7 Steps: Building Your Corporate Communications Strategy for 2026
If you are working in the Corporate Communications Field, then you must be in the process of building up your communications strategy at around this time. And these are 7 steps to share to ensure that your communications strategy is truly strategic and tailored to deliver tangible impact and results that matter to the organization and/or business.
Why Strategy Matters
A strategy is structured, purposeful, takes a logical approach – operates step by step and ensures that all the right questions are asked, considered and addressed in the approach that is taken to deliver an initiative, program, agenda or mission. It works from objective to outcomes – takes a problem-solving approach and is designed to ensure that impact is achieved in a measurable, visible and business-relevant terms.
As communications professionals, it is important to understand that the role and value of the team is measured against how much we are able to deliver value that is tangible and relevant to the business. Value that enables the business and/or the organization to create new value (brand and marketing), protect existing value/assets (reputation management), mitigate risk (crisis or issues management) etc
7 Basic Steps to Develop an Effective Corporate Communications Strategy and Plan for 2026
1. Business Objectives
The starting point is to ask the question: What is the business trying to achieve? This is very important because your communications strategy should be designed to enable and support the business or institution to fulfil its mission and achieve its agenda. This requires communications professionals to work to understand what the business does. i.e. how it makes money or loses money. We must know what the key objectives, activities, relationships, regulations, projects, risks etc are. We should also take interest in developments in the industry and sector and also be actively monitoring communications and business practises of key players and competitors in the sector.
2. Desired business/organizational outcomes
Next question to ask is What does success look like? This enables communications leaders and professionals to understand what to focus on. The goal of strategic communications is to ensure that we are supporting with messages, relationships and enabling clarity; garnering support; harnessing goodwill and helping to create support for the business to operate effectively.
Every communications team must understand the priorities for each new year and adapt its strategy accordingly. It is lazy practise to continue to roll-over plans rather than doing the hard work to challenge and discuss relevance and value in light of current realities.
- The communications priorities and objectives for 2026 must be guided by the feedback from the conversation with the leaders about what the overarching business priorities are.
3. Key stakeholders
The next question is to confirm who the key stakeholders are with regard to the business priorities for the year. Who is most important within the organization (internal stakeholders) and outside (external stakeholders). What do you know about them? What is their level of interest and influence with regard to the mission, agenda that needs to be fulfilled. Assess in terms of High, Medium and Low and categorize accordingly. Stakeholder identification, mapping and profiling is an essential aspect of strategic communications. It is important to do this as part of the strategy development process as it enables you to determine who you are targeting with your communications and engagement, when and why.
4. Audiences
The next step is to understand who your audience is for different programs, projects, activities, iniatives, products, services and interventions. Stakeholders are different from audiences. Stakeholders are managed closely with a combination of relationship management, communications and close proximity engagement. Audiences are managed primarily through communications and distanced engagement. The Corporate Communications team needs to ensure that it strikes the right balance between communicating with audiences and stakeholder on specific issues.
On issues of high public interest, audience communication and online engagement needs to be very high – with offline stakeholder engagement supporting as well. Communications to both must be consistent, factual, credible and clear. There should be no contradition in what is said to one group or another. However, the messaging to some categories of stakeholders would be more detailed and would include confidential information where necessary.
Communications team also needs to work with business teams to ensure that the high-level external messaging is consistent with the business updates to key stakeholder in private sessions.
5. Message Strategy
The next step is to determine what the message strategy for the year 2026 should be bearing in mind all the information gathered above. What does the organization need to SAY and DO to achieve its objectives and outcomes for 2026? What should the business be communicating internally to employees and externally on public platforms and in business platforms and events? What does the business want the stakeholders to KNOW, FEEL and DO. This determines the content and strategy of the messaging for 2026. All of this must be detailed in the plan.
6. Communications Plan
The next step is to begin to craft out the details. The following questions need to be addressed:
- What is the best platform to communicate the messages?
- How should the content be developed and disseminated?
- What is the frequency and timing?
All of this should be on a high-level plan – showing how the proposed actions fit in with the business objectives identified in Step 1.
7. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
This is the most important aspect of your 2026 Communications Strategy & Plan. Developing KPIs that measure what matters. At SA&A, we believe in taking a tailored approach to developing your KPIs. We hardly ever use standard KPIs because they are not relevant to every context and tend to measure activity and not outcomes.
It is important to identify the actions that communications can make a difference in terms of awareness, mitigation, correction, protection etc and ensure that you have a metric that quantifies the current reality and then put in place a tracking mechanism that will show the impact of your communications. The following are a few examples of KPIs
- Media mentions if it is a campaign;
- Reduction of negative messaging if it is an issue;
- De-escalation of misinformation if in response to a malicious campaign – metrics showing de-escalation using AI tools. (shift to positive messaging etc)
- Enrolment for an event or initiative
- Behavioural change or compliance after a communications campaign e.g. signing up for an app; concluding a training; better resumption at work; increased productivity e.g – internal communications culture change campaign
How to Quantify the Impact of Your Communication
- Identify a problem that can be solved with communication or a business or strategic initiative that requires communications to get support, ownership or secure buy-in e.g. listing on the stock exchange
- Determine the areas where communications can make a difference in terms of awareness creation, inspiration or activating a definitive call-to-action.
- Measure the currently reality in numbers
- Determine the change metric that would be measured and agree with management and business leadership
- Put in place a tracking mechanism to measure progress on the identified change metric etc. getting people to sign up to buy shares in our company. (measure campaign success; the spike in registrations after the launch etc; inquiries to the website: if the listing investment target is achieved, it would be obvious that communications was an enabler. But you can only claim this success if you have put in place the structure to identify, measure, track and report as required
*The final step is to implement, monitor, receive feedback and continuously improve the process. Take the learnings and share. Recognize and report success when achieved.
We teach this in detail in our Strategic Communications Course (see details below)
ola Abulu & Associates (SA&A) is a strategy and communications consulting and training firm focused on enabling businesses, brands and organizations to achieve their desired objectives through strategic communications, organizational effectiveness and reputation risk management. Join us in class on February, 2026 for the SA&A CPDSO-Accredited Strategic Communications Course scheduled to hold online via ZOOM from 9am – 4pm WAT.
Register here to join us in class:
If you prefer to learn at pace and on your own time – you may wish to enrol for the same course available on our e-learning platform learn.
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more on how to develop a strategic communications plan.