That title made you think of Mr Kipling, didn’t it? Sorry, no cakes here!

You know what your business or charity does. You know who you serve and how you serve them. You could talk a whole day about it without losing any of your enthusiasm. I just can’t be sure that anyone would stay around to listen.

Knowing the message you want to communicate to your audience is fundamental to creating a strong marketing strategy and to any campaign you run, be it email marketing, Facebook Ads, or face to face networking.

Take the time to get your message right. It’s your best shot at reaching your audience. Here are three tip we use at Aubrey to make sure our clients have messaging that marks them out from the rest of the crowd.

Know your audience

The first stage to creating your message is to address it to your audience. A car company will talk about brake horsepower and acceleration if they are selling to someone who has a degree of technical know-how and an inclination to high performance vehicles. However, if the company is selling cars primarily to parents with young families, then it will speak more about the car’s storage capacity and safety features.

The audience will determine the words used and the style the message is written in. Mr Kipling effectively targets a family audience with ‘exceedingly good cakes’ but this message would need to be rewritten if it was targeting an older teen audience. Try it!

Your messaging needs to be able to communicate how you can solve your customers’ or supporters’ needs in language that they can understand.

Solve their problem

It’s not enough to simply explain to the target audience what your charity or business does in appropriate language. Rather, the target audience needs to know what problem you will solve for them.

I’ve never looked for an accountant but I have looked for someone to help me with taxes; I don’t want to give money to a charity but I do want to help homeless people.

Just remember that you’re not presenting your business plan here, you are solving a problem the target audience has. Mr Kipling know that the target audience want a tasty treat to keep them going until the next meal so it doesn’t talk about the bakery process or the ingredients it uses in its messaging.

It comes back to really knowing your target audience. Tell them how your product or service solves their need.

Don’t overcomplicate it

All businesses can be complicated and charities are just as bad. They might not start that way but as they grow, complexity is inevitable. Unfortunately, target audiences aren’t inclined to spend too long understanding what your business is about.

Imagine a customer in a supermarket choosing a box of tea bags. They aren’t going to read a description of each product on the shelves, they’ll go for the option that is clearly what they are looking for. Anything that is too complicated will be passed over so keep your message simple.

One last time, Mr Kipling communicates his message in three simple words. Simple but well-chosen and memorable words. Simple doesn’t mean easy! Spend your time getting this right even if it means spending time on it and asking others.

Conclusion

Mr Kipling has been our example here. It uses language the target audience would feel comfortable with, it provides a solution to those who have identified marketing as a problem and its ever so simple without any need to talk about KPIs, analytics or PPC.

Messaging is crucial to building a loyal following confident they know how you can help them. It can also help us, leading our businesses and charities, to maintain a razor-sharp focus on what we are there for.

Get in touch if you would like to talk to Aubrey about how we can help you create strong messaging for your brand that’ll win supporters and loyal customers.