Why your comms channel strategy needs a backup plan
There are more ways than ever for a single channel to fail you, and not all of them are within your control.
A domain's sending reputation can be damaged by something as simple as a shared server picking up a bad name. An account can be compromised through a phishing attempt aimed at just one employee. A platform can change its algorithm, terms of service, pricing or ownership (read: X) overnight, meaning it's no longer a tenable option.
A provider can suffer an outage at the worst possible moment. And increasingly, cybersecurity incidents – targeted or random – can take a channel offline entirely, with no clear timeline for getting it back.
If you've spent years and thousands of dollars building up a single channel, you could be sitting on a serious vulnerability.
None of these scenarios are rare or dramatic. They're the ordinary cost of doing business in a digital world, and most communicators have a story, or know someone who does, about a channel going dark for reasons entirely outside their control.
Relying on a single channel for your entire communications strategy can leave you more exposed than it first appears.
The case for channel diversification
Most communicators already know the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" line. Yet still, in practice, email so often becomes the default and other channels get neglected until they're needed in a crisis, by which point it's often too late to build them from scratch.
With this in mind, it's worth considering the following points:
1. Map your single points of failure, not just your channels
Most teams can list their channels easily enough, but few have mapped what happens if one specific thing breaks, such as a login, a domain, a platform partnership or a key person's account.
Diversification isn't just about having multiple channels; it's about making sure no single failure takes out more than one of them at a time.
2. Owned doesn't automatically mean safe
The advice used to be "prioritise owned channels over rented ones" or, grow your email list over your social following. That's still broadly good advice, but a domain reputation issue or account compromise proves that even owned infrastructure has a dependency you don't fully control.
The real question isn't owned vs rented, it's: what's the blast radius if this one thing goes down? And are we prepared for the fall-out?
3. Warm channels before you need them
The channels that save you in a crisis are the ones that already have an audience and a rhythm – not the ones you turn to under pressure.
A LinkedIn newsletter or an industry partner's channel, for example, can take time to build credibility in, so the return on maintaining a modest presence now is disproportionate to the cost of starting from zero later.
Take the time to find where your audience are – including unexpected places like Reddit – and start seeding a genuine presence in these spaces. That means sharing content or starting conversations that add value to them, not just being there for the sake of it.
4. Dark social and communities are quietly becoming more valuable
As public reach on major platforms keeps declining due to things such as algorithm changes and pay-to-play feeds, a lot of genuine influence has moved into semi-private or more niche spaces, such as public Slack and Discord communities, Substack channels, alumni networks and industry association groups.
These audiences might be smaller, but they're usually high-trust, highly engaged and less exposed to the volatility of public platforms.
5. Don't ignore AI-mediated discovery
A growing share of people are finding information via AI search tools and chat assistants rather than clicking through a search results page or a social feed.
This is what's referred to as a 'zero-click search result', with various reports suggesting that anywhere between 60-80% of all searches now do not result in a web page click.
This means that AI search has now become a channel too, and many comms strategies haven't caught up to what this means for how content needs to be structured and where it needs to exist.
Start by asking a few AI tools the sorts of questions your audience would realistically ask about your organisation or industry, and see how you're represented, if at all.
From there, keep your key facts consistent across your website, LinkedIn and any other indexed sources, and structure new content with clear headings and direct answers to user queries near the top, since that's what these tools tend to draw from.
This is an emerging channel with no set playbook yet. The goal isn't to perfect it now, but not be caught flat-footed later.
6. Actually test your exposure
Most disaster recovery thinking in comms is theoretical until it's needed. Treat it like a fire drill: pick a channel, imagine it's gone and check whether you could genuinely reach your audience elsewhere within 24 hours. If the honest answer is no, that's the gap to close.
Cyber risk, algorithm shifts and volatile regulations aren't going away anytime soon. This means every channel you rely on carries some exposure you can't fully control.
The organisations that come through a bad day well are the ones who already have somewhere else to send their message – and an audience already there to receive it.
In summary:
Cyber risk, algorithm shifts and volatile regulations aren't going away anytime soon. This means every channel you rely on carries some exposure you can't fully control.
The organisations that come through a bad day well are the ones who already have somewhere else to send their message – and an audience already there to receive it.
Keep the following in mind:
- Map every channel you rely on to reach your audience, and be honest about which ones are genuinely diversified versus just different flavours of the same risk.
- Build at least one channel outside your core domain and platform, even modestly, so it's warm and functioning before you ever need it.
- Practise good list hygiene on your existing email database. A clean list protects your sender reputation and reduces your exposure to deliverability problems in the first place.
- Treat any secondary channel as a genuine audience relationship, not an insurance policy left in a drawer.
