Do you know at what stage of a campaign organic social media works harder than paid social media?
Do you know which combination of digital tactics encourage action more than others?
As public sector communicators we are compelled to consider: ‘What is the action we want people to take as a result of our communications?’
Whilst its good practice to consider that question, the answer will depend on how much a person knows about your endeavour to start with. It’s worth recognising that there are different actions along a customer journey and that we may want different audiences to do different things.
You may be running all manner of community engagement and communications campaigns. The range of actions that council comms teams deal with is vast:
- Raising awareness of your campaign
- Driving people to your website for more details
- Encouraging people to download information
- Encouraging people to transact online
- Soliciting sign ups
- Ensuring you have enough feedback to change policies
- Getting people to act on information
- Encouraging participation in consultations
- Encouraging behaviour change
So how do we start to make sense of all these variables?
There’s a simple tried and tested model of behaviour change we can apply to any of these actions with just 5 steps.
Precontemplation – this is where your audiences are not aware of your campaign, your intent or your communication initiative or do not like it or agree with it.
Contemplation – this is where people are considering, but are not yet bought into your campaign or communications intent.
Prepared for Action – this is where people are bought into and agree with your campaign, but as yet, haven’t taken the desired action. It maybe that its hard for them to do, or there is no compelling deadline. You will need to make the action as easy as possible to do once people are at this stage.
Action – this is the action you wish people to take as a result of your communication.
Maintenance – This is where you encourage loyalty and stimulate advocacy.
These stages are not linear. You will want to create advocacy at the beginning of a campaign and arguably where influencer marketing works well.
Where it gets more complex is that different audiences may be at different stages of the model and require perhaps different creative treatments.
Knowing and understanding which different digital tactics work better at different stages of the behaviour change model to help people move along the customer journey to your desired action and intent is critical.
On the 23rd March we are running a 3-hour course to dive into the right digital tactics at each stage of the behaviour change model, helping you to develop campaigns that are using the right tactics to better effect.
We’ll look at the behaviour change model and what digital tactics sits where, as well as running through a brief to test and learn together in a safe space applying the model to a real campaign.
To sign up and for more details below:
