Once upon a time, PR firms and the clients they worked for looked within when creating an audience journey. It was their values and perceptions that were projected onto the products or issues that ultimately went to market.
Try that with an audience today, and you might as well be living in a fairy tale.
You can’t operate as though you’re in the castle with the moat around you. To pretend perceptions aren’t changed by external forces is to ignore context and, for companies and causes to connect with the public, context is key.
If you’re out of context, you’re out of touch.
Vital to your success is a holistic view of your operating environment — news and technology trends, the social media landscape and your competition’s performance within it and the larger marketplace. Only by collecting and synthesizing that data can you determine not only what differentiates you from others but, most important, where in the current context you can be relevant.
It’s also important to be cognizant of macro and micro context, depending on the audiences you hope to reach. As I recently read in a blog on communications, we may all look at the same moon, but we’re all closest to a different McDonald’s.1
When analyzing data and having those difficult debates over what your mission means and how you can get your audience to hitch to your star, remember:
- Context helps you be more relevant and serve your audience better. It allows you to decide which aspects of your culture are relevant to the situation and make a meaningful connection.
- You don’t exist in a vacuum — or that moat-surrounded castle. Gaining instant feedback on digital and social media lets you analyze your environment that much more quickly and enhance and pivot your work when necessary.
- Context makes moments of connection that much more powerful. In today’s digital landscape, we are building relationships, not making transactions. If your approach is meaningful in context, you’ll forge that emotional bond needed for success.
If you’re out of context, you’re out of touch. Today’s customer journey is complex. They’ve got more messages bombarding them, more choices to make and more devices on which to listen to or ignore those messages and choices. If you’re sounding a flat note from your castle, you won’t have a chance to be part of the music.
