 There are a lot of ways that marketers—whether they’re companies or the companies that represent them—stumble when it comes to addressing their target audiences.
Want to learn from their mistakes? Of course you do! Let’s dive in. Looking the wrong way There’s probably not a company in the country today that doesn’t boast its “customer-first approach.” But more often than not, that’s lip-service. We were recently handed an assignment by a brand-new client of ours, and were given lots of “customer research” to review first. Customer research! What a treasure trove! We were psyched. We were quickly disappointed. The “information” was basically an overblown SWOT analysis. SWOT, if you’re unfamiliar with the acronym, stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Lots of companies still do these, and they do yield some value. But we’ll take two good pages of customer insights over 100 pages of SWOT analysis any day. Here’s why. SWOT is, by its nature, inward-facing. The exercise consists of asking the company to think deeply all about itself. What is it strong at? What is it weak at? What competitors threaten it? What’s missing in all this conversation? The customer. That’s who. Now you might think you can’t tell anything about a company’s SWOT approach (which was conducted, of course, in confidence) by its outward-facing marketing materials. But boy can you ever. Any marketing communications that talk all about “us” and “the company” are a dead giveaway. Here’s a quick-and-dirty test: How many times do you see the word “You” in their materials? “You,” of course, refers to the audience, to the customer. Leave them out of the conversation, and they’ll go elsewhere. Looking the right way Now consider the opposite alternative. What if you spent all of that SWOT time on learning more about the customer? What if you really dived deeply into their needs, pains, wants, hidden desires? That’s where you’ll strike marketing gold. The more you know about your target audience, the better—and easier!—you can address them. You can hit them squarely between the eyes if you know them well enough. In other words, you can both grab their attention, and motivate them to take action. And isn’t that what marketing is all about? Here’s another way to look at it. Think of the last ad that really made you stop and grabbed your attention. It could be on TV, or a LinkedIn feed, anywhere. Ask yourself: What was it that made you sit up and take notice? If that ad motivated you to take action—such as checking out a website or calling a toll-free number—then it was clearly a winner. Those are pretty rare; if you can recall one, great. Parse it. Figure out why it grabbed you. Then learn from it. But even if you didn’t take action—even if you just paused to look at the thing—ask yourself why. Unfortunately, there’s a phrase we have to introduce at this point in the conversation. Much as we hate to mention it, it’s an unavoidable reality. And that’s click-bait. How many of those ads (“My Jaw Dropped When I Saw Her Dress!”) have you stopped to glance at? How many have you actually clicked? Don’t be embarrassed. Click-bait ads work. More important: You can learn from them. You might see an ad for an “article” about, say, a sweeping new law affecting car owners right in your state! (Gosh.) But then the image will show something different entirely: An old man with a scrunchy face. A woman in a swimsuit. Why? These are not mistakes. These are the result of rigorous A/B testing. You’re being served up those images precisely because they work. Often, as noted above, they’re quite counterintuitive. But if you can connect the dots, you can connect them through your own marketing efforts. You won’t win any popularity points for saying you’re inspired by click-bait ads, but if you can learn from them, and the way they tap into your audience’s lizard-level brain, you’re ahead of the game. Respect their time Once you understand your audience and you know the message/offer you want to present to them (both tasks are easier said than done), you need to execute effectively. Again, it’s easy to illustrate what you should do by showing you what you shouldn’t do. Don’t bury the lead. We recently worked on an assignment where we went through a client’s existing marketing piece as input, and were half-way through it before we discovered just what they were offering. Now, we were getting paid to read this thing. Do you think that a prospective customer, on their own, would ever get that far into the piece? No. Never. Remember, that prospect is always in a hurry. They have no intention to curl up with your marcom like it’s a good book. They want info, fast. They want to know how your offer will help them. Responding to this need is what we call “pushing the greed button.” Sometimes the executional challenges here are more mundane than you might think. Here’s an example from Hollywood: A screenplay is written to sell. That is, a producer must want to buy it before, say, a movie star wants to play in it. So what happens if you see a passage like this: EXT. DAVE’S PORCH – NIGHT We see Dave’s house. It has a porch out front. It is night time. Enough already. That short passage is a sledgehammer of redundancy. Think that that movie ever got made? Same thing applies to your messaging to your audience: Don’t waste a nanosecond of their time. Search for redundancy and dead wood. Chop, chop, chop. Less really is more. Get help Admittedly, many of the challenges we’ve addressed in this article are easier said than done. If you find yourself struggling, then turn to an expert for assistance. Like us. Contact us today to get help making your target audience take the action you want them to.
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