The purpose of a communication platform is to ensure that communication either achieves the intended effect at the lowest possible cost or achieves maximum effect for a given budget.
To succeed, two questions must be answered:
a) Which messages are most attractive to the target audience?
b) How can we deliver these messages in the most effective way?
In a first step we must decide who we are talking to. A “market” can be divided into:
Potential market: Every company that have or may develop an interest in the offering.
Available market: The companies that is a fit for eg your technology and can be addressed
Selected market: The group of companies you choose to target with the offering.
Customers: The companies who have purchased
In a second step, we must do further segmentation and decide geography, size of the companies, decision-makers and influencers among other segmentation criterias.
When we know who we are going to talk to, we need to start formulating our offering. The objective here is to create an attractive and clear image in the target group’s mind that highlights the emotional and/or rational arguments that make us better than all others in the product category. Our task is to get buyers to believe what we say, think what we want them to think, and do what we want them to do.
Advertising is one of many tools that can help create the desired image of a company and/or its products – provided that the communicated position is vacant, relevant, attractive, achievable, and credible. If advertising is also used in coordination with other communication, such as PR, exhibitions and personal sales efforts – and if the chosen position meets the above criteria – the likelihood that the advertising will also be effective is high.
And never forget to include internal audiences – i.e., employees, owners, and strategic partners. Advertising can be used just as effectively internally; for example, to increase motivation and knowledge, improve sales effectiveness, and reduce unwanted staff turnover.
Concretely, these are the steps needed to identify and formulate an effective communication platform:
a) Identify the arguments (emotional/rational, verbal/visual, etc) that best communicate the desired position
b) Define a core message, which should run like a common thread through all communication, regardless of media channel, and help convey a brand with clear values and a clear promise to the market.
c) Present a communication platform describing how arguments should be transformed into attractive and target-group-relevant messages.
d) Recommend the media and channel choices that we assess to be the most effective for delivering the messages to the right target groups.
With this in place you have a good platform for effective communication that’s support your marketing strategy. This is the last part of the strategic platform, which includes the Vision framework, the Brand platform and the Communication platform.
And if you want to discuss strategic communication, you are always welcome to contact ulf@sfinxconsulting.se
