The modern process features advanced planning, international telecommunications, and dedicated global network assets.
It involves a strategic approach to planning, developing, and eventually executing communication campaigns in order to achieve specific goals and objectives.
[citation needed] It conveys deliberate messages through the most suitable media to the designated audiences at the appropriate time to contribute to and achieve the desired long-term effect.
[4] Strategic communication, sometimes known as public relations, is a conscious, planned, and ongoing effort made by organizations.
The goal is to create a receptive environment for improving cooperation, reducing conflict, and marketing products or services.
[7] Steve Tatham of the UK Defence Academy offers an alternative view of strategic communication.
[citation needed] Strategic communication provides a conceptual umbrella that enables organizations to integrate their disparate messaging efforts.
Strategic communicators aim to prevent contradictory and confusing messaging to different groups across all media platforms.
Mulhern (2009) states, ‘These changes mean that marketers are in a far more challenging competitive environment in attempting to fulfil customers wants and needs, while simultaneously seeking to develop long-term relationships.'
An approach that could be used to determine the current state of the objective, is to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
Success in this process requires diligent and continual analysis, which should be fed back into the planning and action stages.
Having a good understanding of the business issues will allow the organization to offer effective solutions that will help the objective.
Tailoring messages to specific stakeholder groups can increase their effectiveness since it perfectly demonstrates an understanding of their priorities and concerns.
[11] ‘Sustainability calls for a value chain approach, whereby firms need to take wider responsibility and collaborate with a range of stakeholders to ensure that unsustainable practices are addressed’.
The objectives are effective when using SMART goals: they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-sensitive.
Collectively decide which strategies and tactics are going to be pursued to provide a clear objective for the business.
Across the spectrum of missions and broadly covering all levels of involvement in a civil-military, comprehensive approach context, the function of strategic communication and its military tool for implementation – information operations – have evolved and are still under development, in particular concerning their exact delineation of responsibilities and the integration of non-military and non-coalition actors.