Tin Cans, Walkie Talkies & Megaphones: Where’s your message?
TL;DR: Whenever you open your mouth to speak, think about what your audience wants to hear and how that’s different than what you want to say.
Bona Fides: Early in my career I was responsible for an advertorial magazine for a local community hospital. One of those inserts you toss with Sunday’s paper. By considering what my audience wanted to read vs what my organization wanted to say, I changed that magazine from advertorial to a must-read that went into reprints that the local American Heart Association chapter kept in stock. Now that magazine is self sustaining through advertising revenue.
The Situation
No matter what size business you have, you are there for an audience. Ideally, you know who that audience is: What they want, what they love, what they hate, where they shop and who they listen to. If you’re nodding along still, that’s excellent.
“But Steph,” you say. “I have this great offer that’s perfect for my audience! They simply MUST know!"
Awesome. Let’s talk.
Assessing your Mess(age)
Let’s take a beat and consider your message.
If you’re in stage one, your message is probably something that would work for a tin-can telephone. It’s simple and direct, something like: Company X now has Y offering at Z price! And it works if you’re talking to that one buyer who is looking for exactly that, exactly then. A one-way, short-wave broadcast in a crowded market.
Stage two is more like a walkie talkie. You’re speaking to a broader audience but still want to get your point across: "If you need Y, Company X has it! Today only Z price!” You’re appealing to the buyers in-the-know with a broader message. What you’re still doing, however, is focusing on what you want to say. Again, this has its place with knowledgeable customers!
In my experience, and the way I took that small magazine from an advertorial to awesome (sorry, advertorials, I know you have your use!) is by flipping the script and considering what my audience wanted to hear. For instance, I needed to let them know that the hospital had a brand-new cardiac catheterization lab that would save untold community lives in the future. Let them know just that: “We have a brand-new lab with myriad capabilities,” it might interest the subset of audience that has heart issues, recently underwent cardiac catheterization or had a loved one who did.
But on the California coast in the early 00s, keeping heart healthy was high on people’s minds. Not to the extent that they wanted to know about their friendly neighborhood cath lab, but taking early and preventive steps to live a healthy lifestyle was the top of every news hour, morning show and blogosphere entry.
That magazine took messaging to Stage 3: Megaphone. By flipping the concept of “what message we need to get out” by considering “what our audience wanted to (and was ready to) hear, we attracted a broader audience than our knowledgeable few with a wider message scope that (not-so-coincidentally) fit in exactly what we wanted to say.
Instead of a news brief and a fancy picture of the new cath lab, we had local cardiologists submit frequently asked questions. We had a quiz about health overall. Our rehabilitation center staff provided exercises and recipes to try. The maternity and children’s health center provided tips and stories of how to lead a heart-healthy life. So by the time readers got to that two-page spread highlighting the new cath lab and pointing out its lifesaving features, the message received was: “Look at all the ways my local healthcare organization is keeping me healthy.”
Megaphone Power
If you want to flip your message from what you want to say to what they want to here, here are 3 tips.
Breathe life into your audience. You know they need widgets, but what problems do the widgets solve for them? When they go to their audience homes at night and sit with their audience families, why is it they say, “I love those widgets!”?
Take a step back and think of your audience pipeline. How do you get Entry Level Career Audience considering you as Seasoned Audience automatically turns to your products? What considerations lead to your widget?
Finally, go to a mental dinner party or child’s concert: Anywhere outside of Widgetville. How do you keep a layman interested in your offering? What path do you take to get them to understand why someone would need a widget?
More Resources
For additional resources on Messaging and a deeper dive on this topic, please email stephanie.miller.pnw@gmail.com.