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How do I target my audience?

8/29/2020

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Targeting the specific audience for your product or service is the key to unlocking success in your strategic communications. You should spend significant time on this exercise. In the Strategic Planning Institute’s MARKET™ method, analyzing your Audience comes second in the strategic planning process, after establishing a link to your Mission.

Here are the steps you’ll need to follow to target your audience:
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  • First, determine what are the tangible benefits of your product or service. Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” from your target’s point of view. This will help you form a realistic picture of what you are trying to market.

  • Make a list of your audiences. Who are you trying to reach? Who is most interested in what you have to offer? Be as specific as possible. (For example, instead of “teachers,” try “middle school social studies teachers in Wisconsin.”)

  • Going audience by audience, determine:
    • How you already communicate with them and how you’d like to communicate with them. Where do they hang out online? Are there any missed opportunities?  
    • What do you want each audience to do? What is a teeny, tiny first step they can take to get there? And even better: how can you incentivize that first step?
    • What are their values and beliefs? Can you find the intersection between what you want and what they want?
    • What sort of messaging is likely to resonate with them? Do you know their pain points and can you speak their language? (hint: do some research!)

Research is the next step after your audience analysis in the MARKET™ method, followed by Key Content and Channels, Evaluation, and Tracking. For a deeper dive into strategic planning, consider becoming a Certified Communications Campaign Manager through the Strategic Planning Institute, where you'll have exclusive access to the tables and templates needed to write your own strategic communications plan.
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Three Ways to Make Your Marketing Pandemic Sensitive

6/6/2020

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For a hundred years, we’ve never made a lifestyle adjustment quite like the one we’ve had to make during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, many organizations are seeing visits and sales drop. Others may be seeing them rise. The reality is that the behavior patterns of customers are changing dramatically to accommodate this public health emergency.

As a communicator and marketer, do you still know how to reach your audience and customers during this time?
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Dr. Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, writes in his book that it takes only 21 days to make a new habit stick. 

Now that we are three months -- 90 days -- in, do you know what sorts of new habits your target audience members have adopted? 

Here are just some samples of new habits a few real people I interviewed have already established:

  • Prioritizing more family time -- a “no rush” morning
  • Shopping online and having groceries delivered
  • Sleeping later
  • Exercising daily
  • Teleworking - “I can’t imagine driving back into work”
  • Avoiding news -- or bingeing on it
  • Becoming more consumed in childcare and household affairs, with less time for “extras”
  • Adopting a simpler lifestyle with more routine

Rooted in new habits are new priorities -- of taking care of self and family, of saving money, of simplicity in the midst of new demands, and of trying to help others during a stressful time. 

The good news is that with a bit of market research -- like the list of habits and behaviors above -- you can reexamine your outreach and promotions to align your customers’ current top values with what you have to offer them.

With that said, here are three ways to make your marketing more pandemic sensitive:

  1. Be human: The number one most important thing to do right now is to be empathetic in all communications. You don’t know how the customer on the receiving end is feeling, so you need to err on the side of being understanding, especially during this time. “[Everyone we are working with] is human, and they are under stress. Making time to just be human with each other in how we are doing things is really important,” says Frank X. Shaw, who manages communications at Microsoft, during a recent webinar he gave on lessons for communicating during COVID-19.
  2. Keep it simple: There is a lot of complexity now that there didn’t used to be -- even formerly-easy trips to the grocery store now involve planning ahead, strategic shopping and masking up. As a communicator, you should keep your messaging and calls to action simple and clear to make it easier for your audience to understand and act quickly. Revisit your sign-up and check-out forms to make sure that they all work smoothly and can be accomplished in as few clicks as possible. “[But] don’t try to create anything new during this time,” says Shaw. “Keep it simple and go back to the basics.” 
  3. Give back: Some of the best recent promotions acknowledge customers’ desire to give back to first responders and social causes as part of the experience. Organizations are coming up with all sorts of creative ways to do this. Just a few examples:
  • Badd Pizza giving customers the option of purchasing a personal pizza for a healthcare worker when they check out;
  • TouchNote challenging their audience to send a card of encouragement to any front-line workers or simply a loved one who could do with a little pick-me-up, and offering a free card in return. 
  • BeautyCounter advertising that they are matching donations to Save the Children.

Staying attentive to these three practices during the pandemic will go a long way in helping you connect with your customers. At a higher level, we also recommend that you revise your strategic communications plans.  This may require some dramatic rethinking, not of your mission, but of how you implement it. 2020 has been a shock to the system, but with the right sort of planning, great change and hardship can also bring new opportunity.
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How do I find resources to implement my strategic plan?

5/16/2020

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A question that many strategic planners ask is: "How do I find resources to implement my strategic plan?"

In other words, once the planning is done, how do I convince my organization's leaders to give the implementation team the resources, including money, time, and staff, that we need to make it a reality?

As a strategic planning professional, here are three tactics that you can use to guarantee that the implementation team has the resources it needs to execute your strategic plan:

  1. Involve your leaders from the beginning, and keep them updated. Have an open discussion with your leaders at the onset of the strategic planning process, and clarify with them the scope of the planning and the available resources that they will be able to commit to implement the plan. Keep them updated on the planning as is progresses.
  2. Invite budget officers to be part of your strategic planning team. That way, you'll have access to some financial experts who can provide a reality check to the strategic planning group along the way.
  3. Offer to pilot smaller-scale projects. If you don't have a full budget available to implement part of your strategy, devise a scaled-down pilot project that you can carefully monitor to show potential. Present the success of this pilot project as you ask for more money to scale up your efforts.

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What would it take to get there?

3/18/2020

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After you ask that all-important question, "Where do you want to go?" there is always one that naturally follows: "What would it take to get there?"


Note that the way the question is crafted is optimistic. We didn't ask: "Is this really possible? What are all the things that stand in our way? What if we fail?" 

Imagine that our goal is the summit of a mountain, and your team of rock climbers (strategic rock climbers?) must examine the face of the mountain to see which route will best get us there.

By keeping this next question deliberately open, we lead our strategic planning team to open their minds and think more creatively about all the paths, however ambitious, that could possibly lead to our goal. We focus on possibilities, not impediments. Save the talk of impediments for later on in the process! 

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Where do you want to go?

1/14/2020

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The idea of a strategic plan can be huge and intimidating. You might wonder - how do I get from zero to detailed, actionable plan?

Success lies in knowing which questions to ask, and when. Good strategic planning professionals don't start at the beginning - they start at the end. 

Your first question to your client should always be: "Where do you want to go?" Ask the client(s) to paint a detailed picture of where they would like their company to be.

By starting at the end, you have a destination in mind. It's much easier to map out a strategic plan with a clear destination than a fuzzy one.



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Is creating a Facebook page a goal or an activity?

11/6/2019

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Often, in the course of a strategic planning process, people ask us to help them create a Facebook page for their business or initiative. They are confident that they want this page and have already mapped out when they’ll build it and when it will launch. They speak about this Facebook page as one of their goals.


We usually nod and ask them, “What do you hope to achieve with this Facebook page?”


They’ll pause and think and often answer, “We want fans.”


We’ll challenge them further. “What do you want to be different as a result of launching this Facebook page? How will creating this page contribute toward a business goal?”


Through our conversation we often find out that actually, maintaining the Facebook page is not a strategic goal for them - it’s an activity that should be supporting a higher-level goal. Just collecting fans and likes for their own sake does little to support goals of a business.


At this point, we advise clients to take a step back and start with their target audience. Does this audience even use Facebook? Perhaps another social outlet would better-reach the demographic in question. If Facebook is the best place to find their target audience, how do they plan to both attract fans and convert these fans to customers?


It’s important to think through WHY you want to engage in a specific activity, WHO it is for, and HOW it will support your strategic goals before taking it on.

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What is strategic planning?

9/1/2019

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What exactly is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the process of defining and documenting where you want to go, developing an implementation plan with specific activities, and determining your metrics of success, all while considering your resources and challenges.

Why would we need a strategy?

If you’re wondering if you even need a strategy, the answer is: you already have one. Every business already has some sort of a strategy, whether it’s a vague idea confined to the owner’s head or a thorough written strategic plan well-known by everyone in the organization.  Your organization will benefit many times over by taking the time to do it right and developing a strategic plan from start to finish using an industry-standard method, like the Strategic Planning Institute’s MARKET Method™, to think through each step and to produce a strategic plan which helps guide your organization.

In fact, strategic planning saves you time in the long term - since you have already thought through your priorities, approaches, and activities, you can make decisions more quickly and trim activities and busy work that are not contributing toward your goals.

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    Training Director Michelle and the SPI community share advice and respond to real strategic communications quandaries.

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