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A Guide to Building an Internal Comms Content Strategy

An internal comms content strategy can be just as daunting to put together as and external one, especially if your reach spans various countries, cultures and even languages – internal critics are often perceived to be the most harsh.

But putting together a strategy for an internal comms website, blog or social media needn’t be a headache if you have the right team, the right skills, the right tools and the right attitude!

Since January 2017 we’ve been working with a great brand whose internal comms team deal with a huge region; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). We took the PPG People internal magazine online and launched the blog and social media channels with great success. – Read the case study here.

But the success has only come from working extremely hard with various members of the team across different countries and implementing processes of gaining interesting and valuable content.

To set up your own strategy you need to first look at ongoing initiatives that will always generate content throughout the year, these may include:

  • CSR programs – work with your CSR team to plot events that are planned for the year into your content calendar and gauge when information, images and video content will be available
  • Annual events – look at annual events of cultural significance that occur in the different regions you cover and research what activities are planned for these
  • Members of staff – create an open call for your members of staff to be involved in your content, with PPG, we created the Extra Mile campaign which celebrates members of staff and their achievements. Staff can either nominate themselves or their colleagues can put them forward for consideration
  • Internal awards – work with your HR team to plan content around internal recognition schemes and events or awards relevant to them
  • International days of celebration – in our calendar we consider days such as International Day of Charity, Literacy Day, World Water Day etc. you can then create an open call to your staff to find out if there are any activities or celebrations planned

The above points can help towards your annual plan, you then need to consider what you’re going to post on a day to day basis. 

It can help to create themed days, Monday Motivation, Tech Tuesday, Throwback Thursday etc. that way you will have inspiration for topics of conversation.

To plan out your content you need a tool that allows more than one member of the team to edit in real-time for a collaborative approach to planning. We started out with a mix of Google Docs and Google Calendars which were fine for one or two members of staff.

We then moved on to Trello which allows us to create a calendar that various members of staff can view, make comments on and add content to:

You’re also able to view the cards by what stage the content is at and you can add labels and notes to define where the content is going to be published:

You might also want to consider a sign off process. In some cases there may be sensitive information that you might not want on an outwards facing blog.

It’s best to define what type of story or theme that may be considered contentious, work out a process with your HR and management team that allows for swift approvals on content so there’s little friction in your strategy.

If you’d like to learn more about how Halston Marketing can help with digitalising your internal comms click here or get in touch to see how we can help create or refine your strategy.

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