Why Isn’t Your Message Reaching Your Audience?
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Your message is important, but no one is listening. What now? We do a lot of work in healthcare and life sciences. We see SO many messages that are good messages, that people should know and care about, that would make people live longer, healthier lives. But they don’t get distributed beyond a small group of people. WHY? Usually, one of these 5 reasons:
There’s a solve for each problem below – but IMO it’s better to do all of the steps to produce the strongest product: Step 1: Define a very specific target audience and work to understand their motivations, pain points, and fears. It’s hard to be special to a broad audience – niche audiences give you a chance to build a message that’s meaningful to them. Step 2: Pressure-test your message: Does it reflect a real problem the audience has? The entire world feels a time famine. If you’re not obviously solving a problem your niche audience has, you’ll be ignored. Step 3: Match the content to the audience to the channel. Invest in formally studying (and spend your own time reading and watching) what they are reading and watching, then apply it. And remember – on most channels you have about 3 seconds (or less) to win attention. Your content has to have an immediate “hook” to matter. Step 4: Test test test test test. Test. Audiences and channels are always changing. You have to try new things to keep up with them. We just did an analysis of a client’s TikTok and learned so much about the settings, experts, captions and narrative structure that works vs. doesn’t. We’re getting more questions related to auditing distribution channels (reply to this email if you want to hear more about that). Step 5: Post consistently. A “campaign” style approach can work, but only lasts for the length of the campaign. To earn sustainable engagement and drive long-term value, you need to keep showing up and keep trying to solve your audience’s pain points. I hope I was able to address your pain points as part of this post. If you want to chat about a message you have that needs more attention, I’m always here for a virtual coffee. Until next time,
P.S.: This newsletter is part of a 9-part series on the biggest challenges marketers face when they’re trying to get people to pay attention, engage and act. Next week: We’re creating a lot of content, but it’s not helping us meet our business goals. |
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