In the early days, when you were first developing your products or services, you might have been particularly close to customers and getting their feedback on what they needed to address their pain points. You might have even shared the same pain points yourself, which inspired you to launch the company in the first place. The job of any salesman, however, is to do all the homework on behalf of the customer to create something that will provide value.
When it comes time to develop your marketing strategy, though — no matter what channel you use to raise awareness or drive demand you have to leave that terminology behind. It won’t impress anyone.
Knowing who you are speaking to is a key component of any kind of effective communication. Whether you’re crafting targeted emails or direct mail letters, web banners or blog posts, webcast scripts, or tweets, you need to know who’s on the receiving end.
The customers want simplicity and clarity. Here are some steps to double-check your marketing copy to ensure it reaches your target market:
- Use the words they use: Ask yourself what words would Customer 1 use to search the internet for an answer to his business trouble. Write these words down — and build them into your copy. Your reader will recognize them, and you are subtly setting the expectation that you will speak their language and be attuned to their issues. If you are doing your work correctly, you should find a natural overlap between the words your personas use and the keywords most commonly used to find what you’re offering.
- Create a customized call to action: You may employ targeted marketing tactics like segmentation and lists here, too — for instance, create and send a different iteration of a campaign or email to each persona type. Sure, it creates more work for you. But if it helps you get your point across more clearly to your various audiences — and gets them to act/buy — then it’s probably well worth it.
- Be influenced by influencers: Don’t limit yourself to what’s being said on social media. Also look to how bloggers write about your industry, or how it’s covered by those working in newspapers, magazines, and even broadcast outlets. Journalists are trained to communicate in ways that will be easily accessible to audiences, so follow their lead as appropriate. Even if you don’t see any differences in the words they’re using, pay attention to how they might distill the essence of a product or a customer’s need down to a hashtag. You may be able to use those hashtags in your marketing as well.
- Walk in your customer's shoes: walking a mile in someone else’s shoes should help you gain perspective. For the purposes of content writing and marketing, the goal is to understand your customer. To empathize. And to get a reaction that is natural for them. For you to succeed, you must be able to think from the gut of your customer not your own. You must temper your gut instinct so that you can better understand the gut instincts of others.
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