Campaign Strategy
The plan behind a multilingual campaign: which communities, which languages, which channels, which message, and how you will know it worked.
Get a quoteMost multilingual campaigns are built in the wrong order. The creative is signed off in English, the language list comes from a national ranking, the media is bought against language groups, and the evaluation question is settled somewhere near the end. Every one of those decisions constrains the ones before it.
Campaign strategy is the work of making those decisions deliberately, in the order that lets each one inform the next.
The decisions, in order
- Who. Not "CALD communities". The specific communities whose behaviour has to change, located to the suburb using ABS Census 2021 data.
- What. The single action you want, expressed as something a person can actually do this week.
- Which languages. Derived from the catchment and the objective, not from a national top ten. Ten languages done properly beats eighteen done thinly.
- Which voices. Who carries the message. Departmental authority and community authority are different currencies and rarely interchangeable.
- Which channels. Where this audience already is, including community media, messaging platforms and organisations that reach people no media buy will.
- How you will know. The measure, agreed before launch, expressed as behaviour rather than reach.
Why the language list decides the campaign
Budget divided across too many languages produces a campaign that is technically multilingual and functionally invisible in every one of them. Concentrated across fewer languages, with real weight and real community distribution, it moves.
Deciding that is a data question first. Springvale in Melbourne's south east is 75.3 per cent language other than English at home across 81 languages (ABS Census 2021). You cannot run all 81. Choosing the right eight is a strategy decision with evidence attached, and it's the one most often made by whoever has the strongest opinion in the room.
What you receive
A written strategy: audience definition with census evidence, language plan with rationale, message architecture by community, channel plan, community partnership recommendations, production schedule and an evaluation framework with the measures set before anything launches.
From there it moves into multicultural marketing for execution, community engagement where relationships need building first, and multicultural research for concept testing before production.
Common questions
Speak to our teamHow many languages should a campaign run in?
Fewer than most briefs assume, with more weight behind each. The number should come from the catchment data and the budget: work out what genuine coverage costs in one language, then see how many that budget supports. A campaign in eight languages with community distribution and real frequency outperforms the same money spread across eighteen with neither.
How long does the strategy phase take?
Two to four weeks for most programs. Census analysis and channel mapping happen quickly. What takes the time is community consultation, and that's the part worth protecting when the timeline compresses, because it's what stops the campaign being built on assumption.
We already have a national campaign. Do we still need this?
You need a shorter version of it. The audience, language and channel decisions still have to be made, and the national platform has to be assessed for whether it holds across the communities in scope. What you don't need is a fresh proposition. That assessment is usually a one to two week piece of work and it prevents the more expensive failure of discovering the problem in production.