Before you begin creating any content, including writing blog posts, which we covered last week, you need to know your audience. Who are you targeting in your messaging? Why are you trying to reach them? And what do they want to know?
Customer Personas
In public relations, we often hear about customer or buyer personas. A customer persona is “a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience.” We give the persona attributes, describing their interests, demographic details, educational background, location, motivations, and challenges. The idea is to this think about this persona “as if they were a real person.” Then we create our messaging with this persona in mind, crafting content for them.
You also might have several customer personas. For instance, if you work for a civil rights law firm, you might want to not only target potential clients but also sources of information to help you build cases. In addition, you might want to target potential partners or sources of litigation funding. Each of these audiences will have a separate persona.
How Your Business Relates to the Customer Persona
Next, you need to think about how your product or service will benefit your customer persona (or personas). How does it make your customer’s life easier? What is the value-add for your customer?
Also, consider your audience’s knowledge of the topic, service, or product and their attitude toward it. Some preliminary research, even talking to members of your audience, will help with this. Otherwise, you might risk being overly technical or nuanced and losing your audience’s interest. “On the other hand, drastically underestimating the audience’s knowledge may result in a speech that sounds condescending.” Moreover, understanding whether your audience has a positive, neutral, or negative attitude about the topic is important and can help you to be more targeted in your messaging. For example, you may need to clear up a misconception or explain why your company responded to an event in a certain way.
Connect to Your Audience to Persuade
According to Forbes, understanding your audience is a sign of respect: “Connecting with your audience is a key part of persuading your audience. Even if one person is standing up front and speaking for 20 minutes straight, there are ways to make this type of communication feel like a conversation, not a lecture. To do so, you need to show your audience that you respect them, their time, their needs and their challenges. You need to demonstrate that you know your audience.”
By understanding your audience, you can “better position your marketing and content,” which increases the likelihood that you will reach your intended audience, speaking to them in a way that truly resonates with them.