Are your organic communication campaigns not working well for you? You might be doing it all wrong.
Our featured leader for today, Rebecca Blewitt, Senior Communications Manager for Downer Rail & Transit Systems, is straight out of Akolade’s 8th Annual Corporate Comms Leaders Summit 2022 held at the Stamford Plaza Melbourne from 12-14 October 2022.
There, Blewitt had a presentation on “Communicating with no audience and no budget” where she shared with the participants her approach to positioning Downer as an industry leader through three distinct groups; internal staff, audience outside her organisation and the industry as a whole.
Blewitt’s eight years of experience in strategic communications have equipped her in both strategy and tactical implementation. She has completed initiatives related to workforce transformation, infrastructure, public relations, internal communications, staff engagement and events in addition to national advertising campaigns.
Here, we’ll get to know more of her principles and insights in content creation.
You said in your LinkedIn bio that you are a “channel agnostic.” Can you elaborate on this and tell us why people should follow the same principle?
Agnostic in an IT context refers to something that is generalised so that it is interoperable among various systems. While possibly not a common description in communications, I relate it to my role. I am agnostic in that I use any channel for my communications to ensure I get the message to the target audience.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the message is so general that you simply lift and place the same content on every channel. But more that you are open to any of the channels needed to deliver the message to the audience.
Being channel agnostic is important in strategic communications so you look at how your communications can work across any channel to best solve the problem.
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What are the most important lessons in communication that you learned while working across all three layers of the government?
Government Departments and Minister’s Offices are very hierarchical, so the biggest lesson I learnt is that your audience and approver are not always the same. This is further highlighted as you go up the chain of command and each approver has a difference of opinion.
When faced with this I would recommend a few things:
- Remember everyone likes to be heard, so edits to your work aren’t always a reflection of your work and you need to be resilient and not take it personally.
- Always fight for the audience. CX and UX is now bigger than when I started my career, so you can refer to a lot of best practice about this to help challenge those who disagree.
- At the end of the day, if you want your communications to have impact you need to produce it for the intended audience – so if you’re finding your communications aren’t working, maybe check who you’ve produced it for
Do you believe that organic campaigns can be as successful as paid ones? Why?
In my communications career I very rarely have budget, so the vast vast majority of what I do is absorbed, organic and placed onto owned channels.
So with that said, I would like to think I’ve had some success in my career through my organic campaigns! As an example of organic success, earlier this year I did an unpaid LinkedIn post which saw a 17% CTR. The average is about 3%.
Whether it’s as successful will depend on your metrics for success, but I certainly believe in low budget communications and have a 12-year career pointing to various successes.
Read also: Effective communication in an attention economy with Asha Burns (commsroom.co)
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.