What does it mean to engage with your audience?
When developing the right tone for a marketing strategy, one of the biggest challenges consists of discovering the ideal approach — capturing a voice and narrative that your intended demographic or audience will both react to and engage with.
Matching the tone of your audience is even more important when you’re marketing a specific service or product. For example, let’s assume you are marketing a perfume. Your initial research should include your customer’s economic status, interests, and commercial behavior. Are they the type of person who enjoys spending a little more for a desirable luxury brand? Or are they looking for a quality and tasteful product that’s priced lower so the buyer can keep a fresh bottle on the dresser at all times?
Understanding Your Audience
Understanding the specific range of your product’s worth and its price elasticity allows you to hone in further on your demographic. This frees up future efforts to study the subjects and topics that surround your primary consumer. Be cautious, though, as similar tone and phrasing, while related, may not perform as effectively across multiple demographics. This is why knowing your audience’s voice is paramount.
An exaggerated analogy of this concept would be to attempt to use the same tone and approach to market an F150 pickup as you would a beauty product. Are there women who drive pickups and also care about perfume? Of course! But… would your content perform as well across both demographics without specific and targeted intent? No.
As you draw in closer to your ideal customer, common thematic phrases, concepts, subjects, and terminology will begin to echo with that base. These “keywords” are recurring themes that could potentially advance your campaign’s efficiency. Because use of these themes can have a varying effect, the more time and effort you spend on researching your audience and observing how they engage with the community, the better sense you’ll develop for what works and what doesn’t.
Provide Value by Joining the Conversation
When your primary focus is to connect, engage, and start a conversation with your customers, you will start to become aware of how organic and ever-changing the landscape can be.
Sophisticated phrases and buzzwords can work well, but even the most established and practiced tone can begin to fail over time. This is because it’s easy for repetitive actions to become tiresome.
You can easily understand this concept by imagining an advertisement where selling the product is the overt primary objective… think of a television commercial for a local car dealership: they all have an identical tone, aesthetic, voiceover, copy, and call-to-action. This form of marketing has become a recognized formula among consumers. While this approach may have worked successfully in the past, at each viewing less and less people are engaging with it because they’re aware it’s an ad and they learn to tune it out.
The only way to insulate yourself from this phenomenon is to provide value to your customer within your marketing strategy.
Building Brand Awareness & Empathy
By focusing on tone and voice, your primary objective shifts to encompass starting a conversation with your audience. Showing your readers and viewers that you share interests illustrates value and is very effective at building brand awareness and brand empathy.
Orienting your market strategy to focus on tone and matching the interests your customers are already engaging with sets the perfect stage. It allows your new, carefully crafted writing and strategically placed CTAs to beat out the redundant, monotonous, and tiresome generic copy your competitors are using.
