Less haste, less waste (2/2)

We argued the case for media-neutral planning (MNP) in part one. Now here’s how you do it...

Review your marketing

Once you have defined what you want to achieve from your campaign, look at what has and hasn’t worked in the past – this is valuable information, but don’t be afraid to challenge it. Then review the marketing materials that you currently use. If you can, ask someone from outside the organisation to lend you a fresh pair of eyes. Your aim here is to check that you have been using a set of strong and consistent messages that reflect your positioning in the markets you are targeting. Ideally, these messages should be informed by marketing research.

Develop your brief

Now you are ready to develop a simple communications brief. On a single side of paper, identify all the background information you would need if you were to ask an outside agency to come up with some creative ideas. Focus on your audience, your goals and the purpose of your campaign – you can worry about your media later.

The hardest part of developing a brief is formulating a ‘single-minded proposition’. If your target audience understands one simple idea from your campaign, what should that idea be? You should be able to support it with your product and services messages.

Hold a messaging workshop

Messages? What are those messages? It is easier to figure this out if you have done some solid research to find out how your customers perceive you, your competitors, and your products and services. Failing that, you should bring together a small group of key stakeholders to brainstorm, filter and refine a set of messages based on what you already know.

If this task proves impossible and you can’t agree on the messages for each market, the chances are that you have some problems with internal communication – either that or you didn’t have a strategic plan in the first place. The elevator test might help you here: the idea is that you should be able to clearly articulate the positioning in a 30-second elevator ride shared with a fictional customer.

Who is the product aimed at? [customer segment]
What problem does it solve? [problem]
What category of product is it? [category]
What is the key differentiator? [differentiator]
What/who is the competition? [competition]

See if you can crystallise your sales pitch into the following sentence: “For [customer segment], who have [problem], our product is a [category] that [differentiator]. Unlike [competition] our product [differentiator].”

Choose the right media

Once you know what you want to say, and to whom, it’s time to figure out how you want to say it. We use what we refer to as the ‘channel marketing framework’, an adaptation of the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) sales process model, to help identify the most effective media for different audiences. The media you use to engage your target audience should be informed by how well you know them: for instance, third party media are unlikely to prove effective if your objective is to up-sell to existing customers.

For more information on messaging workshops, the channel marketing framework, or any other concepts in this article, please contact us.

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