Be Versatile: launch across channels and languages

‘My strength is in my ability to be versatile.’
—WENDY STARLAND, Singer, Songwriter, and Producer

It was a 19th-century German general who came up with the well-known observation that in military planning, no plan survives the first contact with the enemy. It’s the same in any marketing or communication campaign, and Native Experience (NX) is no different. Even the most well-researched campaign will face unexpected challenges once it meets the public. That’s why every communicator, brand, government department, and non-profit must learn to stay alert, agile and, above all, versatile.

After investing so much effort into drafting your strategy and co-creating with communities, it can be tempting to think that reaching implementation—the GO phase—means you’ve achieved your goal. But as any experienced communicator will tell you, launching is not the finish line; it’s the start of a new race. It takes you into a dynamic, ever-changing landscape that requires versatility and the willingness to be nimble.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the art of being Versatile, learning how to pivot when circumstances demand it, and how to optimise opportunities that might present themselves. When used well, versatility is key to effective communication in dynamic markets where communities grow, sentiments shift, social issues can reframe priorities, and cultural nuances are as fluid as they are intricate.

In this landscape, a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach will almost always fail. Australian communicators—especially those in public-facing roles—must work with grassroots organisations, multicultural media, and local leaders who can offer real-time insights into emerging community trends. These insights help fine-tune your strategy and messaging before issues become obstacles.

Being versatile is crucial in responding to changes as they occur. It means understanding the drivers of community behaviour, preparing contingency plans, and maintaining open feedback loops so you can act before small shifts become major challenges. This proactive stance is made possible through continuous engagement with community contacts and stakeholders who serve as your eyes and ears on the ground.

By now, these relationships should be well established and naturally integrated into your NX efforts. As you enter the GO stage, they become even more critical. They offer real-time insights into evolving cultural norms and sentiments that allow you to fine-tune your strategies and messaging. When you empower these partners and your NX teams as co-owners of the process, you ensure your campaign stays grounded, practical, and impactful in real-world conditions.

It is important to keep in mind the previous stages that form the basis of your approach: being notable to the efforts as a whole, authentic in your messaging, trusted by the audiences, and inclusive in your approach. Now is the time to be versatile in your execution and evolve with the changing dynamics of the campaign and its audiences.

This chapter also explores the tools that can help you adapt to changing realities, the grassroots distribution strategies that can put your campaign directly in touch with the communities you aim to engage, and the short-term metrics that will help you measure your impact—because if you don’t know your impact, you won’t know when to adapt.

We’ll also discuss how to keep your finger on the pulse of community response, ensuring that your strategies are resonant as well as effective—and ensuring that you’re versatile enough to change if you need to as you plan and then launch your NX campaign.

The two stages of GO—Versatile and Evolving—are the most interconnected of all the stages of the NX experience, so it’s helpful to keep a few things in mind to ensure you have the right context:

• Metrics are your closest ally in both stages.
• Short-term metrics allow you to be Versatile, while mid- and long-term metrics allow you to Evolve.
• Versatility helps you make your initial splash in your launch, using grassroots channels to introduce your campaign to your audiences and communities; Evolve takes you into a maintenance and evolution phase.
• Versatility means empowering your audiences and communities with the creative assets they need to generate content themselves as they see fit.

Prepare to Launch: Integrating Strategy and Creativity

An NX launch is not quite like a traditional campaign launch. It requires a plan that transcends traditional marketing boundaries—one that weaves together creative vision, cultural foresight, and an intimate understanding of Australia’s diverse audience landscape.

Before launch, refine your strategies to seamlessly incorporate stakeholder and community insights, ensuring every piece of the puzzle fits. This alignment not only helps your campaign connect with the audiences you’re aiming to reach but also empowers communities with the creative assets and confidence to generate and share their own content.

Strategic Refinement

Before the grand reveal, revisit your strategy. Does it still reflect current cultural nuances, policy contexts or community priorities? If not, it’s time to be Versatile. The process developed in the Trusted stage was intentionally designed to be flexible—to adapt in real time based on insights from grassroots networks. If those insights have changed, tweak your communication tactics and creative execution so they continue to mirror your audience’s current and evolving behaviours, needs, and expectations.

From Awareness to Action: Crafting Compelling Messages

The transition from capturing attention to spurring action is delicate. Your messaging at this stage isn’t just about informing, it’s about motivating. To ensure this, develop a series of steps to align your content with stakeholder and NX team expectations:

• Bridge awareness and action: Ensure your communication and launch efforts connect capturing attention with encouraging meaningful action.
• Design for organic engagement: Develop content that lives naturally on the platforms where your target communities engage, fostering a smooth progression from awareness to consideration.
• Inspire meaningful response: Make sure your messaging in this phase is informative, compelling, and clearly directed toward inspiring action.
• Create a shared checklist: Use this with your stakeholders and NX teams to confirm alignment and readiness. Include key points such as:
• Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Whether it’s ‘Learn More’, ‘Join Now’, or ‘Share with Friends’, ensure that each CTA is crystal clear and provides a direct pathway for engagement.
• Highlighted Benefits: Emphasise the value of the action you’re asking your audience to take. Why should they click, sign up, or participate? Articulate the benefits in a way that resonates with their cultural context and personal interests.
• Reduced Barriers to Action: Your audience is more likely to take action if the process is simple and user-friendly, such as a sign-up form that is concise, easy to fill, and optimised for mobile devices.

Above all, measure clarity through feedback loops—test your messages with community representatives before launch to ensure they read as empowering, not instructive.

Remember, your strategy should be as engaging as it is informative, ready to evolve based on feedback and impact assessments.

Prepare Campaign and Media Kits

Your campaign and media kits need to reflect the inclusivity and shared ownership of the co-creation process.

Campaign Kit: A comprehensive package containing campaign guidelines, individual in-language style guides, and creative outputs for client areas, community organisations and other stakeholders. Include plain-language summaries and visual templates so materials can be easily adapted for localised use across campaigns, councils, agencies or community services.

Media Kit: A ready-to-use package containing press releases, media contacts, and other essential information to support effective media relations. Consider including a short Q&A sheet or briefing notes for spokespeople to ensure consistent, culturally aware communication across all interviews and channels.

Integrating Cultural Insights

Your strategy should respect and reflect the cultural nuances of your audience. The best way to ensure cultural appropriateness and genuine buy-in is by involving your NX teams, ambassadors, community representatives, multicultural liaison officers, and local partners in strategy development and the finalisation of campaign materials. For example, aligning creative with local cultural calendars—such as Lunar New Year, Diwali, Ramadan, NAIDOC Week, or Harmony Week—can significantly strengthen connection and visibility. It’s also important to offer fair remuneration or honorariums when appropriate, as this demonstrates respect for community expertise and time.

Framework Agility: Adaptive Objectives

Your go-to-market plan should be as versatile as the market itself. Avoid setting rigid goals. Instead, create objectives that can evolve with market trends and community sentiments. For instance, a campaign that begins with the objective of improving service awareness in culturally and linguistically diverse communities may pivot—based on community feedback—to focus on participation or behavioural change.

Adaptability is crucial, allowing you to react promptly while keeping long-term goals, such as inclusion, in sight.

Prepare for Versatility

Versatility isn’t just about being prepared to implement changes but being prepared to implement them at speed. Developing or gathering a dedicated rapid response team can address sudden shifts in market sentiment or other immediate needs.

• Be ready to act at speed. Establish a cross-functional team structure and communication plan that supports quick decision-making and execution across departments or partner organisations.
• Include NX Ambassadors and key community stakeholders as part of your rapid-response network. Their cultural and linguistic insights can be vital in shaping real-time decisions and responses that remain culturally appropriate.

Continuous Feedback Loop

Create a feedback loop to refine your strategy continually. Regularly adjust your approach based on performance data and stakeholder feedback.

• Plan for feedback collection immediately post-launch, whether through online surveys, social media listening, focus groups, or direct input from community ambassadors.
• Incorporate feedback channels into your ongoing communication plan. This allows for quick recalibration—adjusting messaging, visual assets, or delivery methods based on what’s working and what isn’t.
• Use local community networks such as neighbourhood houses, multicultural centres, or local councils to gather real-world insights.

This approach builds trust, supports sustainable impact, and optimises resource allocation.

As you gear up for the launch, it’s crucial to stay alert and ready to engage with the unfolding dynamics of the market. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the launch phase is simply about putting plans into action. It’s a critical period for learning in real time and responding swiftly to how the market and your audience interact with your campaign.

Launching a campaign in NX means being prepared to take both proactive and reactive measures. It’s a time to engage with your audiences, listening to their feedback as it happens, and adjusting your course accordingly to maintain credibility and connection.

Strengthening Community Immunity for the Department of Health and Aged Care

The Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care (the Department) partnered with LEXIGO to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake in traditionally hard-to-reach communities. The result was a campaign that demonstrated co-creation in practice. It was launched and adapted through deep community partnerships, ensuring messaging not only reached its audience but was created, tested, and delivered in the languages and formats the community trusted most.

While many organisations take the approach of simply translating information from English into target languages, this campaign developed every piece of content through an innovative co-creation process involving input from more than:

• 300 people online
• 120 community members from 14 different cultural and language groups (Albanian, Arabic-speaking, Assyrian, Chaldean, Hazaragi, Hmong, Pashto, Serbian, Somali, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek)
• 10 in-person consultation locations.

Participants contributed their unique views and sentiments on COVID-19 to shape the campaign messages. Once the initial assets were created, they were tested within their respective communities to ensure the messaging was culturally and linguistically accurate, reflected the co-creation sessions and effectively drove behavioural change.

A total of 1,274 assets were created across the 14 communities, including:

• 2 posters
• 8 social media stories
• 8 social media tiles
• 1 video story.

The campaign did not use above-the-line advertising methods. Instead, it focused on tailored, community-centred approaches that connected authentically at a grassroots level. This included QR codes that empowered community leaders to create print materials directing people to in-language content.

The campaign was launched across multiple platforms tailored to each target audience, including WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Facebook, and SMS, as well as through direct community engagement such as events and discussions. Platforms central to each community’s daily interactions were used, and partnerships with local community organisations were leveraged to amplify reach and engagement.

To date, over 180,000 people have been reached in-language. The campaign generated a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data to measure performance in each target language. It established new benchmarks for multicultural public health communication, demonstrating how culturally informed strategies can drive genuine community engagement.

Through co-creation and trusted partnerships, this campaign shows how culturally tailored communication can achieve measurable impact and lasting connection. It stands as a model for how NX campaigns can translate inclusivity into action—turning collaboration into real behavioural change.

Soft launch: Test, Learn and Implement

If you have time and want more reassurance about your launch, consider a ‘test and learn’ approach in which you assess the effectiveness of pilot campaigns before a full-scale launch. This gives you a chance to tailor your messaging for different regions, platforms or subsets of audiences and evaluate the impact. Your strategy should accurately reflect cultural subtleties and nuances, backed up by cultural consultants or local teams if helpful. Maintain versatility in your implementation with a team structure that enables quick decision-making and action.

Launch

It’s here! Time to launch. The thoughtful execution of your NX campaign takes you back to the work you did scoping out your strategy in the Trusted stage and stress-testing it with real community insights. Your launch strategies might include earned and owned media outreach, partnerships with local councils, leveraging in-language and multicultural media outlets, and grassroots activations through community organisations or NGOs.

The essence of the NX approach lies in the careful development of deliverables that form the campaign’s adaptability, efficacy, and enduring influence. These deliverables—your creative assets, partnership frameworks, distribution plans, and feedback loops—become the structural pillars of your NX initiative.

As part of launch readiness, start integrating short-term performance metrics that track awareness, engagement and reach across your target communities. These early insights will guide your versatility throughout the campaign’s lifecycle, ensuring your strategy remains responsive to audience feedback and grounded in local context.

Launching With Your Channels

As you enter the launch stage, the channels you’ve identified based on your audience personas play a pivotal role. You need to activate both digital and traditional channels in a coordinated effort in order to reach your audience effectively at the right place and time.

Strategic Launch on Selected Channels

Digital Platforms: Use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and WeChat, which can connect local community members and extend your reach globally—especially if your target audience includes migrant or diaspora communities who maintain regular contact with family overseas.

Traditional Media: It’s often a mistake to overlook the power of traditional media. Depending on your audience research, this might include community radio stations, regional newspapers, or even TV broadcasts.

Tailored Approach: Remember, the key is to tailor your launch strategy to the preferences of your audience segments. Younger demographics may engage more with short-form digital storytelling or interactive content, while older groups may prefer trusted local media, newsletters or in-person engagement via community organisations.

Practical Steps for Launching

Channel Coordination: Ensure that your messaging is consistent across all selected channels yet tailored to the unique tone, format, and audience of each.

Timing: Plan your launch to coincide with times when your audience is most active and receptive on your chosen channels. It might also be possible to align this with special community events or festivals.

Monitoring and Adjustment: As you roll out your campaign, closely monitor the performance across different channels. Be prepared to make real-time adjustments based on engagement and feedback. For instance, if engagement is stronger on local radio or via WhatsApp groups, pivot resources accordingly. (We’ll get deeper into short-term metrics soon.)

In this launch phase, your channel selection is about more than just finding a way to get your message ‘out there’. It’s a deliberate strategy to connect with your audience in spaces they trust and value. Your choices should embrace the nuances of cultural sensitivity and resonance, ensuring that your message reaches your audience and speaks to them meaningfully.

Remember, a successful launch is as much about how you communicate as it is about what you communicate. By carefully selecting and using your channels, you’re poised to maximise your reach and ROI, truly connecting with the heart of your audience, whether it’s through digital or traditional channels or PR.

A multifaceted, comprehensive approach ensures a robust launch, combining the extensive reach of digital platforms with the depth and personal touch of grassroots initiatives.

Launching With Community

In NX marketing, grassroots implementation and community partnership become core strategies for achieving genuine engagement by working within local networks, cultural spaces, and communication ecosystems that already exist and are trusted.

While digital platforms and mainstream media have their place, nothing replaces the authenticity of locally led initiatives that reach people in their own languages, through familiar messengers and on the channels they use every day.

Grassroots Distribution: A Case for Community-Centric Implementation

Grassroots distribution is the epitome of versatility in action. It encourages feedback from audiences, so it allows for real-time adjustments. Whether it’s partnering with neighbourhood houses or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations to run workshops, co-designing information materials with multicultural associations, or collaborating with local radio presenters and faith leaders to amplify your message, grassroots efforts take your message to where people naturally gather and connect.

The NX Ambassador Team plays a vital role in this strategy. With their close connection to the ground and direct involvement with various stakeholders, they serve as the campaign’s pulse. Their insights are invaluable for adapting strategies in response to community feedback, ensuring the campaign remains resonant, relevant, and culturally attuned.

The benefits are manifold:

Immediate Feedback: Grassroots initiatives allow for real-time interaction with your target audiences, providing invaluable insights to adjust messages, timing or delivery methods as needed.

Cultural Sensitivity: By engaging directly with the community, you’re better positioned to understand the cultural and linguistic nuances that can make or break your campaign or determine whether a message connects or falls flat.

Enhanced Credibility: Communities are more likely to trust information that comes from within their own circles—such as through a community liaison, multicultural media, or respected Elders—enhancing the credibility of your campaign.

Cost-Effectiveness: While it is definitely not always the case, grassroots initiatives often have the potential to be more cost-effective than large-scale media buys, especially when well-planned and executed.

Community Empowerment: Perhaps most importantly, grassroots distribution empowers the community by involving them in the campaign, turning passive recipients into active participants.

In the implementation phase, grassroots distribution is one of the most versatile and sustainable tools. It allows you to adapt, listen, and pivot in real time, ensuring that messages, campaigns or programs are disseminated among and embraced by the communities you aim to serve.

Provide Tools for User Generated Content

Another vital tool in this phase is User Generated Content (UGC). If you empower a community with a set of campaign materials, guidelines for how to use them, and direct contact with your NX Ambassador Team, they can generate content that truly reflects their communities week by week. That helps turn them from your audience into your advocates.

Your materials might include:

• Community toolkits with logos, visual guidelines, and key messages for councils and local partners.
• Digital assets like social tiles, animations, or infographics translated into community languages.
• Interactive training for community representatives on storytelling, social media use, or event promotion.

The aim is to equip individuals with the knowledge and tools they need to effectively spread the message within their own circles and generate their own content, taking resonance and targeted messaging to a whole new level.

Adapting to Community Feedback

Continuous feedback is central to adaptive communication. Whether it’s through community forums, social media interactions, or direct conversations, grassroots feedback is a rich source of insight.

Feedback Loops: Establish mechanisms for continuous feedback collection, such as recurring community surveys or regular focus group discussions.

Community Ambassadors: Utilise community leaders or influencers as ambassadors who can provide ongoing insights into community sentiments.

Long-Term Benefits

Community Trust: Consistent and adaptive grassroots engagement builds trust, turning your target audience from recipients to active participants.

Sustainable Impact: Grassroots initiatives that evolve based on community feedback are more likely to have a sustainable impact as they remain relevant to the community’s changing needs.

Resource Optimisation: Long-term engagement allows for more effective resource allocation as you gain a deeper understanding of what truly resonates with your community.

By understanding the life cycle of grassroots initiatives and the importance of long-term adaptation, you’re launching a campaign and building a community. And in the world of NX, that is the ultimate goal.

Short-Term Metrics: Components of Impactful Reporting

As you go to market, the need for a robust monitoring and metrics system becomes paramount. A versatile campaign makes informed and strategic adjustments for continuous improvement. Short-term metrics are crucial in telling you how to adapt and pivot, providing immediate insights into the effectiveness of your strategies.

I’ve listed here the type of key performance indicators (KPIs) you might set in order to ensure that your initiatives remain versatile immediately after you launch and to figure out how they might need to change.

Monitoring Performance

This list is not exhaustive, but it will give you a good idea of the type of metrics that can inform any decision to update your strategy. Use real-time analytics tools alongside sentiment analysis and social listening to adapt your approach in response to evolving conditions. Scenario planning—preparing for changes such as climate events, policy updates or new social priorities—helps maintain responsiveness.

For public agencies, this type of data-driven agility ensures accountability and transparency, demonstrating that campaigns are responsive to community needs and that public funds are being used effectively.

Your strategy will be informed by metrics from two main sources:

Real-Time Analytics: Track real-time KPIs to monitor campaign performance and responsiveness.

Community Feedback: Collect and analyse qualitative feedback from community interactions to provide context to your quantitative data.

Remember that the success of any action-driven campaign is inextricably linked to the platform or channel on which it is executed. No one would announce a community fair or recycling program on a niche podcast. In the same way, NX campaigns—whether developed by government agencies, corporates or community organisations—need to consider:

Frequency of Interaction: Platforms or channels should be frequented regularly by the target community.

Nature of Interaction: Some platforms are better suited for passive consumption, while others foster active engagement. Tailor the campaign’s call-to-action based on the nature of the chosen platform.

Best Practices

What and how often you report is up to you. This is more art than science, but the purpose of whatever process you adopt should ensure you don’t miss anything that would require a change in your campaign strategy.

Frequency: Determine the frequency of your reports based on the campaign’s needs and stakeholder’s expectations. It might be weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Customisation: Tailor the reports to meet the specific needs and interests of different stakeholder groups.

Accessibility: Ensure that reports are easily accessible, which might be through digital dashboards, PDFs, or physical copies. Some stakeholders may be happier with one format than another.

Review and Feedback: Create opportunities for stakeholders to review reports and provide feedback, further enhancing the campaign’s versatility.

By embracing impactful reporting, you maintain the pulse of your current campaign and lay the groundwork for future successes. Reporting like this isn’t just a back-end task, as in traditional campaigns, but a strategic tool that will amplify the versatility and impact of your NX efforts and lay the foundations for ongoing management.

The basis of all analysis of a campaign is reliable data. That data can be reported in a number of ways. Depending on your particular situation, some of these are usually the most helpful:

Executive Summary: A high-level overview that captures key achievements, challenges, and next steps.

KPI Analysis: A deep dive into KPIs, measured against the benchmarks.

Community Feedback: A summary of qualitative feedback collected from the community, providing context to the quantitative metrics.

Financial Metrics: An analysis of the campaign’s ROI, customer acquisition costs and other financial metrics that gauge effectiveness.

Recommendations and Future Steps: Based on the data and insights collected, a section outlining recommended adjustments and future strategies.

Versatility in NX means being agile enough to pivot when necessary and proactive enough to anticipate shifts in cultural norms, policy priorities, and community sentiment across Australia’s diverse audiences. This duality requires a keen sense of awareness and a commitment to continual adjustment, refining your campaign to reflect evolving objectives based on short-term metrics such as KPIs.

As the campaign progresses, the focus shifts from its immediate outcomes to its long-term community impact. For that stage—which we call Evolving—you’ll need to track mid- and long-term metrics that measure not only reach and engagement, but also shifts in perception, behaviour, and trust within the communities you serve.

In the next chapter, we’ll see how to measure your campaign’s ongoing impact—from awareness and participation to policy influence or behavioural change—and how these insights can shape future, more inclusive campaigns across government, not-for-profit, and brand sectors in the future.

Key takeaways

• Be versatile and responsive throughout execution, ready to pivot as audience needs and preferences evolve.
• Adapt your strategy in real time based on feedback and shifting market dynamics.
• Maintain open and ongoing dialogue with your audiences to ensure continuous learning and relevance.
• Use feedback and data to adjust messaging, channels, and engagement tactics in line with your campaign objectives.