Why You Should Have a 360 Communication Plan
You need to use more than one channel in your marketing strategy.
If you're only using social media, this is probably why you have few sales.
If you only use email marketing, this is probably why you generate no interest.
If you only have a website, this is probably why you get no traffic.
Do you get the point?
As our blog mentioned last week, you need an omnichannel presence.
Or as we like to call it, a 360 communication plan. That's where our 360 services and contracts come from😉.
Your communication and touchpoints need to flow into a funnel, ensuring you're reaching potential clients or customers at different points in their journey - and capturing their contact information for future communication.
What is a 360 communication plan?
Your 360 communication plan includes your marketing, PR, and events strategy. These three business functions enable you to capture your target audience at all touchpoints, skyrocketing your brand awareness and sending them into your sales funnel.
The plan sets out what channels you will use, how you will use them and what activities go within.
It could look a little like this:
Awareness
Active social media accounts
PR placements
Consideration
Website/blogs
Events
Data capture
Conversion
Email campaigns
Sales calls
Shop
Your system can be simple, but you need strength within these channels.
Benefits
Brand awareness - the online and offline worlds are very saturated, and many businesses are fighting for consumers and clients. Gone are the days when you could advertise in the Yellow Page book or hand out a few flyers locally.
Word of mouth will get you so far, so you need a strategy and activities to increase your brand awareness.
A 360 communication plan is perfect for this. Your business will be seen, heard, and spoken of on various platforms, online and offline.
Enhances your company's reputation - when potential clients or customers are in the consideration phase, they're learning about your company and whether to choose you. Having a 360 communication plan ensures that your communications convince the consumer. They can discover your values, see your work, attend events, and more.
You are giving them total confidence in your business.
Reach your goals - whether you're looking for app downloads, product sales, more clients, etc., a 360 communication plan helps you achieve this.
A client example of a 360 communication plan
GIG signed a 360 contract with us. They wanted a single brand voice across various platforms as well as to increase their brand awareness and platform usage.
We created a Marketing, PR, and Events strategy from the brief. From this, we crafted specific campaigns for each area.
We wanted to ensure that they would follow a funnel of awareness > consideration > conversion. Conversion for GIG was the usage of their staffing agency platform.
In the strategy, we suggested to use:
Social media
Adverts
Email marketing
Website maintenance
Events
PR
Since kick-off, we have run their social media channel and have increased their collective following by over 1000, maintaining a consistent broad reach of thousands of individuals per week.
We have run two large campaigns. One primarily through media buying, and the second we supported them with a SKY TV advert.
Throughout their contract, we have consistently secured PR placements for GIG with various stories and placements involving their founder, Antony, in multiple industry-leading articles.
Last year we planned and executed two free panel discussion events with industry leaders in London and Glasgow. The events had over 60 people registered, which was a huge success.
GIG is very happy with our 360 Communication Plan results and remains our client.
Here, you can read more about our marketing and PR approach with GIG.
And more about the event here.
