Ever heard the phrase, “you are what you eat?” Well, in the world of brand communication and marketing you are what you tweet, sell, walk, talk, help, share, look, and so on. Creating a cohesive marketing campaign strategy is important for communicating a brand that knows who it is. Being consistent with your message, even if just across a market segment or range of time helps customers and potential customers understand what to expect from your company. That better understanding can help increase engagement and build trust.
So how do you get started creating a strategy that effectively melds the right message and voice across different channels?
Let’s explore, shall we…
1. Define Your Goals
Whether a seasonal campaign or long-term brand awareness building, you should start by documenting goals for big wins and 1 or 2 secondary wins. Only when you know your Point B can you plan your path to get there from Point A.
Start at the high level and broad, then drill down into more detail. Some common goals may be to increase audience size and engagement on a particular social platform or increase online sales by X% through a certain quarter of business. Or possibly improve conversion rate on your website.
2. Understand the landscape
Now that you have some goals in mind it’s important to get a feel for how your current situation could impact those goals. It will help to be aware of:
- The current and potential customer segments involved and their current market size
- How your competitors are chasing similar goals or at the very least, how they are talking to your customers and potential customers
- The strengths of your business that you aim to communicate and why anyone should care
3. Think Customer-centric
Before you can begin building out any messaging you have to understand the audience you’ll be communicating with. What is this particular segment looking to gain from what you have to offer? What is the need or want you’re looking to provide a patch for? How do they prefer to interact with brands?
This is not the time for assumptions and remember, you are not the audience here. Even if you share some of the characteristics, your opinion and experiences shouldn’t get in the way of tasks based on data.
Always put your customer’s needs and the desired actions of the program at the center of your strategy. This also ties into the broad part of defining goals. Marketing and brand communication can take on many forms. It’s not always about selling right away. There’s a time for, and a long-term strategy around, educating markets and building an engaged audience before advocating for your product or service.
4. Get Specific on the Tactical Details
At this point, the Why and the What should be pretty clear. We’re ready to clarify the How including any content that needs to be created, the tools needed, how success will be measured and the team involved.
When it comes to actually crafting and delivering the campaign to meet your goals you should be weighing those actions against the core values of your brand. If you have a brand manifesto/guide already created there’s your point of reference. This is where your brand platform and personality act as a compass across communication channels.
5. Build a Smarter Timeline
Understanding if a campaign is on the right track takes time and more often than not you won’t hit a home run with the first swing. Build a timeline that allows for measuring and refining at certain milestones in the project.
If W. Edwards Deming could help arm a country for rebuilding with the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) Cycle it just might be valuable for your marketing campaign as well.
Of course, these are all broad steps that each require plenty of discussion on details. If you have specific questions or additions feel free to leave a comment or connect with us.
photo credit: Nomadic Lass
modified by Shout Out Studio