Corporate communications are a vast area in a business. It can be defined as the practice of developing, cultivating, and maintaining a corporate identity or brand image. Communication for most businesses is critical in order to get customer’s and prospects’ attention.

Effective communication is crucial if you want to sell a product or a service. Corporate communications is also needed to get messages between management and employees across. Effective corporate communications between your teams can make your organisation more efficient and save you millions of dollars.

Corporate communications also extend to communication with key stakeholders, the media as well as government agencies. The form of corporate communication you will choose will depend on the message you want to get across and the audience. Corporate communications can consist of written, spoken, and non-spoken word.

In many businesses, a lot of the work done is linked to communication. There are different communication department without the organisation that focus on different parts of the job. Of course, this depends on the size of your company. Some organisations have a dedicated media and public relations (PR) department that is dedicated to the communication with the general public. The activities of the PR communication team would include things like news conference organisation, product launches, working on press releases and managing all press coverage regarding the company.

In very big organisations, a special team in the PR team would be responsible for crisis communication. During a crisis, a company needs to be able to react through their communication. This type of corporate communication needs to be well thought after since this has the potential to damage the reputation of the company. These crisis scenarios will often involve communication with the public which is why it’s often associated with the PR team.

Corporate communications also incorporate customer communications and marketing. The overall communication strategy of a business is often blurred with marketing since overall communication often impacts the marketing strategy. A corporate communication department will therefore be involved in the marketing tasks such as Email, brochures, website, and social media.

A big part of your communication should also be pointed inwards. Internal communications is critical in order to have all employees in your organisation to be informed about the initiatives of the company, the goals and the accomplishments. Internal communications will often involve pushing out emails to employees about company news and initiatives, sharing useful employee resources; create employee handbooks or flyers and managing all internal communication tools: blogs, newsletters, and others.

Your corporate communications department needs dedicated skills and training in order to be successful. The first skill your team needs is good writing skills. Communication activities require a lot of copy writing in various formats, from emails and memos, to blog posts and articles, to website copy, social media posts, printed collateral, and more. Being able to express your company’s intentions and goals in a written form is important.

When considering your PR or product launch efforts, presentation skills are important. The way your employees interact with the public represents your business and your brand. The ability to clearly present your ideas is therefore critical when working in corporate communication. Your organisation also needs to be able to communicate with data.

Data is important to inform your communication and your marketing activities. You also need to be skilful at using the data to tell stories. Finally, corporate communications need to be technical savvy.

Communication is constantly shaped by developments in technology with different tools that are used to communicate with customers: chatbots, virtual reality, blockchain and others.

Especially if you consider your internal communication strategy switching to digital tools makes sense. The current situation has pushed employees to work remotely from home which pushed the need to increase team collaboration thanks to digital tools such as: teleconferencing, web conferencing and video conferencing.

Having a reliable partner that ensures your teams can collaborate efficiently is critical. You want a provider that will be reliable in delivering those services. Even in your PR efforts, you might want to switch online in order to reach people at home or stakeholders worldwide. Webinars are the perfect digital alternative to your physical PR press conferences.

Product launches can also be done remotely thanks to a webinar provider. This can help you reach customers in a new and easy way. Webinars also make sense for your investor relations strategy by delivering digital events directly to those investors.