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How can we ensure that our message reaches the right audience and creates the right connect?
Best Answer
First, know your clients and prospects. Create a process where they talk to you and you listen. Turn the results into effective communications and stop using marketing to simply pat yourself on the back.
First, know your audience. Not just the demos, but what are their needs, desires, goals, etc. When you know that, look at your product/service to see how it addresses those needs. Think, too, of how it does it in ways that no other competing product can. And push beyond that to think about the ways in which your product enhances their lives that may not be readily obvious to them. Now, you have the keys to developing a message that reaches the right audience and develops the right connect. And if you know your audience that well, you also know where to find them - TV viewers, internet users, newspaper readers, etc. That allows you to build a strategy laying out 1) the key points or messages you want to convey and 2) the optimal places or ways to convey it. But whatever you do, be present and genuine in your communications. Be engaged with the audience. Reply, chat, take criticism with praise, but stay in the conversation. That's where you really start to build the connect. And the true believers who will sing your praises as well as, or even more compellingly, than you. After all, the word of your family or friends is often more influential than your own.
In a nutshell: Be honest, genuine, transparent, provide viable information, and know your audience before you communicate to them.
I believe the way to have the right message reach the right folks is to provide them with credible, viable and timely information - always. As PR practitioners, we cannot afford to be too self-serving, and we must consider our audiences' needs and how they best like to receive information in this day and age. Being consistent, honest and having integrity are some of the best ways to stay credible and get your message across to the appropriate audience(s). And, they'll keep wanting to hear more from you.
Thanks everyone for your answers - goes back to communicating genuinely about what you have. Jennifer - thanks for sharing your approach - it sounds interesting and I will take a look at your site. We do something similar albeit on a smaller scale for our B2B clients - we talk to a subset of their customers and prospects to understand what will work with them.
Keyword research and SEO will make you stand out above the crowd.
Getting top placements for specific keyword phrases will determine how you connect with the market.
Best,
Reg
Use free tools like Ice Rocket, Social Mention, or Alterian-SM2 (freemium) to setup searches that pinpoint communities or influencers that are engaging on topics relevant to what you do.
Monitor the conversations, create responsive, relevant content, and then dive into the conversation.
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Hi Jayanthi -
We've taken a scientific/statistical approach to understanding our audience(s) so we can better target our campaigns. It's actually experimental design rooted in conjoint analysis (a mouthful for sure).... here is the approach in plain english:
We discover how people feel about key messages describing a product and then find common groups that share these same feelings. We talk to thousands of people (via online survey) about the product and ask them to rate how they feel about product statements. The trick is that the statements are randomly (computer-generated) combinations of characteristics about the product (brand positioning, product features, product benefits, and competitive claims). This way people can't look at individual product attributes, because the statements group several attributes together. Interestingly, this is the same process your brain actually goes through when making product selections in a physical store. By looking at 80-100 of these grouped statements, we can begin to draw a picture about which things people like and which things they don't like about the product. And they cannot "game" the system like they can in a straight survey
The end result is a statistically derived set of rated product messages and groups (or "clusters") defined by their common response to these messages. In other words, we find groups of like-minded people that respond well to the same messaging. These are your new segments! The next trick is to slot your new leads and prospects into these segments... also done using statistics. We identify "markers" that are similar in the clusters and put people in their likely cluster.
Whew! Probably more info than you expected. Please see the example on our website if you want more(http://www.marketnetservices.com/solutions/advanced-lead-nurturing.aspx). I'm also working on a case study showing how we did this very same thing for the American Heart Association recently and doubled their click through rates. I plan on posting it to Focus so stay tuned.
Jennifer