Do You Have a Formal Marketing Campaign to Communicate Your Vision?

A 'formal marketing campaign'?? For internal communication?? Yes. It's that important.

Marketing campaigns are?sets of strategic activities that promote goals or objectives. A marketing campaign is normally used to promote a product, a service, or the brand as a whole to the end customer.

However, I am proposing a formal marketing campaign to your internal customer.

Regardless of how great your long-term vision is, its effectiveness is determined by how well it is communicated. Especially through periods of change, it is crucial to keep the vision front and center. Imagine hiking in the forest through a thick wooded area with many hills and valleys.?The many changes in landscape could cause you to get off course very quickly.?It important in times like this that we keep our compass out of our pocket and our eyes on our true north to ensure we don’t get lost.?It’s the same for your organization.?Keeping your long-term vision in front of your team will help keep them pointed in the right direction.

Now, to achieve the most effective results, campaigns are carefully planned and the activities are varied. We don't want to approach this with the old "shotgun blast" approach. It needs to be intentional and focused.

Here are the general components of a good marketing campaign:

• A clearly defined outcome: In this case, an example of a good measurable goal might be to increase the number of team members who know and understand the company vision; or maybe to increase the number of opportunities for team members to see, hear, and feel the company vision.
• An audience: In this case, you are "advertising" to your internal team members at every level of the organization. Note: Your campaign may look different depending on which area of the organization you are trying to reach.
• An offer: This is your "call-to-action." What action do you want your audience to take when they experience your creative marketing content? In this case, you might develop an idea suggestion system, survey, or some other creative action to know your campaign is working.
• A clear message: Decide on a clear message and maintaining that message across all the assets created within a marketing campaign is essential to its success. How often are leaders talking about the vision? Do each of them have success stories to share? What visuals are you using?

The responsibility falls on leaders to develop a strategy for communicating vision, and leaders and managers to execute that strategy.?Leaders should always be authentic and should consider simple storytelling.?Stories of company success and failures tied to the long-term vision make the vision real for team members.?Storytelling is a highly effective strategy for communicating your vision for change. It helps the listener understand, and when stories help connect employees with the present state and the future vision, storytelling invokes the emotional attachment needed to develop employee engagement.

Regarding your formal marketing campaign, ensure the vision is communicated through multiple channels.?Storytelling by leaders is one channel.?What about newsletters or monitors??Videos? Get creative and solicit feedback from your team.?The best ideas will come from your team!

In this week episode of The Lean Solutions Podcast, my guest is George Trachilis. George and I discuss the Harada Method and how it can benefit individuals and organizations.

What You’ll Learn This Episode:

• Harada Method background and how George discovered it.
• How Shohei Ohtani, the best baseball player in the world, used the Harada Method.
• George’s lessons that will stay with him for the rest of his life.
• How someone can learn the Harada Method for free.
• What is next for the Harada Method??What is the vision?