Building a Channel Framework

We all know how much good stuff goes on in libraries, museums, galleries and archives. The difficult thing for many of these organisations is how to communicate the range of services, events, or collections they offer. But this problem isn’t due to a lack of opportunities, in fact it’s quite the opposite. Alongside traditional channels, the digital space continues to offer new ways to interact with customers, whether through social media, marketing screens or mobile.

So how can your organisation make sense of such a bewildering range of opportunities to reach out effectively to its customers?

We at Ammba are big fans of the Channel Framework. This is a way of managing and organising communications, enabling and informing the mix of channels your organisation employs. It’s a flexible tool which describes channels currently being used, the target audience for each channel and how these audiences typically use them. A Channel Framework will inform which channels work well and which don’t, it will show where gaps exist and point to ways to increase interaction with customers.

By bringing together all of your channels into one single place you will able to manage them much more coherently. A framework will enable you to remove those silos which sometimes exist around points of communication, especially if they have been used by disparate teams or departments. Alongside this you will be better able to understand how much staff time and effort is needed to keep each channel running.

Of course, at the heart of this concept sits the customer. To build a successful Channel Framework it’s crucial that you start with the people you want to communicate with. Who are they? Which channels do they use? How do they like to use them? What sort of messages do they respond to? By answering these questions you can start to develop a better understanding of your target audiences and are able to build a mix of channels which best serves them.

In a multi-channel world, customers will use a variety of different touch points. Whatever the need, it’s often the case that customers will come into contact with several channels before finding the result they are after. It’s useful to think of this behaviour as a journey. Your customers will start in one place and travel across different media to settle in the location that satisfies them best.

To make this journey as smooth and seamless as possible, it’s important that your channels are fully integrated. If any fault lines exist they will disrupt progress, providing a negative experience for customers. To help prevent this from happening, you should ensure that each channel is aligned and that customers are able to recognise the same themes, messages and purpose across each. Coherent branding and look and feel also play an important role in providing a harmonious, joined-up experience for users. Your Channel Framework will help to map out these relationships for you.

Putting into place a Channel Framework will help your organisation to manage its communications far more effectively. It will enable you to pull together those disparate strands into a coherent whole, and in doing so you can deliver the kind of stuff your customers actually want. Which brings us neatly on to the content itself…

Blog by: Matthew Jelfs

 

 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash