What is communications management? Four core elements and seven ways to choose your channels

Communication management is one of the key activities that helps businesses reach customers effectively, strengthen brand image, and drive revenue growth. To manage communications effectively, businesses need to build a suitable communication strategy, select the right channels, create quality content, and measure and evaluate results. In the article below, Kompa will help you gain a clearer understanding of communication management and how to build an effective strategy.

What is communication management?

Communication management (or media management) is the process of managing and directing the communication activities of a business, organization, or individual in order to attract public attention and engagement with their products and services. Communication management encompasses a range of activities such as communication planning, content creation, audience outreach, social media engagement management, advertising strategy development, and brand building. Common channels in communication management include social media, email marketing, online advertising, PR, and websites.

The goal of communication management is to bring a business or organization's products, services, or ideas to customers in the most effective way, helping to increase sales, build the brand, and earn customer trust.

The role of communication management for businesses

Communication management is an important factor that helps businesses reach customers more effectively and enhance their credibility and reputation. Specifically:

• Building the brand: Through communication campaigns, businesses build and develop their brand effectively.
• Increasing customer awareness: Communication activities help businesses reach customers more effectively and raise customer awareness of the company's products or services.
• Increasing interaction and communication with customers: Businesses can interact and communicate with customers more effectively through the right communication channels.
• Enhancing credibility and reputation: By creating effective communication strategies and engaging positively with customers, businesses can enhance their credibility and brand image.
• Finding opportunities to reach new customers: By building an optimized communication strategy for each channel, businesses have the opportunity to expand their pool of potential customers.

Communication management trends for businesses in 2023

Overall, communication management trends in 2023 will continue to focus on making greater use of new media in order to bring a business's products and brand to customers as effectively and conveniently as possible. Specifically:

• Greater use of video content: Video content is becoming an important communication medium, so businesses will focus on producing more videos to introduce products, advertise, and build their brand.
• Using AI technology and chatbots to engage with customers: AI technology is developing very rapidly and becoming a means for businesses to interact with customers automatically and more effectively. Chatbots will be used more widely to answer customers' frequently asked questions.

• Greater use of influencer marketing: Influencer marketing has become an important tool for building brands and advertising products. As a result, businesses will continue to look for suitable influencers to partner with and promote their products.
• Increased use of social media: Social media has become an important channel for businesses to showcase their products and build their brands. As a result, businesses will continue to increase their use of popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• Increased use of interactive content: Interactive content is a major trend in communications management. Businesses will create more interactive content to engage with customers and build their brands.

Are internal communications management and brand communications the same?

At first glance, internal communications and brand communications may appear to operate in much the same way. However, there are still differences between how brand communications and internal communications are managed. Below are the similarities and differences between the two management activities.

Similarities

A concrete plan with long-term objectives

Every communications initiative needs a clear, stage-by-stage plan and long-term objectives that it aims to achieve. A communications plan must be built on results, statistical data, and real-world empirical research. The plans developed must also include near-term projections (the results achievable after one month, three months, or six months) as well as a longer-term vision (whether a given service or product will need changes or improvements over the next two years to stay aligned with customers).

Internal communications management must also have a clear plan. However, the purpose internal communications aims for is communication between the business and its employees. A business should start by researching and assessing the current state of its internal working environment, employees' emotions and perceptions, and identifying which employee groups the message needs to reach. Assessing the overall internal situation makes it easier for the business to communicate with the right departments effectively.

The message must be authentic

Communications activities that convey information, product and service quality, achievements, growth rates, and sales performance will all be verified by customers, competitors, and the media. Businesses therefore should not pursue activities that convey false information or excessively burnish their reputation in order to generate profit. This is an important consideration in brand communications management.

Internal communications, much like brand communications, must always prioritize the authenticity of its information and messages. Employees need to understand the message being conveyed correctly. Employees are also a special kind of "customer" — they too have loyalty to the business, and they are capable of detecting any lack of transparency.

Differences

Communication channels

When it comes to the most common and most effective brand communication channels, mass media stands out. Mass media includes print and online newspapers, signage, brochures, catalogs, television channels, and more. Mass media has powerful influence and reach across the entire public, and can even directly shape public opinion and sentiment.

Internal communications do not rely on the mass-media channels used in brand communications; instead, they use email, the company website, internal information networks, announcements, bulletin boards, and so on. They are aimed primarily at the broad base of the company's employees. Game shows, speeches to the whole staff, opinion polls, discussions, and meetings are also common channels of internal communication within a business.

Target audience

As mentioned throughout this article, the most fundamental difference between internal communications management and brand communications lies in the audience the business wants to reach.

Internal communications management focuses on conveying messages to the company's employees. This is a four-way interaction: leadership to employees, employees to leadership, employees to employees, and employees to the business.

Brand communications targets loyal customers, potential customers, competitors, the press, and so on — all of these audiences are collectively referred to as the public. This is a three-way interaction: business to public, public to business, and public to public.

Four key factors in communications management

Building an effective communications strategy

To achieve the best results in communications management, a business needs to build a detailed, clearly defined communications strategy. This strategy must align with the company's business objectives and be carried out systematically.

Choosing the right communication channels

Communication channels such as social media, email marketing, online advertising, PR, and the company website each have their own advantages and limitations. A business needs to choose the channels that fit its objectives in order to achieve the greatest impact.

Creating quality content that engages readers

Content is a critical factor in communications management. A business needs to create quality content that engages readers in order to strengthen customer awareness of its products or services.

This content should provide useful information and solve the problems that users of the company's products or services are facing. It should use simple language and avoid technical jargon. It should also incorporate images and video to make it more vivid and appealing. You can use storytelling to convey the brand's message.

Measuring results and optimizing communications campaigns

To achieve the best results in communications management, a business needs to measure the performance of its communications campaigns and optimize them. When measuring a communications campaign, you need to set up data collection tools and the metrics you will use. If you want to measure website traffic, you can use Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Semrush, and similar tools. From there, you can track fluctuations in organic and paid visits over a given period to evaluate the effectiveness of the communications campaign.

Based on these results, you can optimize the campaign by adjusting it or strengthening certain communication channels in order to meet your communications objectives.

Common approaches to communications management

Communications management within the business

This is an activity aimed at building an effective working environment and driving business growth. In this process, businesses need to establish and maintain an internal information system, ensuring that information is conveyed between departments in a complete, consistent and accurate manner. In addition, businesses need to build a positive working environment that encourages internal communication on the basis of compliance with company regulations and policies.

Building communication management that engages with the press

This activity helps businesses build relationships with the press in order to promote and introduce their Brand to the public effectively. Businesses need to develop a suitable communication strategy and provide complete, accurate information to the press. By creating effective communication strategies, a business or organization can clearly explain negative information and rebuild its image and reputation.

Building an effective communication campaign

To build a strong communication campaign, businesses need to define their objectives, target customers and the appropriate communication channels. From there, businesses develop suitable content and messaging, optimized for each channel. Once the communication strategy has taken shape, businesses need to build a plan and publish content at the right time, ensuring the campaign runs continuously.

Finally, businesses need to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the communication campaign in order to make any necessary adjustments.

How to use communication management to drive business activity

Communication management is an important tool for driving a company's business activity. Businesses can use communication to boost their operations through the following:

• Creating brand awareness: Businesses can use communication to build their image and brand in the eyes of customers. Creating brand awareness helps businesses attract customer attention and increase sales.
• Increasing customer engagement: Communication management helps increase engagement with customers through social media channels, email marketing, websites and other channels. Greater engagement helps build customer connection and boost business activity.

• Creating compelling content will attract customers' attention. Content may include articles, images, videos or information about the company's products and services. Compelling content helps attract customers and increase sales.
• Improving searchability: Communication activities help improve a business's visibility on search engines such as Google. This makes it easier for customers to find the business and its products.
• Measuring and analyzing results: Communication management helps businesses measure and analyze the results of their communication activities. This allows businesses to adjust their communication strategy to achieve the best results and increase sales.

7 Tips for Choosing the Right Communication Channel

In an era of technological development, communication channels are becoming more advanced and information travels ever faster. This also creates difficulties for businesses, who face too many options when deciding which communication channel to use for their projects. Many businesses think they should spread their activities across every channel, but this also creates difficulties in communication management. This article will explore tips for choosing the right communication channel.

Business objectives

Each media platform offers businesses a different set of advantages. To choose the right media channel, a business first needs to define the objective of its communications strategy (building brand awareness, driving customer engagement, and so on). The objective of a communications management strategy usually has to be closely tied to the company's business goals. So as a business sets its communication objectives, it will gradually identify which platform is best suited to achieving them.

Available resources

Building a brand on a media channel takes a great deal of effort, time, money and brainpower. Businesses are constantly weighed down by creating content, scheduling and approving posts, deciding which features of a channel to use, and working out which time slots will capture the most customer attention. Another factor with a significant impact on a campaign is the resources the business already has:

• Has the business assembled or established a communications team yet? What are the hiring requirements? How is the work allocated?
• How does the communications team operate? Are there enough people to manage the main media channels?
• How much time does each channel require to build and manage? How long do new channels and new features take to learn and roll out across the entire communications team?
• Who makes up the production team? What are they responsible for?
• What is the minimum budget for each line item?

A business has to know what it is capable of within the budget it has set; otherwise, its operations and profits will suffer.

What types of content does the business already have (photos, videos, etc.)

Large businesses keep a library of content that can be used for posting on their media channels. Storing existing content and creating distinctive new content suited to the current market is the golden rule of content management across media channels. According to experts, the five most widely used content types on social media channels today are video, images, text (comments, replies, etc.), personal stories and live stream video. The type of content created and the way it is managed have a direct bearing on the choice of media channel.

Target customers

In some cases, customers turn up on channels that are not the business's main ones. Businesses can use Social Listening tools to find out whether potential customers are mentioning the brand on any other channels. From there, a business can work out how to establish a presence on the channels where its potential customers are concentrated. Applying market research and demographic research, and comparing the metrics of the main media channels, reinforces the data behind media channel decisions.

What industry the business operates in

Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are currently the three leading social media platforms in terms of traffic and usage. But that does not mean channels with that level of popularity and usage will suit a company's communications management strategy, which is why a business has to get to work researching and identifying the media channel that is right for it.

Researching the business's competitors

Understanding what your competitors are doing is an essential part of building your own business strategy. Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will win a hundred battles. Businesses constantly look for ways — and invest the time — to study their competitors' media channels:

• What kind of content do competitors publish on their media channels?
• Does that content deliver any real benefit to the competing businesses?
• Who is the published content aimed at, and which trends does it follow?
• How do competitors respond to customer questions and comments?

Social media channels are a "gold mine" of valuable information. Social Listening tools can extract the most valuable information — not only about competitors, but also about what customers are thinking. This in turn creates a competitive advantage for your business.

How will your business manage those media channels?

Choosing the right channels is hard, but managing them is no less of a challenge. An unsuitable management approach can leave your channels publishing information later than competitors do, or, worse, trigger a communications crisis caused by unclear posts or statements. Managing media channels is a heavy responsibility resting on the shoulders of communications staff, who often oversee not just one or two main channels but many additional ones that support them.

There are also plenty of options for managing a company's media channels. In practice, many businesses have chosen to turn to partners offering channel-management support solutions rather than handling everything in-house. In Vietnam today, there are many partners such as Kompa providing communications management solutions for large enterprises.

The qualities every communications professional needs

What does it take to manage communications well?

A communications manager is responsible for developing a company's overall image. The core elements of this role include:

• Understanding the market to identify where the brand can fit and grow
• Defining brand positioning and thinking strategically
• Conducting competitor analysis to gain a strategic market advantage
• Working with sales and marketing teams, public relations, content marketers and designers to inspire creative execution and develop campaigns aligned with the brand's image, vision and promise
• Practising sound brand image management to improve the brand's visibility and public perception

The goal of these communications management skills is to maintain brand integrity across every product line and communications activity, while continuously building positive brand perception among the target audience.

9 essential communications management skills

1. Collaboration and relationship management

Managing relationships, adapting to the organisational structure and fostering positive brand alignment internally are essential when you work across multiple departments and collaborate with different teams.

2. Strong communication skills

A good communications manager relies on strong communication skills and carefully crafted messaging.

Communicating strongly with customers also means listening to feedback you did not expect, and letting the customer's voice tell the brand story.

Think of Apple's "Shot on iPhone" collection on Instagram, which showcases content created by customers using its products.

3. Relentless customer focus

To meet customer expectations and drive growth, brand managers must adopt a customer-centric approach and actively participate in customer experience management efforts.

Businesses immerse themselves in customer-facing channels, listening and responding to conversations on social platforms and business review sites, while using customer feedback systems to gather actionable data.

4. Analytical Thinking and Creative Storytelling

Outstanding storytelling ability and strategic creative thinking are also qualities that brand managers are sought after for. You must be able to draw detailed insights from data and use that data to tell a story that makes your brand irresistible to customers.

Excellent writing and design skills are sufficient, but what is more essential is the ability to balance creativity and strategy while transitioning smoothly from research and facts to creative communication. Successful brand managers also think analytically to diversify engagement methods across the entire customer journey.

5. Technology and Social Media Literacy

The skills required today include social media literacy, as well as the ability to leverage digital marketing tools and technologies.

It is important to recognize that social media is now inherently intertwined with the customer journey.

The brand management team behind Spotify consistently delivers excellent examples of how to use social media to drive brand resonance. The streaming service's multichannel "Wrapped" campaign turned memes into billboards.

6. A Data-Driven Approach

Building a winning brand is not just about design aesthetics and world-class copywriting. One of the most important brand management skills is quantitative reasoning: the ability to measure, prove, and refine branding efforts based on data.

This means knowing how to produce in-depth brand assessments, dig into analytics, measure campaign performance, and continuously update competitive intelligence. If the market shifts, you can adapt and execute new strategies while still maintaining brand consistency.

7. Teamwork Skills

Communications managers need teamwork skills to interact and collaborate with colleagues, partners, and clients. This skill helps them build strong relationships and deliver effective communication solutions.

8. Keeping Pace with Market Trends

Communications professionals need the ability to keep pace with market trends in order to create communication strategies that fit the market's current and future conditions. This skill helps them adapt to change and compete in the business environment.

9. Foreign Language Proficiency

Communications managers need the ability to read, write, and speak English or another language fluently. This skill enables them to process information and interact with partners and clients, especially in an international business environment.

Elevate your business management with Kompa's solutions

One of the most prominent examples of applying these three types of tools to corporate communication management is Kompa. Kompa is a company that applies data technology (AI, machine learning) on a Big Data platform to deliver data analytics solutions and equip clients with valuable "insights" to optimize their business operations across many areas such as Marketing, Finance, Operations and other fields. Kompa partners with small, medium and large enterprises in Vietnam such as: Vingroup, Masterise Homes, Vinamilk, SSI, MB Bank, Tân Hiệp Phát, Shopee, Vietjet Air.

Kompa currently provides businesses with solutions such as:

• Social Listening: updating, monitoring and measuring
• Brand reputation management on social media
• Protecting the image rights of company leaders
• Measuring campaign effectiveness
• Strengthening brand connections within the community
• Other services

Conclusion

Communication management is a vital and indispensable part of every company's business operations. By using effective communication skills and tools, a communication manager can build a strong brand image, strengthen customer relationships and boost sales. At the same time, communication management also plays an important role in resolving issues related to a company's image, such as correcting misinformation or responding to online attacks.