by creating and sharing educational content, organising events, providing networking opportunities, mentoring, raising awareness of key issues, or providing support to members to achieve their own goals.

Offer something unique and engaging

Your stakeholders are likely time-poor and juggling competing demands on their attention. By offering them membership of a community that feels unique and that gives a sense of belonging, helping them to feel both listened to and important, you can rise above the noise. Ask yourself what you can do that no-one else can or is doing. Where can you put in that extra effort that will meet an unmet need?

By proactively seeking feedback, suggestions and two-way communication, you’re showing them that their opinions and ideas matter to you. Ultimately, you want to empower and support members of the community to play an active role in its growth and maintenance – encouraging participation and a degree of ownership is key to this.

Choose the right mix of communication channels

How are you going to speak to and with your community, and how will members interact with each other? This is a critical decision to make in the early stage of community building. As a general rule, I’d advise sticking to the communication platforms and channels that your stakeholders already use. Meeting people there is much easier and more effective than trying to pull people over to a new, unfamiliar channel.

This could be an online space, such as Slack, Medium, LinkedIn, TikTok, Substack or Discord; or it could be an offline space, such as meet-ups, conferences or organised or informal events. Also consider how you could leverage email, podcasts, press and media activity and influencer collaborations to speak directly to the people who your business values. 

Nail your brand voice

People want to build relationships with people, not businesses! When engaging with your community, ensure that your business’s voice is consistent, authentic and relatable across all channels. This is NOT an arena to sell or to advertise your product or service, and any obvious attempts to do this will damage the trust and authenticity of the relationships you’ve worked so hard to establish.  

Keep an eye on your success metrics  

Once you’ve decided how you’re going to evaluate the success of your community building endeavour, keep a close eye on the metrics of that success. This will help you to quickly spot what works and what doesn’t, so you can iterate and prevent any wasted time or effort. Metrics you might want to consider are: website traffic, social media engagement, podcast downloads, email sign ups and open rates, event attendance, forum activity and verbal feedback.

Community building is a communications challenge that rewards creativity and effort. Getting it off the ground can be tough (and takes time), but watching it take on a life of its own makes that effort feel very worthwhile. By focusing on communicating authentically and on delivering unique value, your business’s stakeholder community will soon flourish to become worth more than the sum of its parts.