|
Put The Target Back In Your Target Audience
Use a creative brief to hone your communications
Best Buy is facing serious competition from Internet retailers. Today, shoppers routinely use their stores as showrooms to test drive new products, only to turn around and buy their merchandise online at lower prices. Adding to the company's woes, the CEO recently resigned in disgrace due to the all but too common "inappropriate relationship with a female subordinate" phenomenon.
While these are serious challenges, Best Buy faces another, more serious problem. Simply put, their sales people don't seem to know how to communicate effectively with potential customers, as my recent shopping experience shows.
In a world where every new Apple product release is headline news, I wandered into my local Best Buy recently to see what all the fuss was about. I had been toying with idea of switching from a PC to Mac, so I asked the sales guy to explain the differences between the various Mac laptops. Before I had a chance to explain why I needed a new computer or how I might use it, he launched into a jargon-filled diatribe that had my middle-aged head spinning.
After rambling on about the Mac's "8 mega-RAM-Gigabyte-HertzAvis-Mobileapp-Synchronized-Tricolored fusilli-Optimized-Operating system," he quickly moved on to explain new features for which I had zero interest. For example, did you know that you will soon be able to project whatever is on your iPhone screen onto your TV screen? Terrific. But as a lifelong PC user and Nokia phone user, all I wanted to know was whether I would be able to use Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel on a Mac. The sales guy never asked what features were important to me or why I was considering a Mac. In the process, he lost a potential customer.
As this experience demonstrates, many of us are so wrapped up in our own day-to-day worlds that we forget to consider the needs or knowledge level of our target audience. Within the financial services business, many of us are particularly prone to overusing jargon, lingo, and clichés in our conversations and in our writing. Stuff like:
"At the end of the day, we believe the Fed is unlikely to launch QE III, which could cause yield spreads to contract."
While you and your colleagues may talk like that around the water cooler, these kinds of phrases may leave your clients scratching their heads in confusion.
To communicate clearly and ensure that all of your communications projects achieve their goals, I encourage clients to complete a creative brief at the outset of every new project. While some balk at the prospect of articulating exactly what they hope to achieve, I find that taking the time to think about your audience and your goals is worth the extra effort and time.
So, before you develop your next newsletter, market commentary, employee benefits package, or "thought leadership" whitepaper, consider your target audience and answer the following questions:
- Who is your target audience? Are they customers, prospects, employees, or some combination of these?
- Are these people already knowledgeable about the subject matter or do you need to put things in simpler terms?
- What action, if any, do you want your audience to take?
- What is the single most important message you want your audience to receive?
- How do you want your audience to feel after receiving with your communication? Informed? Inspired? Excited? Curious? Reassured?
- How will your audience receive your message-online, email, print, or video?
By taking the time to visualize your target audience and understand their needs, you can vastly improve the effectiveness of your communications. If you find that you have several different target audiences, consider segmenting your email or mail distribution lists and creating separate versions of each communication.
One final recommendation: Keep it simple and short whenever possible. Don't assume your audience has nothing better to do with their time than read your communications. Get to the point. Quickly. Hopefully I have succeeded with that here.
For a copy of my standard creative brief, shoot me an email.
Finally, if you have an opinion on whether switching from a PC to a Mac is worth the effort (and added expense), share your thoughts on our Facebook page.
| 
