What's your strategy for nailing a communication campaign?

Ideal example 1. Increase brand awareness by achieving a 20% increase in social media followers or website traffic within three months. 2. Generate leads by capturing 500 email sign-ups or contact form submissions from campaign landing pages within a specific timeframe. 3. Drive sales by achieving a 15% increase in monthly revenue or a target number of product purchases. 4. Enhance customer engagement by increasing average time spent on the website by 30% or achieving a specific number of user comments or shares on social media posts. 5. Improve brand perception by conducting surveys or sentiment analysis to measure changes in brand sentiment or customer satisfaction scores.

First, whether it's increasing awareness, driving sales, or educating the audience, your objectives should be specific and measurable. Second, know your target audience: demographics, preferences, pain points, and communication habits. Third, write a compelling message that highlights the value of your productor service. Focus on what makes you different.

Defining clear objectives is paramount. Specify what you aim to achieve – whether it's raising brand awareness, driving engagement, or advocating for change. Concrete objectives provide direction, ensuring every aspect of your campaign aligns with your intended impact.

Know your audience. Understand what moves them them. Make sure you know what platforms to reach them on. Never assume knowledge and never condescend.

Do you have a business goal or strategic direction that is driving the campaign? Start there. Aligning with other activities in your organization or business will help you accelerate the impact of your campaign. (For instance, if you are crafting a campaign about your municipality's commitment to environment, and another comms team in your municipality is preparing to announce a recycling plant closure, that will affect your campaign.)

Your message's design, frequency, length, language and other aspects will depend on how these personas are created and how you segment your target audience. For example, if you are targeting social media users, you can categorize your recipients based on age brackets, the amount of time they spend on a particular platform, the days they are most active, the trend that they are most likely to follow, so on and so forth.

Prioritize understanding your audience deeply. Conduct thorough research to grasp their needs, preferences, and communication habits. Tailor your campaign to resonate with their motivations, ensuring your message connects on a personal level. This foundation maximizes the impact and relevance of your communication efforts.

Be able to connect with your researched audience on all levels,using a variety of mediums to reach a wider range of people. Your strategies must be sensitive to the diversity of your audience.Work towards ensuring your strategy is inclusive. In addition, it is important to add a human touch to your strategies,using the information you have gathered,find ways to connect with your audience on almost a cellular level.

I truly believe this is one of the most important steps in building a communication strategy. Both from a marketing perspective and an internal communications perspective. From researching your audience, you should also land on the best way to get to them, so that you can determine beforehand the best channels to communicate to each segment of the audience. Because, for me, this also impacts the way you craft your messages. For each channel and audience, your message or the way you portray that message changes.

Employing Design Thinking in your campaign can be very beneficial. Also called Human Centered Design, placing your Target Audience right at the center of your Communications Campaign empowers you to gain critical insights that will feed into your campaign, giving you a higher chance of success.

After you have understood your target audience backed by significant research and data, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your recipients before drafting content - keeping in mind that if it were you receiving that communication, what would you want the most or what would attract your attention. It is imperative to customize content messaging and design keeping in mind what the end user needs the most out of a particular communication message. For example, if you are sending a message regarding a new book launch, you need to put forth ideas that draw the audience and make the most impact. This may include a hook to attract readers, genre, key take aways from the book, possibly followed by some strong testimonials.

Crafting a compelling message is pivotal. It should resonate with your audience's values, needs, and emotions. Tailor it to be clear, concise, and relatable, capturing attention amidst the noise. Infuse authenticity and a call to action, inspiring engagement and fostering a lasting impact.

Knowledge of your audience is paramount while crafting a message. What are they looking for ( do we know them well enough?), what is the language they speak, the culture, their lifestyle, their traditions, their thinking and bahaviour patterns....once we know them as well as we can, then comes the crafting of the message. The message is never just a headline or tagline or any copy - it is what we say to them, how we say it, how they receive it and how they respond to it. Communication is the brand speaking with its target audience!

While crafting your message is important, packaging this message and including an appropriate Call-To-Action is equally important. Think about things like images, graphics, and colors to accompany these Key Messages. This ensures your message is not only acceptable to your Target Audience but also generates the intended response.

One thing I have found helpful is being able to read when to stick to known structures of constructing a message and when to flip it entirely with something totally new. If your audience is a bit rigid and you are considering taking a new creative route. Then consider how you can let it grow on audience through the way you craft your message. See your message as the vehicle to the desired change you want to see.

One thing that is often missed in this step in considering your internal capacity. If you can only resource one channel, or two, or three, plan to maximize their impact.

One thing that is helpful is to diversify your mediums to reach different sub-audiences (e.g. age) within your main audience. Maybe one group uses social media more than opening up newsletters. Diversify the medium, while staying consistent with the message is key. There is no need to reinvent the wheel either. Utilize the same content in re-packaged ways to get your messaging across consistently and effectively.

I would actually move this step before the step of crafting your message. Because when you research your audience, you choose the best channel for each audience segment, and then, you start crafting the different messages that should go out, depending on the audience and the channel.

There are numerous channels to reach audiences. It is important to consider your communications objectives vis-a-vis the channels. Cost and potential impacts are things you may you want to consider as you choose the right mix of channels that can work for you. In some cases, there may be channels that complement each other. For instance, running an SEO campaign can complement an influencer-led campaign on social media.

This is the real tactical element, where all of the strategic planning culminates with the tasks. I map this out day by day and allocate roles according to responsibility/skillset. No plan survives contact however so it's important to remember it is fluid and that things change - and this document needs to then be kept live and updated throughout the campaign. Third point is that I send this to stakeholders so they know what is happening and when. They might not read it all but they can be confident that things are happening.

Having put all the elements together and having an end-to-end picture of what is needed to deploy this campaign, breaking this into smaller tasks makes it easier for team members to understand their roles in achieving the campaign goals. Some things you would want to think about are the technology to use, timelines and the various budgetlines in the event there are costs implications such as media buying.

Not only researching your audience but researching the complete environment of your product, services, or communicational challenge. Research the context, and the market trends affecting the customers, locally, globally, environmentally, and politically. Research your competitors, what they are selling, how they are selling, what are they saying, and how they are saying things. Analyze their content, copy, visuals, and all the touchpoints they are using to communicate. The more you research, the more insightful and differentiated will be the communication strategy you will propose and implement. So the more you research, the more chances of succeeding.

Consideration: Is there a past successful campaign you can reference? This can help keep your brand presentation consistent. (ie, a union I worked for used a nautical metaphor in an advocacy campaign with a tag line related to Navigating, and an 'echo' campaign later used a similar metaphor and talked about Steering the Ship.)

In addition,have the mindset that nothing in this space is ever static. Information,trends are constantly evolving. Be ready to ensure your communication strategies can easily align with any relevant change that appears!

Adapt and pivot! Communication strategies are not written in stone, you need to measure every step, monitor how the execution is going and adapt what you are doing to the current circumstances.