Who are you serving? Strike A Chord with Those Who Matter
How do you create a connection between your ideas and what’s meaningful to your audience? To understand your audience, you must first understand how connection works. Emotional connection that is.
Brene Brown puts it beautifully:
“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued.”
From an online perspective, you need to connect with your audience on an emotional level, you need to pick a side, or pick something to stand for.
If you know the purpose of your idea, then that’s great. But when it comes to connection, you need to offer a little bit more than simply what you do. Who are you trying to speak with? What are their hopes and dreams? What keeps them awake at night? What challenges are they trying to overcome? What makes them happy or sad? The power of your brand relies on your ability to shape your communications from your audiences’ point of view – not your own.
The modern-day individual is looking for authenticity and connection. Do your research and invest in something that is relative to your audience. Don’t be afraid to embrace who you are. People buy into people – another aspect of human connection. Make your content more human.
Once you achieve that, then build your content around the following 4 rules of engagement:
Educate, inspire, entertain and inform.
Educate
Find out what your audience is struggling with. What are their pain points? This is where the combination of empathy and your expertise comes in.
If the only thing you’re publishing online is for the purpose of awareness, then what are you actually offering your audience? Sure, you want them to employ your service, but why not offer them valuable insight that is related to what you do? This is how you establish credibility amongst your followers and fellow industry leaders.
Inspire
Your content doesn’t necessarily always need to be related to your industry, or what you do. Everyone feels uninspired sometimes. Why not create content that inspires? A simple way of doing this is through the use of success stories.
Every day something beautiful happens, so find that beautiful news and share it in your own unique way. By sharing things that you relate to, you will strike a chord with the people that matter. There’s so much negativity online. Break through it.
Entertain
People want to be entertained. Find out what your audience finds entertaining and create content around that. Chances are if your audience has similar interests to you, the things you find engaging will more than likely be mutual.
A great way to get your ideas across in a captivating way is with the use of infographics or video. There are amazing, user-friendly and free online tools like Canva and Clipchamp for creating content where you’re able to brand your clips or infographics quite easily – so no need to hire a designer or video editor. Such is the beauty of technology.
Another great way of interacting with your audience while simultaneously creating awareness around your brand is by setting up a weekly quiz with Qzzr. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers by asking them the right questions.
You can get incredibly creative through the use of weekly themes, adding images, videos, and animated GIFs – anything is possible really. Think about it, people love taking online quizzes and isn’t the best way to get to know someone by asking them questions?
Inform
David Ogilvy put it this way:
“The more informative your content, the more persuasive it will be.”
What better way to convince someone of your expertise than by diving deep and offering amazing insight into a subject they’re interested in?
If you want to promote yourself, the information you provide through the content you publish should teach your audience why what you do is important and beneficial. Create a story around what you’re trying to promote – draw people in, go wild!
Essentially, a connection is established through shared vision and shared understanding. By understanding who you are speaking to, you’ll be able to connect with them more easily.