Stop Talking to Yourself
June 13, 2019
By Curley & Pynn
At this year’s Media Mashup, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by AKINSPARKER’s Doug Boemler Wareing on content creation and marketing.
One of his points really hit home: Your audience doesn’t care about your business goals.
It sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s deceptively brilliant.
No one – least of all, professional communicators – would deny the importance of speaking to what interests your audience. However, when you eat, sleep and breathe your brand, it’s easy to forget that the entire world isn’t doing the same. More often than not, those key messages you’ve worked so hard to craft are being met with a yawn.
The trick is to find the sweet spot where your audiences’ interests intersect with your business goals.
To achieve this, Doug recommended the following exercise: Start with your brand’s objective and ask yourself, “So what? Why should my audience care about that?” Once you’ve answered that, do it again. And again. And again. Per Doug’s experience, the process can take six or seven rounds of self-imposed Q&A.
At Curley & Pynn, we coach clients through a similar process, encouraging them to ensure that their communications are focused not just on what they want to say, but what their key audiences need to know. Our audience-centric approach informs the way we develop our programs and, after attending this talk, I’m grateful to have another tool in my belt for developing messaging with the end in mind.
