Internal Communication
Internal communication such as pitching a project to management.Present business case to stakeholders to gain feedback and possible approval for project budget. Measurement: stakeholder feedback.
External Communication
Communicating to external stakeholders such as users, customers, partners, regulators and industry insiders.Deliver talks at 2-3 industry conferences to drive adoption of our machine learning platform. Target: 50% growth in users this year.
Responsiveness
The speed of your communication.Respond to customer inquiries within an hour during business hours.
Inform
The most basic type of communication goal is to inform your target audience. For example, an HR team with a goal to inform an entire organization of a new policy.Communicate new job grades to the entire organization to gain 90% awareness of the policy.
Persuade
Persuasion is the goal to change an audience's mind about something. If 40% of your organization thinks a strategy is irrational, you might have a goal to change people's opinions.Sell the customer service strategy to achieve 70% buy-in from customer service reps as measured with an anonymous survey.
Influence
Influence is communication that changes an individual's actions. For example, a pitch of a business plan that achieves a budget approval.Develop and deliver a business plan for the data center redesign initiative to gain budget approvals of $3.1 million.
Emotion
Seeking to invoke an emotional response from an audience. This can include elements of humor, entertainment, wonder or empathy.Develop a promotional video that 95% of the target audience find entertaining and engaging.
Perceptions
Perceptions are elements that aren't strong ideas or emotions but nonetheless influence behavior.The new icon must be perceived as friendly by at least 90% of the target audience.
Talent
Communication goals may be personal development targets such as an employee who wants to become a better listener or public speaker. This can be measured as successful completion of training or communication initiatives.Gain public speaking experience by delivering at least 3 presentations to audiences.
Knowledge Development
Developing new knowledge. For example, a workshop that allows customer service representatives to share difficult challenges they faced to develop new approaches based on these experiences.Develop a set of customer service principles by sharing experiences and identifying techniques that have worked in the past to deal with difficult service scenarios.
Knowledge Capture
Reducing knowledge waste by capturing existing knowledge as communications such as documents, media and presentations.Capture lessons learned for 100% of large projects to reuse effective approaches and avoid repeating mistakes.
Knowledge Use
Knowledge such as documents and media often sit on a shelf and go mostly unused. Knowledge use goals are measurements of how much the communications you produce are actually used.Achieve high usage of the employee manual with at least 90% of employees using the document in a calendar year.
Knowledge Transfer
A goal to transfer knowledge. This implies that you give people new abilities and insights as opposed to simply informing them. For example, an employee who transfers knowledge to a new hire before taking a year off.Transfer 100% of knowledge that is required to administer our analytics platforms. This will be measured with a checklist of required knowledge and the agreement of the new employee that each item has been sufficiently explained.
Education & Training
Education and training can go beyond knowledge transfer to develop new talents in people. For example, mastery education that transfers difficult to acquire tacit knowledge such as the ability to play the piano well.Pass Grade 8 piano certification with distinction.
Experience
Targets for the overall experience of a communication. For example, customer satisfaction with a training session.Achieve 90% participant satisfaction with the workshop.
Cost
Certain types of communication are costly such as a marketing campaign that may spend large sums on advertising. This may be measured with cost metrics such as customer acquisition cost.Achieve a 10% reduction in customer acquisition cost.
Productivity
Productivity and time management related objectives such as reducing the overhead of meetings.Reduce time consumed by project meetings by 15% with more structured meeting formats.
Transparency
Transparency is the practice of being open and honest with stakeholders. For example, an information technology company with a goal to communicate to customers exactly how their data is used and managed.Communicate how data is used to customers, regulators and partners to achieve 100% transparency.
Compliance
Compliance related goals such as a goal to communicate safety information to airline passengers.A safety demonstration will be performed on 100% of flights.
Engagement
Measurements of how engaged an audience is with your communications. For example, the number of questions you get after a presentation or the average length of time a visitor watches a promotional video.Achieve average view time of 2 minutes.
Brand Recognition
Customers are more likely to buy brands they recognize. As such, marketing communication goals are often related to improving brand recognition.Improve brand recognition to 76% of target market.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness goes beyond recognition to target things the customer knows about your product. For example, top of mind is an brand awareness metric that measures the percentage of a target market that name your brand first when prompted with a product category such as "airlines."Achieve top of mind awareness of 20% for the category luxury hotels.
Brand Image
Brand image is how customers think and feel about a brand. For example, the percentage of a target market that think an airline is safe.Achieve 80% perception of safety.
Demand Generation
The amount that a communication increases demand for a product or service. For example, the revenue generated by coupons that are communicated to customers.Achieve $4 million sales from coupon redemptions.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete some desired action such as buying something or signing up for a loyalty card. This is a common way to measure marketing messages such as advertising.Achieve a 7% conversion rate.
Closing
Salespeople are often measured by their ability to close deals. The ability to close is a highly valued communication and interpersonal skill.Achieve a win rate of 30% of proposals.
Reach
Reach is the number of people that receive a message such as an advertisement.Reach 90% of the target market at least 3 times.
Types
The following are common types of communication goals.
Summary
Communication goals can include targets for the quality of your communication, process goals such as engaging an audience and target outcomes such as making a decision.
| Overview: Communication Goals | ||
Type | ||
Definition | Targets for communicating data, knowledge and emotion. | |
Related Concepts | ||
