Welcome to the 2022 summer hacks series! These are really short ‘food for thought’ bite-sized episodes so you can dive in when you have a moment.
I decided to focus on planning tips over the summer. Why? Because when people think about comms planning, they often focus on what they are going to say. You have a great product or service and you want to tell people about it. Focusing on the message seems the logical first step.
But before you start typing, let alone promoting your offer, there are some vital actions you need to take. I’m going to give you an overview of the 7 steps to effective comms planning over the summer hack series. I use this process with all my clients, no matter whether it’s a new product or we’re marketing a built environment project.
This second episode in part one of the series is all about researching your audience
Let’s dive in!
Links mentioned in this episode
My FREE Seven Steps Webinar – https://mailchi.mp/henbe.co.uk/free-webinar-7-steps-190722
How to find your customers and help them buy: https://bit.ly/FindCustomersHelpThemBuy
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Full Transcript (unedited)
Welcome to the 2022 summer hacks series! These are really short ‘food for thought’ bitesized episodes so you can dive in when you have a moment.
I decided to focus on planning tips over the summer. Why? Because when people think about comms planning, they often focus on what they are going to say. You have a great product or service and you want to tell people about it. Focusing on the message seems the logical first step.
But before you start typing, let alone promoting your offer, there are some vital actions you need take. I’m going to give you an overview of the 7 steps to effective comms planning over the summer hack series. I use this process with all my clients, no matter whether it’s a new product or we’re marketing a built environment project.
This second episode in part one of the series is all about researching your audience
Let’s dive in!
You cannot think about creating a key message without understanding who is buying or benefitting from the product or service in the first place.
People don’t go to the gym because they want to go to the gym. People go to the gym because they want to live longer and look good.
This is really crucial and I often see people create key messages about a programme or project and there’s no real insight into who it should appeal to and why. It’s all sell, sell, sell.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to understand the customer and what drives them to buy. If you don’t know who you’re targeting, how can you speak to them in the right way? And also make sure you are targeting them on the platforms of their choice? It’s about creating something that resonates with the person you’re aiming to reach and getting it to them. And that doesn’t happen by accident, unfortunately, or by sitting in a room scribbling notes from your company’s website.
So make sure you spend some time getting to know your customers and figuring out what’s important to them and why they should even bother listening to your message in the first place. If you can’t get that right, it’s going to be really hard to get your comms to the next level beyond putting content out there.
This is particularly important if you work in business-to-business or B2B for short, or you rely on a supply chain to sell your product for you, for example, if you don’t sell directly to your customers yourself.
What we’re looking to do here is break this customer down so they are as defined as they possibly can be.
So whether that’s by geography or interests, buying habits or age maybe, you need to try and understand as much as you can about your ideal purchaser of your product or service in this example that we’re using. This isn’t just a job for sales and marketing, coms has an audience as well and we all need to work together to make sure that we have consistency across selling and telling.
And just picking someone as your customer doesn’t work, you have to do the homework!
Take 10 mins after this episode and write down your top 3 customers. Be as specific as you can be. Do you really know who they are? Surprisingly you may not and this is alarming if you are the one writing content!
I have a link in the show notes today that will help you step by step on this – so look out for that.
If you like this series or want to know more about any of these steps, I am running a free webinar in the autumn on this topic where you can learn more and find out about my masterclass which is a deep dive to help you plan, write and execute your communication strategy.
If you want 1:1 advice and insight on how to be more strategic with your plans, get in touch to see how I can help you. I added a link in the show notes today to my cheatsheet for you which covers the 7 steps – give it a go! I would love to know how you got on.