Who are You Talking to?
Think about this scenario: You crack a joke to your friends, and the room erupts with laughter. You tell the same joke to your colleagues, and you’re met with silence and blank stares. What went wrong?
You failed to know your audience.
In a perfect world, your audience would be everyone. Everyone would laugh at your jokes, and everyone would feel inspired by your brand. Both of these outcomes require one key ingredient: establishing an emotional connection. Odds are, you aren’t going to have that with everyone. So how do you establish that? First, you need to know who you’re talking to. Then, you need to figure out how what you provide can enhance their lives.
On the surface level, there are several qualities you can check-off that will help you narrow down your audience. Age, location, income, and hobbies are a good place to start, but this only tells you part of the whole story. The most important thing you can learn from them is their problem – and how your brand can provide the solution. Once you know their problem and your solution to it, you can develop messaging and branded touchpoints that can motivate and inspire them to take action. But you can’t do this with everyone.
So, take a moment and ask yourself who you’re talking to. If you can’t conjure up an image, some adjectives, or what their problem is, then you’re just talking to everyone (and no one).
If you try to reach everyone, you’ll be talking to a lot of people who aren’t listening, and your brand will just become white noise. Your strategies won’t be effective, your messages won’t resonate, and your brand won’t form an emotional connection – bottom line.
Instead of trying to reach everyone, you need to get focused.
If you don’t know who your audience is, learn. If you do know who they are, learn more. Research them. Analyze them. Talk to them. Run surveys. Conduct interviews. Ask questions. What do they want? What do they need? Most importantly – how can what you do enhance their lives? The better you know them, the better you understand their pain points – the issues that you should strive to solve. The better you know their pain points, the better you’ll be able to tell them how your brand can help, thus adding value to their lives. Once you know and understand them, you need to make them your North Star – the light that guides you back home when developing your branding strategy. They should be the driving force behind every campaign, social media post, email, newsletter, billboard, blog, podcast – you name it. Because if you’re not talking to your audience, who are you talking to?
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RUSSO is a strategic branding agency that uses consumer insight to change the conversation; forming emotional connections with the target audience. To learn more about Razor Branding visit brandrusso.com, or CLICK HERE to schedule a meeting with one of our Business Development Managers.
