Welcome to the 2022 summer hacks series Part Two! These are really short ‘food for thought’, bite-sized episodes, so you can dive in when you have a moment.
I decided to focus on planning tips over the summer. Why? Because when people think about comms planning, they often focus on what they are going to say. You have a great product or service and you want to tell people about it. Focusing on the message seems the logical first step, but before you start typing, let alone promoting your offer, there are some vital actions you need to take.
The summer hacks is an overview of the 7 steps to effective comms planning. I use this process with all my clients, whether it’s a brand new product or we’re marketing a built environment project.
This is the final episode, all about reviewing how well you’ve done and why this is an important part of the process for future planning.
Let’s dive in!
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Full Transcript (unedited)
Welcome to the last episode of the 2022 summer hacks series Part Two! These are really short ‘food for thought’, bite-sized episodes, so you can dive in when you have a moment.
I decided to focus on planning tips over the summer. Why? Because when people think about comms planning, they often focus on what they are going to say. You have a great product or service and you want to tell people about it. Focusing on the message seems the logical first step, but before you start typing, let alone promoting your offer, there are some vital actions you need to take.
The summer hacks is an overview of the 7 steps to effective comms planning. I use this process with all my clients, whether it’s a brand new product or we’re marketing a built environment project.
This is the final episode, all about reviewing how well you’ve done and why this is an important part of the process for future planning.
Let’s dive in!
Act with purpose
It’s important to have a purpose when you start any communication activity. This is how I work with people: strategy first. Just putting content out there can lead to so many things from feeling ineffective and asking, “why isn’t this working?”, through to cutting your budgets, but not really understanding why, through to hiring the wrong team, which, let’s be honest, leads to more wasted money, and who wants that?
As I discussed in the last episode, tracking your activity can help you spend your time and budget much more effectively. It can help you hire the right people to support you. And more importantly, it can help you reach your business goals. I also touched on adding a review date.
But this is all no good if you don’t use the data to inform your future activity.
You want to use your data to report on how effective your activity has been based on step two of my seven steps; your communication goal.
Having an effective evaluation step in your planning means that you will not make the same mistakes twice, plus you can make the case internally for more budget, resources, and projects.
When you’ve perfected this approach to planning, monitoring, delivering, and evaluation, then you can also look more deeply at how your comms is performing. For example, look at the reactions and what people do with the information you put out.
How did people engage with your content? Did it cause a reaction? Did it have the desired effect? How long did they spend engaged? Did they share your content?
This helps you track the relevance and effectiveness of the materials you produced against whether or not they resonated in a way that you wanted them to.
Reviewing our performance also helps us reflect and this is a really good way of working out if you are happy with the results which, in turn, is good for our mental health and that feeling of worth in the workplace.
Taking stock is a healthy way of keeping us grounded and focused on what we have accomplished rather than dwelling on what we haven’t. It also helps us appreciate what we have achieved rather than constantly comparing ourselves to others. In a moment of self-doubt or self-pity, it can be easy to forget what we have already accomplished, but looking back over our work in this way can help us feel better about ourselves. This in turn can help move us forward when we might otherwise feel stuck.
It is such a crucial part of the planning process that most people fall down on. Don’t let that be you.
I hope you have enjoyed this summer hacks series. I’d love to know if you are using the seven steps or if you would like to register interest in my Seven Steps Masterclass, where I dive deep into each step with you and we build a strategy together, then check my show notes today for that link.