Carelessly crafting a media strategy that doesn't take into account the interplay between a medium and your target audience is akin to using screwdrivers to hammer nails. Your role as a communications specialist is to know what sort of approach to your target audience will elicit the desired response. While the words you choose are always important, your words will never reach the right people if your media strategy isn't tailored just as carefully.
The first commandment of any media strategy is to know your audience. If you’re charged with marketing a product for children, aiming your message at adults is usually counterproductive. Equally wasteful is overlooking your existing market research in favor of biased assumptions about your public. If the research shows that your target audience responds to a soft approach, you risk driving them away with a hard sell. If you’re trying to reach a difficult demographic, adopting the wrong tone can be as frustrating as marketing in a foreign language.
If knowing your public is the first step toward an effective media strategy, knowing your medium is certainly the second. Twitter has space constraints that will be unfriendly to complex thoughts. If your message can’t be expressed in 140 characters or fewer, you’re better off avoiding it altogether. Social media sites, such as Facebook, give you more room but impose limits of their own. Be sure to thoroughly research your communications vehicle before composing your first message. At the very least, this approach allows you to structure your message around your chosen media strategy, rather than trying to shoehorn an important message into inappropriate media.
Finally, having learned what you need to know about your audience and your medium, be sure you know how they work together before launching your media strategy. It’s almost axiomatically true that older audiences will be less receptive to social media; consider leavening your media strategy with more traditional approaches such as TV and print. Younger audiences generally resent sales or other corporate messaging on their Twitter feeds; consider a more news-based or less overt strategy for them. Knowing how your audience actually uses its information channels will give you the competitive edge in communicating with people and set your company's communications team apart from the competition.
Following the three commandments of effective media strategy is essential to reaching your goals in business communications. Knowing people, technology, and the interface between them is almost the definition of a successful media strategy. Being able to manage their complex interactions effectively is almost the definition of a successful communicator.
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