How to Prioritise your Stakeholders and Why you Should

Nobody has unlimited resources, so it's important to prioritise which groups you'd like to target. Account Executive Tom Horn explains how to do this.

Prioritisation is hard. Choosing to target your communications at some groups but not others feels exclusionary and counterproductive.

However, narrowing your audience is often far more effective than trying to be all things to all people. Prioritisation is a necessary and useful activity which provides focus and allows you to streamline your resources, maximising their efficacy.

Without having a clear idea of which part of your audience you want to prioritise, your communications can lack direction and purpose. Therefore, it’s important to decide who your most important targets are and pursue them relentlessly, rather than half-heartedly flailing between different groups and making little impact on any of them.

On our podcast Turning Up the Volume this week, we discuss how to identify, segment and target your audience. Prioritisation is a key part of this process, and of the success of a wider communications strategy: Without a clear target audience, your messaging will never land as successfully as you want it to, however well crafted it is.   

Here are three factors you should consider if you want to prioritise well.

 What do you want to Achieve?

An obvious question, but one which is all too often ignored. Your campaign should be razor focussed on your target audience, and you should pick your target audiences based on what you want to achieve from your campaign.

If you’re looking for investment, make sure your campaign speaks to the issues that investors want to hear about, such as your intellectual property and business growth.

If you want to generate leads, present yourself as a proactive, dynamic company that gets results for your clients.

The differences in these messages may seem relatively marginal; they’re both presenting the business as exciting, unique and effective, but these subtle distinctions can be the difference between someone engaging with your campaign and not.

If a stakeholder isn’t getting you closer to achieving your stated aim, you shouldn’t be prioritising connecting with them through your messaging.

Gap in the Market

If you’re looking for quick growth, delivering a campaign targeting a group of people who aren’t well catered for offers the most potential for success.  

When you prioritise them and find a way to connect with them where others either haven’t tried to or haven’t been able to, you will get a better response than by attempting to pierce an already saturated market.

Identifying these gaps is hard, and there’s no strict process for doing so, but doing proper market research can be very valuable.

If you’re successful the returns are often quick and become regular, as there is very limited competition and customers become loyal as you made the effort to reach out and connect with them when others didn’t.   

It may take some time, but finding a gap in the market could be well worth the effort.

Return on Investment

The focus of most campaigns revolves around business growth and lead generation. If you’re investing in a campaign centred around these, it’s essential that it generates returns.

In this instance, your focus should be on potential future clients, as they’re ultimately the only ones who can generate the returns you need. There are exceptions to this, as some stakeholders such as the press can be influential in bringing you to the attention of potential clients, but make sure that all roads lead back to business growth.    

Within this, it’s important to prioritise decision makers, people who are actually able to make the financial decision to work with you as well as those who influence them.

If you prioritise ruthlessly, there’s a good chance that your efforts will provide outstanding results.