An effective campaign strategy brings together the structure and content of your communications, aligning it with the buyer journey it is designed to initiate and facilitate. Ideally, it will build a deep connection with your consumer – preferably something new and true about the relationship between your brand and audience.
We’re all very close to what our companies deliver. So it’s natural to believe that our audiences will be excited by the same things we are. Rarely this is true. The best campaign strategies are therefore research aided. That could involve focus groups but, for us it is more likely to be a combination of deep interviews with customers and stakeholders to enable the formation of a series of customer need hypotheses validated by quantitative research. Only this level of diligence will provide the resonant insights that underpin great campaign strategies.
Ideally (but not necessarily) an extension of an overarching communications strategy, developing a coherent and compelling campaign strategy will ensure your investment in changing hearts and minds.
We recommend developing a campaign strategy to cover:
We like to use research/ consumer insight to distill your business challenge. This way we can illustrate your issues and objectives.
An example may be; IPSOS tracking showed a 10 per cent reduction in unaided brand recall that coincided with a 7% increase in customer cost-to-acquire.
The contributing factors should be expressed objectively, for example:
Simply communicating better may be the solution to the problem. But it may also involve communicating about a product or service initiative in response to the challenge.
We like to distill these goals to a maximum of three:
A campaign will rarely have only one audience.
In most instances, there will be a primary and secondary audience as well as an eavesdropper audience.
Primary audience – this is the mission-critical audience. They are the primary campaign respondents and missing them will mean certain failure.
Secondary audience – this is often an enabling audience. They may be key influencers or members of a supply chain or distribution channel you need to engage to facilitate the primary audience’s decisions.
Eavesdropper audience – these people may need to be aware of the campaign initiative for other reasons.
Interaction between these audiences should be addressed in your communications strategy. Think carefully about these audiences’ mutual dependencies and co-dependencies and their ability to influence one another.
In your descriptions of these audiences, be as specific about their characteristics as possible:
Each audience will have its own set of complexities. It may be that there are subgroups within each audience with specific issues. Mapping will ensure you connect effectively with as many people in your target groups as possible.
Your brand strategy is a vital component of developing a coherent campaign plan. If your brand strategy is not current or compelling, it’s worth taking the time to consider the following factors:
There’s an advertising adage around creative briefing; When briefing Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, the Pope could have asked him to paint a masterpiece on the ceiling. Instead, the brief was to ‘give the world a vision of heaven’.
The quality of your creative brief determines campaign performance. Your brief should cover the basics:
We recommend spending enough time on your brief to get past the tactical requirement to address the strategic shift that will change perceptions. A good agency will coach you on making your creative brief the powerhouse it should be.
We exist to make a difference through the power of ideas. We’re driven to create world-class creative and digital campaigns to help you achieve your vision of success, whether that’s brand awareness and health, audience behaviour change, customer engagement, lead generation or sales growth. Our work deploys across digital, broadcast, trade, direct and experiential media channels.