Industry: Manufacturing (Packaging)
Services Provided: Communications Audit, Strategy and Recommendations
Background
A regional manufacturing company with a growing presence across Southeast Asia approached us to assess and improve their corporate communications. While they had made notable progress in external marketing—particularly in social media reach and PR visibility—they were facing recurring internal challenges that hampered consistency and alignment.
The objective was clear: to create a more cohesive communications strategy that bridged internal and external messaging, involved key departments and delivered measurable outcomes.
The Challenge
While the company had invested in external branding, we discovered that internal communication systems were ad hoc, siloed and often reactive. This led to:
- Lack of clarity on who was responsible for communications
- Poor planning and last-minute content creation
- Inconsistent updates across markets, especially for their overseas operations
- Missed opportunities to gather on-the-ground stories
- Minimal cross-departmental input (e.g., from Sales, Marketing and Quality teams)
At the same time, there was growing pressure to improve content quality, grow digital visibility, and support regional expansion through storytelling and thought leadership.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) We Evaluated
To guide our strategy, we identified internal and external KPIs to track over time:
- Employee awareness and feedback
- Open, read and click rates for internal emails
- Employee advocacy (e.g. employees sharing brand content)
- Engagement levels from employees of all levels
- Media outreach and PR traction
- Speed and quality of crisis communications
What Worked Well
Despite the challenges, the company did achieve encouraging results in some areas:
- Increased social media followers and brand reach
- Improved searchability and findability online
- More favorable PR coverage than two years prior
- Growing awareness of the need to align internal processes with external marketing
What Needed Improvement
We pinpointed key pain points in their content and communications processes:
- No shared calendar or event planning process
- Poor visibility into internal happenings— they had no communications manager so no one was tasked to share news and events
- Roles and responsibilities were unclear across markets and teams (and communications is the first to suffer)
- Little to no structured content from departments like Sales or Quality who were busy with their own problems and operations
- Overreliance on reactive social media updates which doesn’t augur well for a growing company
- Lack of attention to their overseas team and market despite their strategic importance
Our Recommendations & Strategic Proposals
We focused on building proactive systems that the internal team could implement and sustain. Key proposals included:
- Shared Google Calendar: Centralized event and content calendar for all departments so that everyone would know what was happening across the company
- Content Pillars: Documented “buckets” of content themes to guide planning so no more reactive posts
- Video Management: Appoint the communications person to manage their Youtube channel and delete irrelevant or old videos
- Website Management: The same communications person to coordinate with their outsourced web team to update their website with news within 24 hours
- Quarterly Planning Framework: Replace one-off communications projects with quarterly planning sessions
- Internal Comms Guidelines: Develop a guide—but also clarify who would champion and enforce them (and hire a proper communications manager or at least a communications executive)
- Email Marketing Revisited: Reevaluate email as a valuable touchpoint especially for stakeholder updates
- Monthly Content Collection: The communications manager must schedule monthly site visits to the relevant managers to collect stories, photos and updates
- Cross-Department Involvement: Involve managers from key departments in story generation
- Visual Updates: Use more images to increase engagement and this means appointing one person per department to be the photographer of the department
- Industry News : The communications person must share global trends and insights relevant to the manufacturing sector with their internal teams
Outcomes & What’s Next
Following our recommendations, the client began shifting from a reactive, fragmented approach to one that emphasized structure, collaboration and story ownership.
Moving forward, we see even greater potential in:
- Developing a communications training module for department heads
- Creating localized content plans for each market they are in
- Establishing monthly meetings between internal teams and communications manager
What Can You Learn From This?
This case serves as a powerful reminder that internal communications is the foundation upon which all external messaging is built particularly for SME companies. SME companies usually forget about communications until it is too late (when bad news hit the company and there is no single communications person to manage the internal and external communications). No amount of PR or digital marketing can help if you don’t begin with internal communications.
Whether you’re a manufacturing firm or a service-based business, your communications strategy will only succeed when your people—and your systems—are in sync.