Are you trying to impress the right audience?

When promoting our business, it can be easy to get caught up in trying to impress the wrong crowd. Most often, I find that crowd is our competition. It's natural to want to impress our peers, we invest a lot to ensure we are leaders within our industry. But when creating communication for our business, this is definitely not who we should be thinking about.

I am often assisting clients craft communication messages and I absolutely love this part of my job. One of they key questions I always ask is:

• Who are we trying to engage with this?

Sometimes, if we are really honest with ourselves, we are trying to impress our competitors. We are trying to be the best, showcase the best and out-do the competition. With items like customer service, continuous improvement and production, I 100% agree we should keep a close eye on our competitors and try to stay one step ahead.

But with marketing communications, I believe we need to disregard what our competition are doing more often. 

Yes, I agree we should keep an eye on their marketing messages, to ensure we can differentiate ourselves, but I think it can be easy to fall into the trap of impressing them and not our clients - I've seen it many times.

Here are a few questions to use when crafting communications for your organisation to really get you in the right frame of mind:

1. Who am I speaking with?
2. What are they interested in?
3. What are their pain points?
4. What solution am I offering?
5. How am I making their life easier?

Here are a few more to ensure you haven't got yourself too carried away with being an industry leader (and impressing your peers):

1. Have I used industry jargon?
2. Have I used plain English?
3. Have I assumed the audience understands the trends of the industry?
4. Am I pushing a product rather than a solution?
5. Am I pitching this to the right level?

By using these 10 questions as a checklist, you can draft and re-draft your marketing messages to ensure you don't waste any time and money on sending the wrong messages to the wrong audience.

Nobody has time for that!