Communications Objectives

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Objectives drive tactics

When setting communication objectives, think about how they drive things like selection, channels, the targets, our budget and measurement.

What are your communication objectives?

• Increasing awareness: Do you want to generate sales? Or just increase awareness?
• Sharing knowledge: Education is a very important part of communications. If consumers don’t understand how to use your product or what your product does, they may not have any interest. Sharing knowledge with consumers can be a very important objective.
• Projecting a brand image: You might be trying to change the way consumers perceive your brand or clarifying what your brand image is.
• Stimulating needs and desires: So, actually, consumers may not think that they need to purchase your product, but by delivering a really strong campaign that focuses in on this, suddenly, it becomes a desirable object that they can’t live without.

The importance of a clear brief

One of the key elements of producing communication objectives is creating and delivering a clear brief. There is a skill to this.

Consider all the work you have been doing previously around the strategy and around understanding our customers. How do you boil that down into a robust, creative brief? Because, as a marketeer, this is what you are handing over to maybe colleagues internally or to an agency that you’re working with. They are using as the basis for building the communications themselves and for executing it.

If the brief is not clear, if it’s muddled, or if there’s too much detail, then the creative isn’t going to be on point. It will take more time to deliver something, because there will be more questions.

Your brief should focus on identifying who the core target audience is. What are the key elements of the product that you want to communicate or the key elements of the brand? It doesn’t need to be long, but it does need to be concise.

The importance of customer insights

The best campaigns are built from strong customer insights and ambitious targets.

Think about Nike, for example. They have a very strong customer insight. They understand why their target audience wants to exercise and the difficulty, sometimes, of getting up and doing something. Nike wants to motivate people, so they developed the whole brand slogan: “Just Do It”. Don’t think about it, just go and do it and do the best that you can.

That insight has led to massively successful marketing campaigns across a range of sports, not just running. Think about what they’ve executed within cycling, for example, or skateboarding or snow sports. The Nike brand is across all sporting minds now and all categories, and within each one, they understand. They have the overarching insight, but they have specific insights to those sports and to the needs of those consumers, which helps them to deliver superb creative.