The message of a marketing campaign should be persuading and influential in nature in order to deliver your objectives and create a hub where the target audience will engage to your campaign.
According to Liana Barcia of DEVEX in her article 4 great development advocacy campaigns, she said, “While some funds are of course necessary, good campaigns need not be expensive and are more about the hard work, creative thinking and energy you put into them. A strong advocacy campaign has well-researched and clear objectives and a detailed strategy and plan for reaching them. Organizing one requires a creative and multidisciplinary team and selection of the right channels. While traditional print and television remain popular, digital technology and social media have given rise to an alternative communication channel that is cheaper, more dynamic and even more powerful (source).” Her inputs on advocacy campaign is commendable and has given me greater insights and captured my interest in this topic.
1. Know Your Audience
A good marketing campaign should capture the soul and heart of its target audience and may influence others to be captivated by the message of an ads.
Macala Wright, a digital marketing strategist, suggests nonprofits with limited budgets take advantage of free resources to learn about online audiences. For instance, Google Analytics can tell you what country visitors to your website are from, where on your site they’re going and what devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) they’re using. “That’s information any organization can use to make informed decisions on how they’re messaging,” Wright said. (source)
2. Create Powerful Message
Simple, brief and concise message will help the audience to see directly your message than to read thousand of letters in an ads or campaign. Use powerful word directed to your audience. Once you hit their subconcious it will drive them crazy to reflect, agree, see your point or help them to realize something because you have given them pandoras box in your message.
Nowadays, #fakenews is epedemic! Creating marketing campaign should be science based, evidence-based, well-researched and relatable. Josephus B. Cayabyab
Misleading heading can ruin the campaign and the organization working on that specific advocacy. Emphasize the need of your campaign, express your advocacy in a way that will hit their interest rather than impress them with your portfolios.
3. Use Your Theme
From font size and style to its colors are important elements, colors and its hues will draw attention, and inserting pictures or caricatures have power to immortalize your campaign.
A picture that can tell a thousand stories is an indicator of excellent campagin. Josephus B. Cayabyab
4. Use Technology
In this generation, the 4th industrial revolution is all about technology where the combination of research and innovation have transformed to something great to reach the masses for consumption. A successful campaign should be consumed with ease by your target market through the help of technology. A campaign may be spread through different platforms at a lesser costs such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and many more.
5. An Advocacy Campaign should be S. M. A. R. T.
Simple Measurable Achievable or Attainable Realistic and Relevant Time-bound
Define a Specific Outcome Each objective must define a specific outcome. The goal should contain enough detail so that the people involved understand what results are expected. Generalities only create confusion and lead to poor results. Just having an objective to “get more business” is not helpful to anyone.
Defined Measurable Results An objective without a defined measurable result is like playing football and not keeping the score. Numbers are essential for keeping track of your progress toward a goal and defining the expected outcome. It is impossible to know if an objective has been reached unless it can be measured.
Goals Must be Achievable One way to assure certain failure is to set goals that no one believes can be reached in a realistic time period. Objectives are achieved by taking well-defined, measurable small steps on the path to the goal. People must agree that the goals are attainable, and that they have the tools and skills needed to reach the objectives. The sales staff has agreed that increasing sales by 4 percent in the next six months is realistic and achievable.
Goals Must be Realistic Goals must be formed in the context of current economic conditions and realities of the business climate. It would be unrealistic to set a goal of increasing sales by 25 percent when a recession is looming on the horizon, and when three new competitors just opened up down the street.
Deadlines to meet a Timely Goal Experience shows that goals are not reached if there is no deadline specified. Efforts toward achieving a goal will meander, if a time expiration does not exist.
Thanks to the author James Woodruff James has been writing business and finance related topics for work.chron, bizfluent.com, smallbusiness.chron.com and e-commerce websites since 2007. The author also cited 3 references and 1 resources: References (3) University of North Carolina Wilmington: Writing SMART Learning Objectives Alma College: Setting “SMART” Goals and Brainstorming an Action Plan University of Wisconsin: SMART Goals Resources (1) Entrepreneur: How to Create a Marketing Plan (Source)
6. Palatable to the Eyes
The marketing campaign should be eye-catchy. Yes, it should be palatable to the eyes. In making a campaign poster the eyes digest the message first before the content. Deciding to what picture or medium of interest to paste in your campaign matters a lot. It is like being attracted to a good-looking guys or gals first and learning about their character comes after and not the other way around, right?
7. Know your Grassroot (Grassroot Marketing)
Grassroots marketing, sometimes known as guerilla marketing, starts from the ground up. Instead of launching a message you hope will appeal to many people, you target your efforts to a small group and hope the group will spread your message to a much larger audience. Grassroots marketing often uses unconventional or nontraditional methods. Grassroots marketing often costs less than more conventional marketing efforts, but can produce big results. Target people or groups you identify as influential, then count on them to use their influence to spread the word about your product or idea. (Source). The source also cited:
Northwest Missouri University: Grassroots Marketing for Leaders; 2011
“Web Marketing for the Music Business”; Tom Huchison; 2008, pp. 37-38
The defining idea behind grassroots marketing is one of audience and intent. Whereas some campaigns aim to reach as many people as possible (think a brand awareness campaign on the Display network, for example), grassroots marketing is the principle of purposefully targeting a highly niche group of people in an attempt to persuade that group to then propagate your message organically. Grassroots marketing relies heavily on social media and virality to succeed. Since the idea behind this kind of campaign is to encourage people to share a story, it follows that social media is pivotal in making this happen. (Source)
More tips at https://fitsmallbusiness.com/grassroots-marketing/
8. Start a Storytelling Campaign
According to Adrienne Irizarry, Principal Owner, Leviosa Communication that “One of my most successful campaigns was a storytelling campaign. We chose several success stories with our product and told the story of how they use it and how by using it they were successful. We ran it as a series of short stories on our website and through social media — one a week featuring a different person or business — and it was wildly successful. People trust people so, in a way, it was a mini influencer campaign, long before influencer marketing really became a buzzword in the marketing world. The person featured shared it, that person’s family shared it and the ripple effect was remarkable. Our return was triple what we had projected.” (Source)
9. Ethical Response to an Issue
The advocacy campaign was not meant to destroy directly a certain entity but rather discourage bad habits (ex. anti-smoking drive) , make a call to end a certain issues (ex. domestic violence), imply for an action (ex. corruption), deliver message of change because of unfair practices (ex. discrimination and gender equality issues) and create an awakening ideas (ex. HIV-AIDS stigma, the downside of miing).
Although it is sometimes very challenging to convey an advocacy campaign without offending certain groups. If the advocacy campaign’s objective is to act against powerful forces such as norms, culture, heritage, politics, religion, influential people/group and history. A friction might arise in ascending rate and may create division. When touch these topics, sometimes we can only influence the tip of the ice berg which is just 1% of what we see. Therefore, strategy will bring huge help to achieve the goals. To evaluate the success of campaign is to check wether majority understand the message. If the campaign fails it does not mean that a certain cause or advocacy let say your group is campaigning to fight fake news, misinformation and disinformation but the public still believe of what they think is right (perception-based) and not what is legitimate. This may be because the opinion-maker of the information is influential and powerful in nature and they are part of spreading these fake stories as part of their propaganda. Here are the list of fake news site according to Wikipedia Philippine Star and Rappler. According to Preen.ph a certain known personality spread fake news that might influence its five million followers to think what she share is legit news (source).
More of related topic here: Statistics & Facts about Fake News, Perceived frequency of online news websites reporting fake news stories in the United States as of March 2018, I have falsely believed a news story was real until I found out it was fake, Where Exposure To Fake News Is Highest, Over 65s ‘more likely’ to share fake news on Facebook
The desire to create meaningful place to live, implementing goodness and fairly to one another and ethically sustainable issues may be hard to find most especially in religion, politics, business world and sometimes in journalism/news. The good news is universal truth always prevail in an advocacy campaign, and when I say universal truth it should be priciple-based (ex. universal gravitational pull), science-based (ex. depression is not just feelings but a mental illness), and well-researched (ex. Generation-Z respond to edgy campaigns)
10. Details of your Organization, Institution, Brand, or Group
Ofcourse you do not want to be labeled bogus or anti-social or central processor of destabilization, so, never ever forget to pin the profile of your group you are representing. Your brand will always make sense and its details will add legitimacy for your purpose such as name of the group/organization, valid email address (sometimes it looks legit if the email represent the company or organization you are part of ex. marketing_campaign@yourorganization.org.ph), contact details etc.
I have cited some of the BEST advocacy campaign available on different website, check them out below.
https://www.damyantiwrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/smoking_kills_by_pu3w1tch.jpg
https://www.damyantiwrites.com/2011/04/14/a-z-l-is-for-lie/
https://osocio.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Unicef-Schweiz-stopp-gewalt-an-madchen-pakistan.jpg Source
http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/240/5/3/wipe_out_homophobia_by_wipeout_homophobia-d4835i7.jpg Source
https://www.devex.com offers one of the BEST site I’ve seen for an advocacy campaign, follow this link.
HATS OFF TO ONE OF THE BEST ADVOCACY COMMERCIALS
References:
Do you want to contribute in this article? Feel free to message the author. Have a nice day!
References:
YLAI. (2017, May 12). 5 tips for building a successful advocacy campaign | YLAI Network. (2017, May 12). Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://ylai.state.gov/tips-for-building-successful-advocacy-campaign/
Barcia, L. (2015, November 30). 4 great development advocacy campaigns. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://www.devex.com/news/4-great-development-advocacy-campaigns-87380
Myers, Cynthia. “Definition of Grassroots Marketing.” Small Business – Chron.com, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/definition-grassroots-marketing-23210.html. Accessed 13 February 2019.
Woodruff, Jim. “Example of a Smart Objective for a Marketing Plan.” Small Business – Chron.com, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/example-smart-objective-marketing-plan-11290.html. 05 February 2019.
Dizon, A. (2018, June 20). 25 Creative Grassroots Marketing Ideas & Examples 2018. Retrieved February 14, 2019, from https://fitsmallbusiness.com/grassroots-marketing/
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