Questions to Build More Strategy into Your Campaigns

The foundation to any strong campaign is understanding the business-level principles that define success. With a few pointed questions in your toolbox, you can piece things together more strategically.

Within today’s fast-changing digital landscape, organizational roles and relationships are also changing quickly. With goals and expectations constantly in flux, and an increasing need for marketing and sales to deliver on business-level KPIs, understanding your organization’s business-level needs has arguably never been more important. This starts with asking the right questions to the right people to ensure your team’s efforts are meeting the needs and challenges of your top leadership team. By being more strategic in your questioning, you’ll frame yourself as a more valuable asset to the business. When developing your next project, here are a few questions you can ask yourself to transition your role from builder to strategic asset.

What is the change we seek in our audience?

Any project begins with a desire to change an audience’s behavior in some way. While your team, or role, may have its own audience goals, it’s possible that your leadership or other stakeholders may have their own. Asking leadership about what change they seek in audience behavior results in better transparency of the organization’s needs. To be seen as a strategic asset, the question also opens up conversation on how everyone’s interests might better align for growth—without losing focus on the audience need.

Is our idea of the audience backed up by data?

When discussing target audiences, it’s worth re-examining whether your vision of it is accurate or out of date. As a builder, you likely have a more intimate understanding of what the customer loves or reacts to more than others in the organization. Show leadership or others across the organization how important an accurate understanding of the audience is for the bottom line. But what organizations learn about their audience might surprise them, so look for opportunities where you can provide those insights.

Is this the solution we need right now?

There are several factors that indicate whether it’s the right time for a given strategy or solution. A bit of probing at leadership can help them reflect upon whether they’re considering the right platforms or might be falling for hype. Again, consider your audience proximity as someone who works with these platforms. Does the solution leadership is eyeing tap into native user behavior?

Take voice, for example, which many businesses are currently trying to adopt. “Voice is not new, but it needed a user behavior,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “It’s been in phones, watches and browsers but people didn’t pick it up” before Amazon’s Echo devices provided a context that made sense for them.

Is a lack of capability keeping us from using any channels?

It may be a bit bold to ask leadership about uncertainties they face, though understanding perceived limitations doubles as a way to look for new opportunities. Take a moment to also re-evaluate your own skillset, looking for ways you might brush up on your own abilities to meet the challenges leadership are facing.

Upon reaching our goal, what will happen to the organization? The audience? The brand?

Before your next project can develop a win scenario, you’ll need a clear picture of what all the stakeholders will get out of it. Sure, audience or customer well-being is at the top of the list, but what does success mean to everyone else? In a best-case scenario, you’ll be able to achieve all of these indicators of success—which means laying out all the data available to develop the best strategy moving forward.

By teasing out business-level principles, you’ll have a more solid understanding of organizational goals that will help you build upon your next project. Asking the right questions is not only essential to this process, but also asserts yourself as a more strategic asset across the organization. From there, you can help carve a path that satisfies all stakeholders—and might lead to more opportunities for impact, too.