Do I Need a Communications Consultant If Someone Already Handles Comms?
- Kim Fischer
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
"Do I need a communications consultant if someone already handles comms?" is usually asked by someone who's fairly sure the answer is no. They already have someone so why bring on a comms strategist? But what they usually have is someone executing tasks, and that is a different job.
I found that exact problem the moment I was brought on to help improve an organization's content. The first person I consulted was the head of comms. She turned out to be strictly PR: media relationships, placement, reputation management. Skilled at her job, and her job wasn't the missing piece.
Then there was the woman writing the founder's Substack. She'd learned the founder's voice well enough to get close, but still needed one-on-one time with the founder before every piece to actually get it right. And there was a social media team that followed the founder everywhere, capturing a strong, consistent message that filled her personal timeline.
Everyone at the organization had an idea of what they did, but they couldn't say it like the founder. That's because it had never been shared with anyone else. It lived in her head. People were creating content everywhere but there was no strategy, and no foundational materials employees could reference to learn what to say.
"Handling" Comms Usually Means Doing Tasks, Not Owning the Story
"Handling communications" is a phrase that covers a lot of different jobs, and most of them are about output: a press release, a social post, an email. None of that requires figuring out the organization's story or who's responsible for keeping it consistent.
That organization had three people producing content and zero people who owned the underlying story. Each one was good at their piece, but none of them knew what the organization was supposed to sound like. Heck, they didn't even really understand the goal of the content they were creating. It got some top of funnel attention, but no real leads.
A Content Producer and a Communications Strategist Are Not the Same Hire
A content producer executes. They write the post, manage the calendar, get the release out the door on time. That work matters, and most organizations genuinely need it.
A communications strategist does something upstream of that: decides what the organization's story is, why it matters, and how it should sound coming from anyone in the building, not just the founder. Without that person, your content producers are executing beautifully against no shared direction, which is how you end up with a founder's Substack, a social feed, and a press release that don't pull in leads.
Do I Need a Communications Consultant, or Just Better Use of the Person I Have?
Sometimes the answer really is the second one. If you have a strategist buried under content-production tasks, the fix might be redistributing the workload, not hiring outside help.
But if every person "handling" your communications is executing against their own read of what the company should sound like, with no shared foundation underneath any of it, a communications consultant can help define the story, so your team can create the tasks that lead to real outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between a communications manager and a communications strategist?
A communications manager typically executes: scheduling content, sending releases, managing day-to-day output. A communications strategist decides what the organization's story is and how it should be told consistently across every channel and every person. Communications manager vs strategist comes down to execution versus ownership, and most organizations have hired for the first without realizing they still need the second.
Can my marketing person also handle communications?
Sometimes, if they have the strategic training and the bandwidth. More often, marketing and communications get asked to do too much at once, and the strategic piece, deciding who should own messaging and what the story actually is, gets skipped in favor of whatever needs to go out that week.
Do I need a communications consultant if I already have someone in-house?
It depends on what that person is actually doing. If they're producing content well but no one has defined the organization's core story, you likely still need the strategic layer, even if you keep your in-house team for execution. In-house vs outsourced communications isn't an either-or question. Plenty of organizations need both.
What does a fractional CCO do that my current team can't?
A fractional CCO owns the strategy and accountability piece: the story, the consistency, the alignment across departments, at a senior level your in-house team may not have the bandwidth or mandate to take on. I've written more on that role specifically in "What Is a Fractional CCO? And Do You Need One?"
How do I know if our messaging is actually working, or just busy?
Ask three people in your organization, including someone outside leadership, to describe what the company does in one sentence. If you get three different answers, you have activity, not a strategy. Busy and working are not the same thing, and the difference between them is usually invisible until someone asks that question out loud.
About the Author
Kim Fischer is a strategic communications consultant and Fractional CCO with 16 years of experience in journalism and nearly a decade working with founders, executives, and leadership teams. She helps leaders understand how to talk about what they do, whether that means writing messaging, sharpening a pitch deck, or finding the story that was buried in the one they already had. She is based in Dallas-Fort Worth and works with clients across the country
Comments