Engage your followers by following these simple steps

By Alex Zelaya

 

When we promote a company, a brand or a project, communicating its essence and messages to the audience, it is extremely important to hit the nail on the head as to how we speak to them. What platforms do we place them on? What do we want to convey? And in what way and in what tone are we going to communicate the message to achieve our objectives?

Whether we want to speak to a Gen Z audience through the communication channels of a university or our goal is to communicate the results of complex research to a broad Baby Boomer audience in a simple way, knowing how to communicate and reach a certain kind of hearings is an art that you can learn and perfect.

 

First things first: know your audience better than the back of your hand

 

One of the keys to reaching audiences with impactful content and the right tone is to ask ourselves a lot of questions:

Who is really our target audience and what characterizes it?

What are the platforms you use the most?

What type of content and formats can have the greatest impact with them?

To define our target audience, let’s start by seeing what are the characteristics that the people who make it up have in common; this ranges from demographic data such as age, occupation, income or level of education, to identifying your interests, for example, in terms of topics, activities or products. It also helps to take into account what similar behaviors they present or what are some of the habits that are frequently repeated in this group; and of course, what are the channels and formats that they use the most.

In the case of our previous example, what we want to apply is a simple and colloquial tone and vocabulary, avoiding technicalities or long and complicated definitions. And if, on the contrary, our audience were specialists in the subject, we would welcome all the more technical terms.

Let’s go back to the example of the complex study: we have a campaign focused on publicizing the results of the research, which deals with political and economic issues and handles many technicalities, but which we want to transmit to a young audience and get them interested in the subject and ideally Get actively involved in it. When asking us what is the relationship of young people between 15 and 25 years old with economic issues, how familiar are they with certain key terms and, above all, identifying in what part or moments of their daily lives and environments they are confronted with these issues , we will be ready to move on to the most interesting: what will be the best way to reach our audience?

 

How to talk to your audience and not die trying

 

A trick that can help us define the tone that we will use in our campaign is to locate the emotions that we want to activate in our communication and this can be done through scales. That is, where we want to place our tone of communication on the following scales:

cheerful ←→ serious

casual ←→ formal

simple ←→ complex/technical

juvenile and colloquial ←→ formal

So, depending on where we place our communication objectives on these scales, we will be able to identify the tone to use. Having this as a base, we can make a list of what are going to be keywords, suitable to communicate to our audience and, likewise, what is the list of negative words that we are going to avoid.

 

Eye-catchers for your audience

 

Clearly, communication on digital platforms is not reduced to the simple use of words. What really captivates the audience and will allow us to reach them with great impact, is with what elements do we complement the information of our audience? The important thing is to appeal to an effective visualization of data, since users remember any informative, visual or auditory content with greater intensity than a simple text.

To really reach audiences, it is key to discover what type of content and formats we can capture their attention with, and make sure that this is complemented in a 360 turn.

 

And what happens when we get to the audience?

 

We managed to find the right tone of voice and complement the messages with the ideal (audio)visual elements. And so? The path does not end there; Although we have these key points identified, the process of knowing the audience continues as we observe how your audience interacts with the content. So we have to listen to the audience, observe and allow them to constantly teach us what content they are looking for and what generates the greatest impact.

Daring to listen to your audience is how you can reach them.