From story to strategy: what to consider in preparing your communications plan

Your organisation has got something to talk about.

You might have a young and growing company, ready to introduce more clients to your game-changing solutions. You might be launching a new product or service, or taking the leap into an unfamiliar marketplace. You might have a major partnership to discuss or a good cause to get behind. 

Whatever it is you need to say, getting your voice out there is only part of the challenge. The media ecosystem is big, crowded and noisy, and it takes clarity and precision to cut through. 

The right communications strategy is essential to your success: creating a path that leads your message to the people who need to hear it. Every company and campaign will have different needs but there are a few factors to consider before getting started. 

Establishing narrative

Any good communications strategy begins with a good story. 

And a good story helps to answer some fundamental questions. Who are you? What do you do? What problems can you solve and how? Why does it matter?

In business communications, it catalyses the connection with your target audience – who can more easily grasp your value to them – and can help define your USP. 

So the strategy planning period is a good chance to sharpen your organisation’s story further. 

Setting goals

A communications strategy is a framework for delivering success, so you have to begin with a firm understanding of what success would mean. 

Much of that will depend on the needs of your business or organisation. You may want to cast your net wide and build top-line brand awareness, educate potential customers about new products and services, or target very specific segments of your audience to convert awareness into action. 

And you need to be just as clear on your aims for a shorter-term campaign or a partnership. 

Outlining these expectations will make it easier to choose the right activities, eliminate distractions and channel resources in the right direction. It will also help you to work out what to measure when assessing the effectiveness of your approach. 

Identifying audiences

Whatever its ambitions, any communications strategy is going to be addressing certain audiences above others. 

Those could be existing or prospective customers, or industry leaders and CEOs. They could be the decision-makers who will commit to paying for your product, or potential champions who will speak to your credibility and innovative thinking.  

In sport and entertainment, you might need to consider multiple audiences at the same time. As a sponsor, for example, you may be making a B2B play but you will need to recognise your partner’s need – as a rights holder, team or promoter – to demonstrate value to their fanbase. Or you might be directly supporting a community or initiative in sport or culture in a way that communicates your core values back to your primary commercial audience. 

Finding the right channels

Once you have a strong sense of your audience, you can develop plans for where to reach them. 

When it comes to media distribution, there are a few layers to bear in mind. Budgets and in-house resources will also affect your capacity to produce and target content. 

Internal channels like newsletters and social media can be a profitable route to an engaged audience, while the right value-adding content can also grow the reach of those outlets. 

Building and leveraging relationships with third-party media is often critical. You will need to identify the right outlets for your communications aims – across generalist, specialist and trade media, as well as the influencer space and other independent voices – and have a keen sense of what is newsworthy or important to their communities.  

And if the money is there, paid media can be a powerful tool: media partnerships, advertising, and boosts or targeted posts on social platforms will amplify your message with careful planning. 

Maximising assets

With so many organisations vying for attention, it pays to be able to make a distinctive, compelling and purposeful impression. 

As well as crafting an effective message, it is worth thinking about who can best convey it and how you can give additional value to the audience receiving it. 

Your organisation may have access to unique data and insights that attract prospective audiences and generate coverage. You may have great existing partnerships that can take your brand into the places it needs to go. Or you may have charismatic and well-informed leaders and specialists, who are outstanding candidates for interview in features, podcasts, broadcasts and events, or have an exceptional ability to provide context on breaking news.

Setting clear plans

After the planning, comes the doing. To properly execute any communications strategy, your team and partners will need to understand who is responsible for what and when.  

It is vital to have key information lined up before launch, such as timelines, dates, budgets, internal channels, and accountability structures. 

And you need mechanisms in place to make changes when things aren’t working. To adapt a line from Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, but not everyone has to head straight to the canvas.

Refining and reacting

A live communications strategy should be just that: alive. 

The best strategies leave room to respond to fresh challenges and opportunities – from issues within the business or marketplace to a sudden opening for coverage or interviews. 

And they also offer something to build from. It is always important to absorb feedback wherever you find it – from audiences, clients, partners and the media – and work that back into even more effective communications in the future.

Trippant champions people and storytelling to grow businesses across sport, entertainment and experience. If you want to see what we can do for you, connect with us here.

Generative artificial intelligence is about to transform sports and entertainment media but that is only making communications fundamentals – like trust, great storytelling and personal connection – more important.

By Tom Scott

There are moments when the future suddenly feels a lot closer than it used to. 

A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI gave the world its first glimpse of Sora: a text-to-video generator which seems like another quantum leap forward in that space. 

In the year or so since the explosive arrival of ChatGPT, we’ve all had to accelerate our thinking on the adoption of generative AI: businesses, regulators and content creators are reviewing timelines on a near constant basis. 

That much is certainly true for those of us in PR and media. Big tech is always serving us reminders to be wary of hype cycles but one way or another, this really is going to change how we communicate. It will revolutionise industries and workflows, bringing pain and possibility, automating some functions and jobs while maybe inspiring brand-new ones. 

That dawning reality has been central to our outlook at Trippant over the past 18 months, through a period where we’ve rebranded and retooled to offer truly valuable communications services to the sport, entertainment and experience industries. 

All of this has led to an important realisation: the better AI gets at producing content, the more content is going to exist. Some of it will be great; a lot will be derivative, insubstantial or disposable. And there is already a lot of content out there – great torrents unleashed in the hope that social media algorithms carry it where it needs to go. 

In that context, quality counts. So does your intent. Amid all the noise, it has never been more important to understand the message you are trying to get across, who you are trying to reach, and why. 

It really comes back to some of the fundamentals of communication: building trust, connecting to people, and telling great stories. 

The new AI toolkit

Many businesses, of course, are already using AI-powered media tools all the time, in ways that have transformed their output. At Trippant, we’ve discovered accessible solutions for everything from transcription to sound engineering to video editing and subtitling. 

New things are quickly becoming possible at scale. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported on a couple of projects from advertising giants Publicis and WPP. 

Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun sent personalised New Year’s video messages to each of the agency’s 100,000 staff. In an Indian campaign for Cadbury’s, WPP created videos for thousands of stores across the country – all using regional languages and details – where Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan encouraged consumers to shop locally. 

Neither of those initiatives would be feasible without generative AI and – allowing for ethical due diligence – it is not hard to envisage similar concepts being applied in the sports industry. 

You could imagine, for example, AI-generated ‘appearances’ by brand ambassadors across multiple networks and territories. Or personalised birthday greetings for young fans from a football club’s captain or star player. Through more sophisticated distribution, content can be further refined and targeted at the right audience.  

WSC Sports – a Trippant client – has spent years evolving its AI-powered platform to help partners build and distribute automated highlights and video packages, enabling more potent fan engagement, relieving pressure on content teams and freeing up resources for deeper storytelling. It is now experimenting with generative AI to produce localised commentary, bespoke music and even ‘what if’ videos – replays where that crucial shot hits the net instead of the post or the rim. 

The potential of this is incredibly exciting. Yet that can only be realised through thoughtful and judicious execution.

People, networks and fandom

A lot of communications strategy comes down to a few simple questions. 

What are you trying to say? When and where will you say it? And who is going to say it for you?

Communication is about discipline. In 21st century media – particularly in the age of AI-generated content – you can insert yourself into any more or less any conversation. But that hardly means you should. Doing so, in fact, puts you on a very short path to irrelevance. 

And communication is also about authenticity. The right spokesperson is not just compelling, carrying a message with clarity and conviction – they also get that the person receiving that message is on the more important side of the conversation. 

Whatever means you use to piece it together, having a meaningful picture of your target audience remains vital. So does properly defining your role in their world.

In other words, a B2B service provider must be able to explain how their product will address pain points that limit the horizons of prospective clients. Anyone representing a sports team – whether from the boardroom or the dressing room – needs to recognise the values and the history they are protecting, not to mention the impact their actions and performance can have.

Meanwhile, you cannot underestimate the value of human connection. From TikTok to Taylor Swift, we are all gravitating towards people and personalities in a crowded media ecosystem. Honest, open discussions about challenges and motivations can bring others on to the same wavelength. 

The storytelling baseline

Stories are fundamental to how we understand each other. They generate empathy, organise information, and access mental patterns that aid memory and trigger emotional responses. And they predate most media technologies by thousands of years.

As Donald Miller writes in Building A Story Brand: “Story formulas reveal a well-worn path in the human brain and if we want to stay in business, we need to follow that path.”

Every successful organisation tells good stories: about what they do, about why they do it, and about what they can do for you. Most of them really nail two stories in particular: one about themselves, and one about their customers, audiences or supporters. 

The story of a company or a club is about motivation and values. The story of their customer or fan is about solving problems and enriching lives. Taken together, these form a superb basis for all other communication and creative expression. 

In the sports industry, we’re lucky enough to deal in moments that matter to people – the experiences that become part of millions of personal stories.  

That is an extraordinary and powerful thing, whatever technology has in store.

Tom Scott is the founder and CEO of Trippant, a communications consultancy championing people and storytelling across sport, entertainment and experience. If you want to see what we can do for you, connect with us here.