With digital channels, it is now possible to measure the impact of your communications in quantifiable terms. The impact of course means whether your target audience has read your content, whether they have passed it on to someone else, whether they have acted on the information by issuing a reaction whether positive or negative.
Also, you are now able to know more about your target audience to not only enlarge it, but also finetuning your outreach by communicating at specific times, on specific days or occasions. You understand their demographics better, and you are able to reach out to them through the other subject matters they are interested in.
Communications impact is fundamentally based on Audience Resonance
But before you can do all of that, you have to go back to the basics of communications, traditional or digital, by asking the fundamental question: Does my content resonate with the people I want to reach out to?
- Is the subject matter of interest to my target audience?
- Am I crafting the content in a convincing way through story-telling?
- Is my target audience on platform X (Facebook, Twitter, newspaper etc)?
- How can I make the information more interesting and attention-grabbing on the channel that I have chosen?
- Can my target audience easily identify with the content?
- What do I expect my target audience to do after viewing my content and is that call to action clear?
Communications is about continuous testing and deployment
Remember, no one gets this right the first time round. Communications is about continuous testing and deployment. You need to constantly test your hypotheses based on your data until you achieve your communications goals.
If you think there are more questions one should ask oneself about audience resonance, feel free to comment below or send me an email.
If not, please look at other of my Eureka Moments. If you are interested in the choice of channels and target audiences, here’s another read.
Eureka Moments are not so much moments of sudden realisation or enlightenment like Archimedes. They are moments while I am in my commute when I get to reflect on things that someone mentioned to me, things that I am confronted with, things that I or others have sought a solution for. They are more ‘oh I get it’ rather than ‘I have discovered it’.
