The key to effectiveness – putting your audience first
As marketers, maintaining a broad perspective can be difficult. When you’re in the thick of planning, running campaigns and reporting, it can feel a bit like you’re chasing your tail just doing the do. But if you don’t take the time to step back and consider the bigger picture, your marketing activity is at risk of falling flat.
Regardless of what you’re working on, the most important thing to remember is the client. That sounds obvious, but so many of us fail to think about our audiences critically. Your marketing shouldn’t be about who you are and what you do, but who your clients are and what you help them achieve.
But before you get to that stage, you need to establish who your clients actually are.
Businesses are often guilty of thinking about their clients as one amorphous ‘other’. ‘Lawyers’, ‘CEOs’, ‘the technology industry’, ‘the financial sector’. But just like us, our prospective clients are real, individual people, with real, individual needs.
And these needs will vary across industries and roles. A marketer at a finance firm will have different objectives to the same firm’s operations manager. And an operations manager at a publishing company may have different objectives again. Your challenge is to address these objectives in a way that’s authentic to your business proposition.
Adapting to audience needs through segmentation
Dividing your audience into different groups is called segmentation, and this helps you develop targeted marketing strategies that are more likely to resonate.
By way of example, in my past life at an IT company, our target clients primarily sat within the finance industry – but we spoke to different people with different priorities within those businesses. Our communications for an IT Manager needed to be different to our communications to the Finance Director.
The IT Manager was usually concerned about external agencies stepping on their toes, so our message to them was always about complementing, not competing with, the internal team. Helping them achieve more, provide a more seamless experience, and create a better internal perception of the IT function.
The Finance Director, on the other hand, was more concerned about stretching budget further, boosting efficiency, and making use of existing technology investments. For this segment, our messaging hinged on IT training to help staff utilise resources, improving resolution rates so the same issues weren’t recurring, reducing downtime that led to unbillable work, and nipping problems in the bud before they had a chance to impact the bottom line.
While the products and services were the same, the way we communicated them had to flex depending on who we were speaking to.
A helpful way to apply this kind of thinking is to remember that when it comes to our careers, we all want the same things: to be good at what we do, and for our day-to-day to be as painless as possible. Your messaging should tap into that.
Consider how your product will help your prospect impress their boss. How it will help them meet objectives. How it will ease their workload. Those are the messages that will resonate.
Tangible benefits, not shiny features
By focusing your marketing solely on the features of your services, you’re relying on your audience already knowing exactly what they’re looking for and how your services can help them – but that’s not often the case. Shifting your marketing to directly address the client benefit or need will create a far more appealing and relatable narrative.
Apple’s iPod marketing is often used as a good example of benefits vs features. Which of the following is more appealing to you – “3GB of storage” or “1000 songs in your pocket”?
How to reframe your content strategy to meet your audience where they’re at
1. Be clear about your positioning.
Positioning defines the value your brand offers target consumers and helps you focus on what matters most to them. Establishing a clear and compelling value proposition that resonates with this audience is key. It can be as simple as “We help complex organisations communicate technical subject matter with clarity”.
2. Use tailored marketing tactics for each segment.
If you’re targeting CEOs and senior executives, roundtable events are a good way to get people in a room with something that feels valuable to them. If you’re aiming at marketers, LinkedIn campaigns can capture their attention while they’re on social media duty.
3. Consistency and persistence is key.
Keep at it! It takes an average of seven touchpoints to capture a prospect’s attention and lead to action. These touchpoints might include emails, event invitations, sponsored ads, an editorial feature or meeting at a networking event.
4. Focus on the client need.
Scrutinise every piece of content you produce by asking yourself, ‘so what?’. Put yourself in the client’s shoes. If what you’ve said doesn’t directly relate to them, reposition it.
5. Measure and adapt accordingly.
As with anything, there will be some trial and error. Keep track of how campaigns are running, recording metrics like response rates, engagement rates and sign-ups. This will tell you which tactics work for which audiences. As we like to say at Stratton Craig, what we can measure, we can improve.
How we can help
At Stratton Craig, we’re not just writers – we’re strategists. Our team will quickly get to the heart of your organisation and what you do, who your audience is and what matters to them, and how best to capture their attention through impactful writing.
Get in touch with us to learn more.
