Five tactics to include in your next campaign

Are you spending as much time and effort promoting your new service as you did to develop the service? There are five tactics to include in your next campaign efforts.

But it feels like we are rushing through so many things in life and business – including actually campaigning for our efforts. In the intro to this week’s episode, I invited you to think about when you were a child and wanted to make sure your parents knew what you wanted for Christmas. If you were like me, you put notes everywhere, circled the item in catalogs (OK, I’m old enough to remember department stores sending holiday catalogs), and pointing out the item anytime I saw a TV commercial for it. I was campaigning for what I wanted – and I was tenacious.

Why don’t we do that for our business?

I started talking about campaigns last week – presenting the idea that as marketers we had distorted the definition of campaign. We’ve simplified it down to a single effort or tactic representing tactic. I am calling BS.

Don’t rush the process

During the first image campaign I was part of developing for the University, I was told the media buy should be 1.5 times the cost of production. So if we spent $100K on production, our media buy should be $150K. It takes more effort to share the campaign than it does to make the campaign. This has stayed with me for a lot of years. Yet we don’t put that extra push of effort into our own efforts. Why not?

Five tactics to include

In a recent episode of Building a Story Brand, Donald Miller outlines five tactics to include in a successful communications campaign. And before those tactics can be developed, you must define your core message or story you need to widely share across your audience base.

Those five tactics include:

Speech
Corporate video
Press release
Social media
Email

As you consider each of these tactics, you need to keep your audience in mind – do you need to share the message of the campaign to internal teams as well as external prospective clients? The internal audience and their understanding is a crucial element of any communications, and should not be ignored.