What are the Messages and Media?

Your research or the commercial customer profile should have clues about the “hooks” that will make your customers do what you want them to, to enable you to design the messages in the campaign. It should also help you decide which media to use (newspapers, radio, emails, leaflets, posters, mail, websites, personal contact via call centres/intermediaries) to get the message in front of that particular group.

The e-Voice and e-Citizen projects did work on this “multi channel marketing” approach which will offer ideas on designing your marketing campaign.

You may have to compromise based on what is worthwhile in terms of the numbers you are reaching and the unit cost of different media compared to the benefits if you achieve your target outcomes.

Strictly speaking the whole of the process outlined in this guide is “Marketing”. However many people think of marketing as just the marketing communications or “marcomms” element of the process – advertising, publicity, branding etc.

Design the communications campaign

The easiest way to develop your campaign is to put it together in a table which has the following columns:

o    Market – who you want to communicate with
o    Message – what you want to tell them
o    Media – what is the channel you will use to communicate that message
o    Mode – when will you communicate these messages

Remember the market includes internal and partner stakeholders as well as the customer group. It should also cover all the elements of your project and not just the part at the end when you launch the external publicity work. A good discipline is to take the elements of your project plan and put them in the first column and think about the four Ms at each of those stages. Your table will therefore look like:

Test the campaign – Co-Design

Before you launch the campaign it is always valuable to do some testing of the proposals with your customers via a focus group. This will enable you to make changes before you incur expense.

It is also worth carrying out either pilot campaigns or to have a “control” area where the campaign is not carried out to see if there are measurable differences as a result of the campaign as opposed to other things that happen at the same time (such as more general media coverage).