Over the past ten or so years, I have worked as a digital or communication specialist in both full time and consultancy roles.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing brands including MTV, EE, O2, Samsung and NOW!. My roles have always been focused on building a brand relationship with the end user and improving the corresponding business metrics (KPIs), and in this article I’ll explain an approach that consistently brings success.
This article is step 1 of 2. In this step I will run through the initial steps taken to prepare your optimal communication strategy.
Step 2, which will follow soon, will focus on the initial execution, ongoing testing and deep analysis that form the foundation of long term success.
For the purpose of this guide, we’re going to use a (semi-) hypothetical scenario:
A Music App, powered by backend CMS technology and fronted by a large well known UK brand.
The key success metrics in our scenario are every customer interaction post acquisition. This primarily covers activation, engagement, conversion and churn.
The outlined approach had achieved results as high as a 16 times increase in conversion from free trial accounts to paying subscribers.
Contents:
What is a Communication Strategy?
Strategy Creation: Step by Step
Audience
USPs & Competitor Analysis
Industry Best Practise & Real Life Examples of Success
Channels
Rules
Summary
What is a Communication Strategy?
Communication is what holds people together — and the same goes for people and brands. Communication is forever, and always a vital part of the product. If customers like the way you communicate with them, and it makes them feel loved and taken care of, it will probably translate into more sales and more revenue for you. A communication strategy is a guide that helps transform a company into a brand. It’s kind of a light beam that shows you the way and the approach to your audience. It helps you learn how to provide people with additional value in form of high-quality content, and how to communicate with them in a way that will make them love your product.
2. Strategy Creation: Step by Step
Audience: Overview
Before you can even consider your communication strategy, you need to identify who you are communicating with.
Understanding your audience is paramount to ongoing success.
So let’s break it down, how can you identify your audience?
You should already know what your product is and to get started, you need to research. Get online and analyse the demographic that similar propositions appeal to — there is a wealth of information out there. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel at this stage, use it.
Through this research, you need to identify the key aspects of your demographics — Age, Gender, Location, Occupation & Interests are your initial key demo-markers.
Understanding who your audience are will help define how you speak to them, and where.
Before moving on, take the information that you’ve gathered and create your ‘Ideal Customer’.
Audience: Example Scenario
Demo-markers:
Age: Strongest group are 16–35 year olds and the weakest are 65+. This is partly due to the fact that the proposition is mainly on mobile, and the proposition delivers chart music on demand, which according to the research is more popular in younger audiences.
Gender: Music App content consumption is favoured slightly by a female audience at a ratio of around 65% Female, 35% Male. (Statistics true when the research was done, but these are ever evolving variables.)
Location: There was no discernible favour shown by location analysis and so to begin it would not be a point of focus. This presented no problem as the proposition was a mobile app and so location did not create any barriers.
Occupation: There was a range of occupations with no major winning demographic identified. However, an analytical report done by a competitor had shown that people who work from home, were unemployed or were full time home-makers engaged with them more than others.
Interests: This is one of the harder markers to analyse prior to running your campaigns. There will need to be an element of logic and common sense used to identify some potential initial profiles. For example, when considering an audience who would be most interested in a music app, we would consider soft targeting communication on those who are known to attend gigs/concerts/festivals and those that may have shown interest on social media in artists who appear in the app.
The Ideal Customer
A stay at home mother in her late 20s / early 30s who follows several artists on social media, many of which are expected to appear regularly in the charts and hence on the app.
USPs & Competitor Analysis: Overview
You will already know what you sell, whether it be a re-sellable service or a range of sunglasses, you need to identify and define what makes you unique. An effective way to start this process is to look at your industry and your competitor market, and to understand where you stand amoungst them In all probability, there will be businesses up and running that have a similar proposition — albeit I’m sure not as good as yours! It is important to understand not only what makes you different, but also what makes you the same, as this will help you to understand what works and what doesn’t in your space. Use your competitors to learn your market. Then, ensure that you are able to definitively identify a Unique Selling Point that sets you apart. Is your service the same quality but cheaper, are your sunglasses more exclusive? Whatever your USP(s) may be, you need to be clear on them.
The Selling Points that set you apart will form the basis of the positive benefit messaging that will be heavily used throughout your customer comms strategy.
Industry Best Practise & Real Life Examples of Success
This step is quite straight forward. The aim is to spend some time researching existing examples of brands and campaigns that have been successful. There are two parts to consider, look at the most successful brand campaigns without any specific industry or product target, then start to refine your research based on your own brand. Take each case study and identify the things that you like about the campaign, and collect ideas based on which successful strategies you think could be transferrable to your own brand. There is one issue here, most of the infamous campaigns are acquisition focused, and the purpose of this article is to develop a communication strategy that takes effect post initial acquisition. Another method that I always personally maintain is to sign up for the newsletter of any and all brands you admire, or are successful. You should especially do this for all of your competitors to analyse their methods and keep up to date with their business.
Channels: Overview
Now that you know your audience, your USPs and your competitors, you now need to decide what channels, or mediums, you’re going to use to communicate with your customers. There are two types of message medium that I have always focused on — Passive and Active. Passive messaging is communication that the customer will stumble upon throughout their engagement journey with your service. These include:
The text content at all brand touchpoints; your website, your app, your store.
In app/Onsite messages, such as website popups or in-app messages.
Active messaging is communication that the you actively send to the customer. These include:
Email
SMS
Social Advert |(When using retargeting)
Search/Display Advert|(When using retargeting)
Direct Mail
Mobile Push Messaging
Your communication strategy needs to consider all of the channels you will use, and they all need to work in unison.
The pros and cons of communication are fairly obvious, and we intuitively know all of this, but it’s good to remind ourselves what forms of communication will best serve our purposes. Here we will focus on the active messaging.
Rules
A successful communication strategy does not pin it’s expectation of success on a single message or campaign.
A successful communication strategy is one that builds a relationship with the customer. You do not drive every customer to the end goal, every time you speak with them. This would be a mistake and ultimately would lead to a failed campaign.
Time must be taken to nurture your audience. You must put their needs ahead of yours. This may seem controversial, but it will yield better results. If you speak to your customers in a way that they, either consciously or subconsciously, don’t feel valued or appreciated, they will not engage.
You do not spam. You do not over message. You do not send irrelevant content to customers.
You respect your customers and their needs, you do not misrepresent your product.
You remain transparent. If you make a mistake in your communication, you own it.
Lastly, you keep evolving. Your messaging must be observed and refined constantly, this is what will set you apart.
Summary
That is the end of step 1, so let’s summarise what we’ve learned and what you should have at this stage.
Before starting this process, you thought you knew your product. But now you know it inside and out. You’ve got your elevator pitch and can spit it off as easily as you breathe.
You’ve taken the time to understand your competitive landscape, you know where you have the strongest proposition, and you know the audience that you will initially target.
You’ve researched some of the most successful methods, as well as observed ones that really caught your eye along the way. You’ve already got your heart set on different ones you’d like to replicate in some form.
You’ve also assessed and chosen your initial comms channels and got the rules written all over the office walls.
Now it’s time to create some message cycles. Find out how in Step 2.
Comments