Crafting a Message

One of the most overlooked area of business is developing a clear message. It seems that most businesses just state what they do in all of their marketing and advertising allowing the potential client to hopefully make the connection that they need that product or service.

We are emotional beings that make decisions on those emotions. Once we make that decision, we look for analytical ways to justify those decisions. Because of that, any messaging must begin with an emotion.

What do you want your customer to feel when they engage with your brand? This may be on social media, your website, or even through your print marketing. Deciding what feeling you want your potential client to feel is your first step.

Deciding the emotion doesn’t have to be a challenge. An attorney may want the emotion to be confidence or trust. A cup cake retail shop may want their customers to feel a sense of nostalgia. That emotion should then drift through all of your marketing efforts using color, graphics and the words you use.

We are no longer within the service age, but in the experience and transformation age. While, of course, service is important, that aspect of business has been made a commodity. People will engage more with a specific experience or transformation.

This is never more clear than a gym. All of their marketing focuses on the transformation of the person who uses their gym. They never say, this is a place to come in and sweat and have your muscles hurt for days. Their focus is the end result.

That is how your messaging needs to focus. Once you have the emotion, what is either the transformation or experience you want your customer to have? If you run a service type of business, it may be something along the lines of how your customer will feel when you are providing them your service.

Finally, once you have the emotion and transformation or experience, you want to focus in on what problem you are solving. It always amazes me how many websites I read and still don’t really know what the company does. Don’t make it hard for your potential client to know what you do and how you can help them.

Since you know your audience, you can specifically speak to specific issues they are facing. You understand the stress this puts them under or maybe by using your product or service, it will provide a more streamlined approach for your client. It really doesn’t matter. Talk directly to the value of what you do, in your client’s terms.

Focus on the value, from your client’s perspective. It is easy for you to look at your business and see all of the value you provide. But looking at your business from the outside often times doesn’t speak to that value at all. Why should a client use your product or service? What does it do for them? What problem does it solve? Why YOU?

At Operation Crusader, we know these conversations are not easy. If you need some help walking through the conversation, please just reach out and let’s talk. We would love to have a conversation with you.

Know Your Audience

One of the first topics discussed with every client is, “who is your audience?”  Typically, I get the response, “everyone.”  This is where many of the challenges begin.  What the business owner is hoping for is to cast such a wide net so they don’t miss anyone who may have an interest in their product or service.  However, casting such a wide net leaves huge gaps in their marketing so they miss the people who they are really looking to attract.

Before we jump into identifying your audience, we should define what an audience is.  An audience is a group of people with specific characteristics.  Sounds simple enough, but the real challenge is narrowing your audience scope. 

To identify your audience you can either begin wide and work narrow, or work narrow and expand.  For instance, a general audience may be “women.”  However, for a marketing approach to be effective, the scope needs to be narrowed.  Do you cater towards all women or women from a certain social economic level?  Is it regionality an issue or are you exclusively only?  Are you looking for women that hold a professional career?  Retired women?  Single women?  Married women?  The questions could go on forever.

Why is this so important?

The narrower your audience scope, the more effect communication becomes.  The reason for this is that you can speak more specifically about struggles and situations that person experiences.  It allows you to engage and connect with your potential client specifically.

One of the core purposes in business is to find a need and fill it.  For your potential client to feel you empathize with their situation so that you can help them, you must gave a narrow enough scope to engage on more specific terms.  This allows you to use words and phrases that have a specific impact on their situation.

Don’t go too far.

One of the dangers of narrowing the scope is taking things a bit too far.  For instance, an audience scope of left handed women who like to wear red and has peanut butter for breakfast every morning creates such a small market that it will make your marketing effort difficult.  Now, certainly, there are some businesses that have to have such a narrow scope.  However, for the most of us, we need to engage a bit larger of an audience.

Can you have more than one audience?

Certainly. Most companies have a primary audience, a secondary audience, as well as a tertiary audience.  For instance, a college admission office may have high school seniors as their primary audience.  But there is another audience they need to be aware of, the student’s parents.  So the parents become the secondary audience.  Finally, one of the biggest resources is the alumni.  They become the tertiary audience.  So when the college communicates, they need to be aware of the impact on each of those audiences.

On top of the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences, you may have a completely separate audience for another aspect of your business.  For instance, a company may be broken into categories such as sales and repairs.  Each specific category may have specific audiences that engage with that category.  Most companies have two or three distinct audiences depending on their make up.