Selling clothing? You market it to those who wear it (and their gift-buying friends and relatives), and shape your message accordingly. Selling business software as a service? Things are a bit more complicated. In B2B and non-profit marketing, sales typically involve people at different levels within an organization, and it is not always clear which way marketing messages will flow. You need to think through all the communication targets in your marketing process to create the copy or content that you want.
You may know that your product will be attractive to Fortune 1000 workgroups that need high-end graphics capabilities, or you may want to reach low-income teenagers with your services. Those are your business targets. The road to your business targets lies through your communication targets.
If your organization provides social services, you might need to connect with those who send people to your organization to get help—not the teens you ultimately assist. Or you might want to tell your story to potential funders. In that Fortune 1000 company, you may need to reach the CIO, the divisional CFO, and the group IT administrator, with your routine contact (the “customer”) having a limited role.
The key to creating effective marketing copy and content is to:
Identify each of your communication targets
Think about the needs and motivations of each of those target groups
Be sure that you have addressed all of those in some way in your digital and print materials
That may mean developing different content and copy for each audience, creating different entry points for different audiences, or perhaps artfully combining messaging for different audiences in one set of materials.
If you could use some help in thinking all of this through for your products or services, let us know.