Fun fact: before I became Nudge’s Senior Customer Success Manager, I was a Nudge program lead. Meaning, before I started helping others get the most out of our frontline communication app, I was at a frontline organization myself, deploying Nudges and updates to 3,500 retail associates, corporate office, factory, and warehouse employees.
After 15 years working in L&D and internal communications, I know first-hand the struggle of communication teams: you want to drive knowledge retention and employee engagement, but to do that, you need truly effective communications – and that takes a lot of time and effort.
That’s why I’m always so excited to talk to our customers about Nudge’s communication campaigns. To me, this is the communication leader’s secret weapon in creating impactful, trackable, and repeatable internal communications that take as little time and effort as possible.
What are communication campaigns?
Communication campaigns help you to distill information into effective (and trackable!) content clusters that you can deploy strategically over a period of weeks. Corralling your internal communications into campaigns allows you to focus on memorable, bite-sized updates all geared toward a common goal, such as boosting safety awareness or mobilizing on a product launch.
A campaign-based approach to communication also allows you to focus your efforts and avoid information overload, while also boosting retention. As opposed to just sending a pile of information all the time, you’re fine-tuning your message to ensure that you’re prioritizing the crucial information needed to drive key behaviors.
Creating effective internal communications is very much like putting a puzzle together. Could you imagine trying to assemble a puzzle without the reference image? It can be done, but not efficiently, and it will take you twice the amount of time to complete it. The active use of calendars and campaign templates eliminates guesswork and helps you put together effective content strategies with ease.
And, done right, they can save communications leaders a lot of time and energy (And who doesn’t want that?). So today, I’m giving away my top four trade secrets for using Nudge campaigns to save time and effort on your frontline communications:
1. It’s all about the structure
So when it comes to building out an effective campaign, the best place to start is looking at core structure types to make creation easier and ensure you’re not becoming repetitive. In Nudge, this is super easy using our 5 Nudge types.
- Announcement: used to drill down messages or remind employees of key dates like upcoming promotions
- Knowledge: used to validate the retention of key messages sent throughout the campaign
- Survey: used to solicit feedback on a given topic
- Buzz: used to create a repository of longer format information that can be referenced at any point during a campaign
- Spark: used to prompt a discussion by posing a leading question to your employees
You can create comms using these content structure templates and then drag-and-drop them into your campaign calendar to find the right mix. Doing this saves you time because you’re working off of tried-and-true templates that make creation easy – plus when it comes to scheduling, you can move Nudges around and get a birds eye view of what a campaign looks like.
Pro Tip: Right place, right time
When scheduling your content, place must-have content before peak days and times within the business to increase the likelihood of response without causing a distraction.
2. Defer to the experts
When you’re creating content for a new campaign, bring in subject matter experts! Having “guest posts” in your internal communications brings in new voices and reduces the burden on a communications team. For example, if the campaign was focused on driving awareness of an upcoming product launch, you might want to have your lead buyer provide some context on why it’s such an exciting product.
But of course, for this to save you time and energy, you don’t want to be managing their content – ideally they’d be adding it in themselves! In Nudge, bringing in other voices is easy using the “Content creator” role, which allows anyone to contribute content, and then the program lead can approve and schedule. This saves time and needless red tape of sourcing content from various teams around the organization. Your experts focus on adding in their compelling content, and your team can focus on building out the campaign.
Pro Tip: Carve out real estate for your experts
If you’re working with subject matter experts on a regular basis, carve out specific comms real estate for them on a weekly or monthly basis. This eliminates the guesswork around when communication on a specific topic should be deployed, and helps your experts to plan around the content asks.
3. Validate the performance
Like anything in business, measuring performance gives you the ability to improve results. This is no different in the world of frontline communication. If you’re able to track and measure how effective your content is, you can get a clear sense of what’s working and what’s not – and, therefore, where you should be allocating your time.
Luckily, Nudge Analytics has a wide array of metrics to help you validate the overall efficacy of your communication campaigns. On the “Campaigns” dashboard, you can track knowledge, performance, and points metrics around specific campaigns will help you understand how effective your campaigns are. They can be broken down by location, role type, content category, and date/time to help your team identify the winning recipe for future campaigns.
Tapping into this information allows you to gain a firm understanding of the high engagement topics and post times to help you further optimize your content and tighten your content strategy.
Pro Tip: Rate your campaigns to identify your success factors
Another way to track the performance of your content is through Campaign Ratings. After a campaign is completed, you can tell us how effective it was at reaching your KPI goals and knowledge rates, and provide an assessment of overall success. From there, your CS team will analyze the campaign to identify the factors that influenced the outcomes. These insights will be used to improve your campaign templates!
4. Template, don’t cut-and-paste
You’ve now created the content, delegated it to subject matter experts, validated the performance of your communication campaigns… Now you’re ready to start creating a consistent communication strategy.
Once you start to identify the winning campaigns and content types, duplicate the elements that work. And while you COULD go down a pretty deep cut-and-paste rabbit hole, there’s a smarter way to duplicate. Though cutting and pasting content is considerably faster than starting from scratch, multiplying that effort across an entire campaign will only serve to eat away at your precious time.
This is where our campaign templates feature comes in. If you have a campaign with a high level of engagement, you can save it into campaign templates with the click of a button. This process will keep the deployment days/time, the content created, and the segmentation that was used in the initial campaign, and will save it all anew as drafts.
You can also duplicate content to avoid repeating the work on pivotal content that goes out on a specific cadence week over week (like a newsletter update or open positions from HR). Simply duplicate the specific Nudge and change the deployment date!
Depending on the size and scale of your campaigns, I’ve seen this tactic save communication leaders anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours a week. Don’t underestimate the power of a template.
Pro Tip: Use Nudge templates
Want to deploy a campaign but not sure where to start? If you don’t have previous campaigns to build from, use our templates instead! We have templates for driving product knowledge, community building, and more!
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Done right, communication campaigns can improve the effectiveness of your content, while saving you time and energy. And with Nudge, building campaigns could not be easier – with robust analytics and templates, you’ll be deploying your first campaign in no time.