Crafting a Successful Communications Strategy in Today’s Media Environment

Groups focused on Beltway advocacy should build their comms strategy around determining where they need to be present and then figuring out how to make that happen with the least amount of friction, according to Jake Wilkins who recently joined ROKK Solutions as an account director.

“Tailoring the message to where you need it to get to is the big goal and we need to spend more time focusing on tailoring it as opposed to creating it and amplifying it,” Wilkins told C&E.

After stints at the RNC and as a spokesperson at the Department of Agriculture, Wilkins joined the Cramer for Senate campaign in North Dakota and later became the senator’s Capitol Hill comms director after his 2018 win. That gave Wilkins some close-up perspective on traditional Beltway comms strategy when it comes to advocacy.

“I feel like traditionally, local to national has been a bottom-up stream. If you get a bunch of local news percolating, it becomes a regional story and then the AP picks it up and then it’s national. That used to be the order,” he said. “Now, we’re seeing it very much go top down. We’re seeing TV stations that are taking content from these groups like Sinclair and Nexstar and Gray, and companies like Axios.”

On the advocacy side, he’d encourage clients to target trade publications in DC to create a few links, then move on to more mainstream DC or New York outlets. Once there’s a significant amount of coverage, then a local outlet with limited bandwidth may feel the need to jump on the story.

But on the candidate side, Wilkins said look to Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia as a good example of a successful path that’s focused largely on local outlets.

“Youngkin wasn’t trying to do a lot of interviews on CNN about his DMV reform proposal. He was focused, he had his goals and he knew his intended audience and then he knew how to hit them,” Wilkins said. “That was these events he was doing, that was his focus on local media, and obviously he did a pretty good job.”