By Sarah Dick, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Inizio Evoke Comms
In today's hyper-exposed media and comms environment, strategic thinking isn’t just a buzzword or something you “know when you see it.” It’s a learnable, teachable skill set we use to help clients find advantage amid uncertainty. As legendary ad agency founder David Ogilvy once said, “The essence of strategy is sacrifice.” Strategists are a bit like Google Maps, recommending which paths to take and which to set aside.
In health communications, my corner of the marketing field, our shifting matrix of variables includes clients’ communication goals, business and marketing objectives, patients’ needs, media landscapes across mainstream, health trade, medical and scientific media, social media conversation clusters, target audience personas, and more.
As Senior Vice President, Strategy at Inizio Evoke Comms, I’m responsible for advancing our strategy offering across all client programs and new business opportunities. In practice, that often means helping our teams’ existing strategic brilliance to shine. Here are some more things “strategy” means in our world of health PR and comms:
Comms strategy is based on, but different from, ad strategy and planning: we borrow from the advertising and marketing tradition. We also work hard to train our intuition with evidence, as we may need to turn around counsel on a dime. We often begin our careers as generalists, and follow a less linear process than sister disciplines.
Like all strategy, health comms strategy relies on good insights: we use many layers of evidence such as market research, media trends, regulatory guidelines, clinical trial data across categories, predictions based on past news cycles, cultural observations, audience qualitative and quantitative data, medical best practices, and more.
Comms success has many measures: ultimately, we try to help our clients improve patients’ lives in addition to bottom lines. Success measures and metrics should be aligned at the beginning of a program and a baseline should be set before work begins.
What role do Comms Strategists play?
There is no perfect strategy, but a safe place to start is a tried-and-tested model. At Inizio Evoke Comms, we’ve used our collective decades of expertise to tailor classic marketing strategy frameworks specifically for communications, and developed custom models to better serve our clients’ needs. We love partnering with clients to shape planning and measurement frameworks just for them.
If you would like to talk more about how our approach to communications strategy can help your business, get in touch.