Many of us have been faced with the reality of having invested valuable financial and human resources in the development of a brand and marketing strategy only to find ourselves with a threeinch PowerPoint document that was, for the most part, non-actionable. Undoubtedly, the insight and recommendations were well-founded, and perhaps even the higher-level implications to the organizational and operational structure were relevant. Best-laid intentions aside, far too often these monstrous strategy “decks” leave top-level executives (and project managers alike) shaking their heads wondering how their investment translates to measurable return-on-investment and what to do with it moving forward.

Intuitively, the best managers understand that someone within their organization needs to be paying attention to the strategic direction of their marketing efforts, ensuring the company has a clearly defined position in the marketplace and that each target audience understands the benefits of the product or service offered. Enlisting the help of an outside firm is invaluable to ensuring the perspective is objective and that it factors in consumer and market dynamics to help shape that view.

But those same managers also know that at the end of the day their company is in business to make money, and therefore someone also needs to be watching the bottom line and taking action to meet the sales numbers. For this too, companies often work with outside firms; advertising and marketing companies tapped to develop programs aimed at achieving specific marketing goals.The outside firm that creates the high-level strategy is often times not the same one hired to execute it, creating a gap between the theoretical and the practical that can be difficult to bridge and awkward to manage.

Whether you’re beginning a strategy project from its initial inception or attempting to bring the existing theoretical plan down to an actionable level, you can avoid the gap by developing a well-articulated, media-neutral communication strategy. Differing from either a highlevel brand strategy document or a traditional creative brief, communication strategy identifies each target audience touch-point in the decision-making process and maps it to key messages.The media-neutral strategy is designed specifically for implementation across all marketing communication tactics, including advertising, public relations, promotions, sales and interactive solutions, providing a foundation from which everyone can operate.

Additionally, a creative concept that transcends across all tactics allows the marketing budget to not only work harder, but smarter. It creates an accumulative effect of the core brand idea and most compelling point of difference. Developing one-off creative tactics may serve the short-term pressures of impending competitive threat but it does little to create a lasting impression in the consumers’ minds or to link a tactic today with another tomorrow.

Some tips to help bridge the gap and develop an actionable communication strategy:

ONE:
Begin with the end in mind.
In addition to defining the overall objectives of the project, it is also important to understand how the strategy will ultimately be manifested in communication tactics. Will it need to translate into an advertising campaign? A PR approach? A sales presentation or all of the above? Thinking this through from the beginning helps determine who has a vested interest in the overall project and allows the key stakeholders to be involved from the beginning.

TWO:
Identify all of the audiences. Including the internal ones.
There might be a primary audience responsible for buying your company’s product or service but they are likely not the only ones involved in the process. Far too often secondary audiences, such as key influencers, endusers and employees are overlooked and their needs not addressed. In a traditional distribution model many companies focus messaging exclusively to the reseller, ignoring the notion that at some point the ultimate user of the product or service has to feel compelled to make that purchase. And opportunities can be overlooked by not properly educating and engaging the entire staff on key messages being promoted. Employees are the best source of word-of-mouth marketing available.

THREE:
Map the sales cycle and decision-making process.
By mapping the logistical and emotional process the audience goes through in gathering information and making their decisions, opportunities can be identified to create messages catered to specific wants and needs throughout the cycle. Is the purchase decision made impulsively in conjunction with other purchases, implying a need to be top-of-mind with the consumer on a regular basis? Or is it planned and analyzed over time, and therefore communication needs to reach them when and where they seek information along the way?

FOUR:
What role does each communication tactic play in telling the story?
Some lend themselves better to one purpose or another because of their reach, the amount of real estate they offer for storytelling or their ability to offer visual imagery of a product or concept. Each audience may utilize or be exposed to a different set of communication tactics based on their decision-making process. Identifying the individual communication streams helps understand the role each tactic must play in ensuring the story is told in the most compelling way to inspire a decision in your favor. Additionally, it helps identify opportunities for new messaging avenues and minimizes the risk of putting too much emphasis on a single tactic to tell all.

FIVE:
Which communication messages are most appropriate for each possible tactic?
It’s all too easy to develop a single creative brief for an entire advertising campaign. It happens all the time.The risk is that you end up with creative that is either not best suited to its medium or the infamous kitchen sink concept, cramming the same amount of information into a 30 second TV spot that you would in a 60 second radio spot. Or cutting and pasting print ad copy into a direct mail piece. The audience doesn’t consume each medium in the same way, and therefore messaging should be crafted to accumulate the story across multiple touch-points: generate awareness, engage the audience, compel the sale. That’s quite a bit to expect from every tactic. It’s difficult to sell if you haven’t even generated awareness.And if you haven’t successfully differentiated your company within the category, your enticing promotional offer may be credited to your competition. A communication strategy takes each tactic and links the key messages based on that vehicle’s strengths.

SIX:
What is the brand thread/concept that links each tactic?
Even though each tactic should play to its respective strengths, somewhere there needs to exist a thread that connects the dots for the audience, making the idea bigger than just a sum of its tactical parts. A communication strategy lays the foundation for development of a media-neutral concept that embodies the overall brand strategy while linking it to a memorable idea.Whether you use a single, integrated source for all of your communication execution or a bevy of individual talent, a combination of a communication strategy and a conceptual brand thread allow everyone to work toward the same idea and makes management of the process a bit less territorial and complex.

SEVEN:
What are the specific objectives of each marketing communication vehicle?
In translating the communication strategy to individual plans and creative input briefs it’s important to identify the specific measurable goals of that portion of the program.Whereas the objective of a brand strategy project may be to develop a compelling and unique position for the company across all of its audiences, for a specific marketing communication program the objective may be to achieve a 110 percent return-on-investment. More specifically, print advertising may be used within that plan to generate awareness of the company and product, while direct mail targeted to the most predisposed audience may be responsible for generating 80 percent of sales needed to achieve that ROI. The more specific the goal, the more accountable the tactic.

EIGHT:
Refine the creative brief.
Nearly any creative communications firm will tell you that the more specific and refined the creative input document can be, the greater the likelihood for stronger creative output. A simplified message leads to a unified idea the consumer can more easily grasp and remember. A communication strategy that bridges the gap between a classically vague notion of “generating awareness” and “increasing sales by 10 percent among young, teen males” begins to disseminate responsibility for achieving goals across the program and ladders each tactical action back up to the brand position and promise.

The single biggest challenge in bridging the gap between that 50,000 foot perspective and the need to drive sales results at the 5,000 foot level isn’t in understanding that a disconnect exists between the two, but rather that there is hardly ever anyone dedicated specifically to managing that gap. We live in a time-crunched environment of crisis project management and increasing expectations for results. That doesn’t leave much room for strategic think-tanks and mid-level managers with an eye above and below them to bring it all together.

So until it becomes common to see employment listings seeking strategic gap-fill managers, the responsibility to bring these two perspectives together sits among those with feet on the top floor, as well as those with feet on the street. And leveraging your external resources more effectively by having them collaborate with one another and focus on what they do best is another way to ensure someone is paying attention to the nearly always-forgotten middle.