How to talk to your audience

Konnichiwa.

Konnichiwa. Welcome.

Welcome, yes. Hi, I’m Matt.

I’m Chris, and this is another Monkey Monday.

Yes, and what are we doing today?

We’re going to talk about how to talk to your audience.

We’ve lost the white pen, so we’ve written this in red. Hopefully you can see this. So we’ve got 6 great tips to help you find your voice and how to talk to your audience. What’s number 1, Chris?

Number 1 is identify the audience you want.

Great point. The common mistake many companies make when they look at their marketing and their communication is not to understand their audience. Or they think their audience is something. They might go, ‘Well we mostly sell to 50 year old women,’ but perhaps that isn’t the actual audience you want to sell to. So, you know, finding that - understanding what audience you want to do and specialising to that audience is a really important thing.

Yeah. If you’ve read any Seth Godin, he’ll talk about you really need to - in business, you should concentrate on getting the smallest possible market, so you’ve really gotta focus in on who you want to speak to and then speak to them directly.

And make it aspirational. It doesn’t have to be that audience you’re already selling to. So it could be - once you identify what you stand for and what that specialism is, you may then discover there’s a whole new audience over here that you actually will be communicating to.

Yep, and that moves on to number 2, which is align your beliefs.

Yeah, this is one we talk about an awful lot, so check out some of our other vlogs about this. But basically, find that cause, find something that they’re gonna relate to, and that is when you’ll sell really well to them and you’ll create relationships that make them become brand ambassadors for you.

Yeah, so we’re all on the same journey. You’re on the same journey with your potential clients - it’s not a kind of them and us where you’re trying to force them to buy something. You’re all trying to go on the journey together, to create something better.

In doing so, try and avoid jargon. You need to keep things simple and easy to understand. And don’t try and baffle people with lots of technical knowledge. So, it’s difficult for us actually, we deal in a very sort of technical industry, so sometimes when we need to talk about API connectors, for instance, it’s a challenge for us to make sure that we that we phrase it in a way that people can understand. Unless we’re talking to somebody who has that technical knowledge. So understanding who you’re talking to, asking the right questions, and avoid mansplaining to anybody is an important thing. So keep it simple, as simple as you can, and understand who you’re talking to in that respect.

And the next one is mimic the way your audience speaks. So if you’re speaking to some young folk who like rap music, you’re going to speak to them differently to people who listen to Radio 3 everyday.

Yeah exactly. So do your research. Once you find that audience, the people who you wanna go on that journey together with, do some research, find the language, make sure it’s correct, make sure you use the same sort of terminology that they use, the same colloquialisms that they use. Get on their wavelength so that it’s easy for them to understand and digest and relate to. It’s really important.

That’s a well dench tip, Matt. Well dench.

Thanks bro.

Think about your words, is number 5.

Yeah, so negative and positive associations with words. Even subconsciously, if you say - if somebody reads something they could subconsciously go, ‘This doesn’t really feel right, this doesn’t feel like something I would really want to buy into.’ Really interestingly we did one recently, we did some work for a company who are in the pregnancy sector, and they have a very clean environment, and they use the term ‘sterile’ and awful lot, but that has a very different meaning for somebody who’s pregnant. It can mean something completely not anything to do with how clean an environment is. So making sure that you’re sensitive to that sort of terminology, make sure you’re looking at any negative or positive phrases, and try and make sure that you’re not miscommunicating in that way. You might think it means one thing, but your audience might think it means something else.

Yep, and the final tip is keep it short.

Yeah, it’s sometimes tempting to provide as much information as you can through copy - we’d recommend keeping most of your written communication as short as possible, and try and story-tell and keep things short, and don’t go off writing essays.

Yeah, I’ve seen a tip online to say if you can’t write an email in 5 sentences, you shouldn’t be writing an email.

Yeah, pick up the phone or do something else. So we hope that’s useful to you. That’s how you talk to your audience. That’s how we try and talk to you, our audience, and we hope it’s resonated with you in some way.

Alright, see you next time.

Thanks very much!

Goodbye.

Oh, yes, sorry, sorry master.

Ugh!