It’s really easy to forget about them—your target audience that is.
Especially when you’re creating your brochure, your Website, your newsletter, your packaging.
It’s really easy to get caught up in the greatness of your brand, your mission and your purpose; so much so that the target audience takes a back seat.
Not about us.
It becomes about what we like and what we prefer and everyone in the office is all excited but no one remembered to ask the question if the target audience would like it.
I remember working with a nonprofit and we were so passionate about the purpose and the product that we momentarily forgot about what was important to the target audience. They weren’t as hyped as we were about the mission, but they were curious about the project we were sponsoring. The project that benefited them, not our mission to save the world should have taken the forefront.
We have to always ask what’s most important to the end user. We have to remember that marketing is all about the exchange. We give our customers and clients what they need/want and value and we get to keep our doors open another day and provide that service to even more people.
So it’s crucial that we remember them when we’re writing, choosing images and deciding where and how to engage them.
Silence from your audience means there’s a disconnect somewhere and it’s on us to find that disconnect and bridge the gap through focused and relate-able messages and images.
GEICO did a great job of connecting with a particular audience and I blogged about it here. State Farm and Toyota also did a series of commercials that spoke to me and I told my husband those ads were a stroke of marketing genius.
Break the silence.
You want to create messages that connect you to your audience and breaks their silence and doesn’t leave them feeling indifferent about your brand. You have to speak their language, highlight what’s important to them (benefits over features) and keep this at the forefront of all your marketing efforts and not be an afterthought.
This is how you begin to break the silence; that and make sure you’re talking to the right people in the first place.
That’s another blog post altogether.