The 5 W’s of Marketing and Communications – FINN Partners

News and Insights

July 24, 2025

You’ve got something to say and you’re eager to say it. It’s tempting to dive right in and tell your story through your website, social media, newsletter and just about everywhere else. But will your marketing message land? Taking a step back to plan your content can make all the difference. A simple yet powerful starting point is the 5 W’s and H. This blog explains what these are and why they are important in corporate communications.

What are the 5 W’s?

Quite simply:

Who, what, when, where and why.

Your content should cover these elements – they’ve long since provided a PR construct for press releases:

• Who is speaking? – this will be your company or organisation
• What are you saying? – the information you’re sharing. Make it succinct at the start (engage the reader upfront and add detail later)
• When is this happening? – if you’re unveiling a product, this will be the launch date. If you’re announcing news, it will be the day you release it or when the embargo lifts
• Where is it happening? – your product or service may be available globally, or regionally. If your news is a senior appointment, they will have responsibility in a particular region
• Why is it happening/why are you telling people? – share the credentials of your senior appointment, it’s why you chose them. Say why your latest customer signed with your company, or you created your new product. Don’t make readers guess – this is your chance to tell them how you meet industry needs.

Use the 5 W’s for content planning

The 5 W’s are fundamental questions to answer through your storytelling, but they are also the basis of content planning. Here’s why:

Who?

Understanding your audience is important. Resist the temptation to dive right into your news and spread it far and wide arbitrarily. You must think about who will see it and how they will react to it.

Chances are, your message has multiple audiences – employees and stakeholders, target customers in different sectors, varied job roles within those customers, the media and industry analysts, for example. Do your research to understand what matters to them.

If you operate in multiple markets, you will also need to tailor your communications to each regional audience. This goes beyond local language translations. Words and images must be consistent with culture, customs and a range of other factors to land successfully.

Furniture brand IKEA does this well. It stays true to its Scandinavian design ethos and consistent branding but localises its marketing and advertising according to each region. This includes content communications. For example, the brand’s message “Ghar Aa Jao”, (Come home) to IKEA in India tapped into the cultural ethos of hosting guests for celebrations, to make memories.

If you don’t think about how best to speak to each audience, and tailor your content accordingly, it is unlikely you will get the reactions you hope for.

What?

There are many types of content. For as long as people, and organisations, have had information, they’ve found creative ways of sharing it. In 1882, the Edison Electric Lighting Company published a bulletin to get across its message of the benefits of electric lighting. Content marketing is as old as the proverbial hills and the Content Marketing Institute has many more examples of it in practice from days gone by.

It’s likely you’ll use a range of content types to share your message. The nature of the message itself will often guide the format – whether it’s a one-off news announcement, a longform white paper, a series of blogs and articles or shorter social media posts. You could work with a customer to create a case study to demonstrate your impact whilst telling their story too.

When?

Plan to release your information at the best time. You could gain more attention if you time it right, for example around seasonal or other events – Black Friday if you’re targeting consumers, an industry event like London Tech Week if you’re a technology company, during the FIFA World Cup if your audience are football fans.

During these times your audience, and the media, will be sensitised to the topic you have something to say about.

Where?

Technology has given all communicators an array of channels for their messages.

Traditional channels like print, radio and television still have their place, as do in-person events. But today, most audiences get the majority of their information online. Websites, blogs, online articles, social media, streamed and downloaded videos and podcasts carry information that is consumed worldwide, every second of the day.

As well as deciding which channels to use, you will also need to tailor the voice, tone and style of your content to fit the medium. Choose well and you will amplify your message, reach the right audiences at the right time and grab their attention.

Why?

The purpose of communicators is to communicate but it is a dereliction of duty to skip the important question – why communicate at all?

Enterprises, consumers, the media – no matter who your audiences are – they are bombarded with information. We all are. All day, every day. The posters and screens we pass when we commute, the inboxes that vie for our attention with every ping and the smart phones that tempt us to keep scrolling.

Too much communication from you and people will switch off. Irrelevant information will turn them away too (and annoy them into the bargain). Make sure you have something to say. If you don’t, it might be best to say nothing at all.

A second aspect to ‘why communicate’ concerns your motivation. What do you want to achieve? There could be multiple things – generate sales leads, raise brand awareness, change opinions.

According to the CMI, only 29% of marketers with a documented content strategy say it’s extremely or very effective and of those that rate it moderately effective or worse, 42% put that in part down to a lack of clear goals. You must know what you hope to achieve, if you don’t, you can’t measure if your content strategy delivered it.

You’re not done yet

How?

The ‘H’ is for how. How will you structure and format your content? You may be planning content in support of a prolonged campaign. The time you spend upfront, knowing what you will produce and when, will pay dividends in the long run when you’re busy refining wording and getting your message just right. Consistency is key. Be clear on your message and convey it through each content piece.

You must also decide how you are going to measure success. If your content isn’t read, it can’t even begin to work for you so readership, website traffic and other quantitative measures are valuable. Going beyond this, you want to know if it helped achieve an outcome, so you might need to look at sales conversions, engagement metrics, sentiment analysis, share of voice and other possibilities. Discuss what you want to achieve with your PR service partner and find out more from our tips on measuring PR.  

Planned and executed in the right way, content marketing can increase brand awareness, stimulate enquiries, help convert sales and influence key stakeholders. But it is hard to stand out in noisy environments. To make your content strategy work for you, understand and be clear on the 5W’s (who, what, when, where and why) and the H (how).

Want to know more? Find out about FINN Partners’ content marketing services.