How do you avoid common mistakes when planning strategic communication campaigns?

Knowing your audience is a very deep requirement. It doesn't stop with motivations, challenges and other points mentioned here are for the starters. As for any strategic communication, you should also know your audiences' - Diversity Background - Nationality Background - Reaction to certain global issues With time, diversity is expanding, and this calls for regular updates in your audience preferences.

Everyone is listening to everything. It's clearly important to understand who your stakeholders are, what they think about you, and what you want them to do. But when you're developing messages, they have to be coherent. Internal comms doesn't stay internal, and your internal audiences are reading what you are saying to external audiences on social media. If these messages are incoherent, you lose trust. This means you have to know who YOU are. What is your organization's purpose and goals, and to make sure this is consistently communicated regardless of the audience you are trying to reach.

In my experience, SMART goals that are well aligned to your overall strategic communication goal and the business goal of the system are valuable must haves. Being careful about not over designing the objectives is important, too - right-sizing the objectives to the goal. A great way to do that is to be sure that the team who sets the strategic objectives are precisely aligned with and understand the SMART communication plan. Alignment internally ensures hitting the targets with greater precision and effectiveness.

Communications departments should always derive and align their goals from the organisation’s goals. However, communications professionals often lack the management tools, business insights and leadership buy in to do so. Business leaders, on the other hand, often underappreciate the essential role of communications in reaching business goals. Communicators can make a greater impact if they invest in a deeper understanding of their business, and learn to speak the language of their leaders. This increases the chances that they can develop a strategy that will have business impact, leading to leadership buy in that can elevate the status of communications in the organization to ultimately secure more resources

Some common mistakes I have noticed include extremely verbose content and lack of a proper 'call to action'. Sometimes we tend to put in a lot of data which is not presented appropriately. Also, the call to action gets lost in paragraphs of content. So, ideally, data should be presented in an infographic format and the CTA should stand out in a button with the ask clearly defined. E.g. if you want someone to register, someone to click to watch a video, so on and so forth. Also, there should almost always be details of a contact person or common mailbox mentioned for any queries or to get more information on the topic.

Measuring the impact of communications is hard. Available metrics may tell you the performance of a communication product, but not whether it helped to achieve the organisational goal. This is especially a problem for smaller communication departments without resources to carry out in-depth surveys of constituents to assess whether their exposure to communications led them to change their behaviour, for example. I've experienced that you don't have to prove causation, as long as you can present a compelling argument for why the communications initiative supports a specific organisational goal. A mix of metrics are needed that indicate progress toward organisational goal and the performance of the communications product.

Thank you for sharing this valuable insight on the importance of ethical communication. I completely agree that ignoring ethical principles and standards can lead to serious consequences. It's essential to communicate with honesty, transparency, and respect for our audience to build trust and maintain a good reputation.

Timing is everything. A good strategic plan is the most effective when it has an achievable timeline to disseminate information or call to action. It's important to understand and recognize external factors that may affect your timing and pivot as early as possible.