Listen To Your Audience
Today’s blog is a quick read to give you a branding tip that’s easy to implement - take a listen…
If you read the subject of this email and thought - duh - I love it. It means you’re already listening to your audience and allowing them to inform your business decisions, your content, positioning & messaging, and even your products and services. If you read the subject of this email and it sparked your interest because you want to understand how to do this better and why it’s important, keep reading.
Why Listening Is Important
Listening to your audience is an important, and vital, part of being able to grow your business and build a lasting brand. Even though you are the expert, artist, designer, educator, or maker of the things you sell, and your business wouldn’t exist without YOU, your business is actually about THEM.
“Them” is your target audience. You’re curating your talents, products and/or experiences with the purpose of selling them to your identified audience. Your business doesn’t exist if your audience doesn’t buy those products and services. Therefore, everything you do is about positioning what you offer for your best-fit clients and customers.
Successful brands listen to their audience. They listen to:
What they love about what you do & offer
What they don’t like (if anything)
What they’d like to see you do next, create next, offer next
Where their ideal clients are on their journey to meet them where they’re at
Another reason I give this specific tip - to LISTEN - is to listen when your audience tells them what you’ve got is NOT for them. Sometimes you want your offers to be for a specific niche, and they’re just not responding. But, if you open your mind and open your ears, you may realize what you’re offering is best for a different audience altogether.
That would be a really important time to be listening as that means you need to shift focus and re-position to a new audience who is primed, excited and ready for your offers.
FOR EXAMPLE - WHEN I WAS AT DISNEY…
As I wrote that last piece of advice - the idea that your offers might actually be for a different audience - a specific film marketing campaign came to mind from the time I spent at Disney marketing movies.
It was a smaller Disney live action film called PROM released back in 2011 - - - which, holy cow, was 12 years ago now! Anyone remember that one? Well, if you were a young girl or tween back then you probably saw it. Which gets to my point exactly.
Part of my job at Disney was working with internal synergy partners at The Walt Disney Company to promote our film releases, and Disney Channel was one of my biggest partners. They also happened to be, most times, the barometer that told us if kids and families were excited about our films.
When we first started to position Disney’s PROM, our marketing team was adamant that we wanted to age it up for older teens and young adults and NOT position it as a kid movie. They felt so strongly about it that I was forbidden to promote this Disney movie on Disney Channel.
When we got early tracking (our market research numbers that guided our marketing campaigns and told us about our audience awareness, interest and first choice potential), it showed that the MOST INTERESTED audience was….yep, you guessed it, Kids and Tweens (the exact Disney Channel audience).
We pivoted our campaign, and I wasn’t only asked to promote it on Disney Channel, I was asked to make it our biggest promotion ever as that was the audience that would make our film successful.
Why share this story? It’s an example of getting the audience and positioning wrong - at first. But, when we began listening to who was responding, who was interested, and understood where our greatest potential was, we listened.
I want you to know it’s okay to pivot. It’s okay to re-position. And, it’s okay to shift your messaging, content, and even offers to get it right. That’s why you listen to your audience. You need feedback from your audience in order to refine your brand, refine your message and elevate your products / services so you can get it right.
What Gets In The Way Of Truly Hearing
Based on that Disney example, I want to address a couple things that could get in the way of truly hearing your audience.
1 - Your own agenda
You started your business and you’re the expert. You have a goal to offer your products / services to specific audience and position it a certain way because YOU understand what you do so well and know your solutions or offerings can help (or inspire, or entertain - depends on your brand).
Where your agenda can get in the way is when you only listen to what you want and you don’t respond to the needs of your audience.
2 - Your deep expertise
You might know your topic so well that you’re coming in hot and speaking to your audience as if they’re already at your level and know what you know. You have to be careful of using “inside baseball” lingo or industry jargon that your audience may be completely unaware of. In other words, you don’t want to talk over their heads. You want to understand where they are on the journey. Listen to them and see how they articulate their own pain points, goals and desires and let their exact words influence your own messaging, marketing and content creation.
Start Listening To Your Audience
I’ll end with this - listening to your audience can be a huge AHA moment for your business. It really can inspire all areas of your brand, so give it a try and see what you start hearing.
One big benefit to listening to your audience can be allowing what they say to inform your messaging. Speaking of, you might also like to dive into another blog article about communicating to your audience:
Check out: How To Create Brand Messaging That Resonates
Finally, if you know you’d like personalized 1-on-1 help to develop your brand strategy, position your business to the right audience, and create messaging that connects, book a BRAND CONSULT CALL with me.