When I meet founders who have been operating their businesses for over 5 years, I hear them say, “I don’t know what to do with my marketing. The website, emails, and social media feel like it is same old. Plus my engagement numbers for views, opens, and comments have been declining”.
Although this issue could be due to a few different factors, the one I am going to focus on here is messaging clarity. This comes from knowing your audience, which will help you update your marketing.
Audience clarity means knowing who your messaging is for, what situation they’re in, and what they need from you.
For a growing business, it comes before delivery, planning, and every other system you build.
Why Must Your Messaging Change Over The Years?
When your business has outgrown your marketing, it is time to adjust and clarify your audience.
Over the years of operating, your company has gotten better at its work, the clients are better, and the team is bigger (which comes with its own rewards and challenges). Yet the website describes the business as it was at startup or a few years ago.
First, we start with clarifying your audience, both who they are now and directing it towards the audience that fits your strategic plan for company growth.
To get your marketing updated, you need to know who you’re speaking to, and what state they’re in when they find you.
This shapes every system you build afterward. It covers what an audience actually is, how to start defining yours, and why it has to come first.
What Is an Audience in Marketing?
An audience is the specific group of people your messaging is written for, defined by their situation and needs, and by demographics such as age, location, or industry.
If you want your marketing copy to work, you must go beyond only defining an audience by demographics. Too often you probably hear, “Know your audience”, then wonder, “What does that mean and how do I do that?”
Unfortunately, this is a textbook approach and only covers the basics.
Demographics describe who someone is.
Messaging needs to know where they are right now (situation and needs).
Growing founders have an extra problem: the audience they wrote for is not the one they serve today, even if the demographics say they are.
Why Does Audience Come Before Systems?
Every system you build, from research, planning, and delivery to analytics,depends on knowing who it serves and what they need from you.
Business tasks, meetings, projects, and relationships run on this fundamental knowledge. It is the backbone for training teams, providing quality service and products because you know where to direct the work.
The work is to serve the audience.
Messaging follows, and then it sits under everything else in your marketing.
Each system depends on your messaging differently:
- Ideation: what belongs in your content and what doesn’t
- Planning: what matters most this quarter
- Implementation: what to build first
- Delivery: who you serve and what you promised them
- Analytics: what to measure and what counts as working
Systems built without clear messaging get built on a guess, and the guess gets expensive to undo. Outdated marketing is the visible symptom, but that is pretty vague to work from.
How Do You Start Defining Your Audience?
Start by looking at and having real conversations with clients and prospects. Listen for what was happening in their lives and business, not just identifying what they bought from you and how many.
Here are practical tips to use to help you define your audience:
- Sources to use: client emails, sales calls, reviews, and the questions people ask before they hire you or purchase a product.
- Listen for the emotional and mental state, wishes, hopes, wants, not demographics. The demographics are objective and easier to find through onboarding and purchase history, and market research.
- Use their words, not yours, in your messaging – it gives you clues about who they are and what they value, and how they want to relate to you.
What Are You Listening For?
You are listening for the state: where they’re stuck, what they’ve tried, what worries them, and what made them look for help.
Here is a specific list of ideas you can ask yourself about while you have conversations with prospects and customers:
- Where they’re stuck right now, and what a bad day looks like.
- What they’ve already tried, which tells you what language to avoid. Example: a consultant whose clients are tired of hearing “streamline.”
- What they privately worry is true.
- Who they compare themselves to.
- The trigger moment that sends them looking for help.
- What they think the solution is versus what it actually is. There is a gap there to pay attention to – what is the gap?
- Where they’re headed with their company – you want to meet their needs now and as they grow.
Having this data helps you build a connection with your audience and helps them get to know you as well. They see you care and really understand their problems and wants. This will also help you create a stronger and more successful product or service.
Conclusion
Building a relationship and developing audience clarity is not about identifying a list of traits and demographics. That objective data can be useful for SEO and delivery methods and platforms. Instead, it is a person (client) in a particular situation, at a particular point in your business’s growth. Define that first, and the messaging has something to be built from. Delivery, ideation, planning, implementation, and analytics all get easier to decide, because you know who each one is for and what it needs to do.
Start small. Pull up your last five conversations with clients or prospects and read them for what was happening in their business, not just what they bought. What you find there is the foundation of your marketing and messaging. That is where clarity will be found.
Want a Second Set of Eyes on Your Audience?
Gathering the conversation data from prospects and clients is usually straightforward.
Then comes organizing the data, identifying what is most valuable and turning it into a message for your marketing.
This can be the tricky part if you are too close to the data and don’t know how to see it from a fresh perspective: the patterns, nuances, clues, and simple message through it all.
Stuck and frustrated over marketing copy messaging is not a fun place to be.
If you’d like help getting started sorting that part, book a free 20-minute call with me. We’ll look at who you’re speaking to now, where the business is headed, and whether your messaging reflects either.