Having a creative marketing strategy is great, but if you don’t know your target audience it’s destined to fail.
As any good PR and marketing professional will know, identifying your stakeholders at the earliest opportunity is absolutely crucial.
Stakeholders are the group of individuals, organisations, businesses, councillors, partners or anyone else you need to reach with your campaign message.
Identifying this crucial audience at the start of your campaign, ensures you’re targeting the right media, using the right language, looking at the right social channels, attending the right events, using your budget effectively and so much more.
Knowing your audience really is one of the most vital aspects of any campaign.
For us, stakeholder engagement has played a crucial role in our current campaign with housing association, Pobl.
We have been working with the organisation to promote its Penderi Green Regeneration Project, which aims to support local people in Blaen-y-Maes, Portmead, Cadle, and Penplas, collectively known as Penderi, to connect with their green spaces, and encourage them to take ownership of their natural surroundings.
The project has been supported by local partners the Environment Centre, Swansea Community Farm, Room to Grow and Swansea Council.
As part of this project, we have utilised the full breadth of PR and marketing toolkit, from drafting press releases and social media campaigns, to managing media relations, videography, photography, design, and so much more.
We’ve loved undertaking this work, however none of this would have been effective without the crucial stakeholder engagement piece.
Identifying key stakeholders alongside Pobl before embarking on the campaign, has been key to its success.
We attended numerous Pobl events across Penderi and spoke with people within the community to understand how they would prefer to be communicated with.
In doing so we were able to create targeted content to reach this audience far more effectively, encouraging as many local people as possible to attend the Penderi Green Regeneration calendar of summer events.
The outcome of this has meant that more local families than ever visited Penderi’s Swansea Community Farm over the summer. This gave even more locals the opportunity to learn about the natural environment on their doorstep; which is a key objective of the Penderi Green Regeneration project.
In addition to this, we captured the events through photography and video, all of which fed into the overall communications campaign. Our event attendance also provided a golden opportunity to speak directly with stakeholders to ensure messaging evolved in line with their priorities throughout the course of the campaign.
Our campaign was vibrant and used all marketing touchpoints. In working closely with all stakeholders, we were able to create marketing outputs that really resonated with the target audience. Our messaging was shared across numerous hyperlocal social media groups to maximise engagement, we designed posters, targeted local press, TV and radio stations all to promote the fantastic work of Pobl and their partners, within the Penderi Green Regeneration project.
So whatever your campaign and whatever its aim – it’s clear that knowing your stakeholders is the key to success.
And the sooner you start the better!
Find out how we can help you to target your stakeholders in your next marketing and PR campaign.
