The Art of Content Development:
Communicating With Your Audience Intentionally
Have you ever stopped to consider what you might be communicating without even realizing it?
There are approximately 30 different dialects of the English language in the United States alone. This number soars to approximately 160 dialects when looking at the English language worldwide.
Depending on your geographic location you could unintentionally be speaking an entirely different version of the English language without even realizing it.
The emphasis of this is not intended to caution flagrantly communicating with your clients in a misleading manner. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s important to develop your content with your target audience in mind. Knowing who you are speaking to allows you to deliver your information with the proper tone and context to support the demographic being reached.
Fortunately, this potential issue is not as complex as it might first appear. A majority of clients are individuals that you have existing relationships with. Some for a fairly significant amount of time.
Most important is the consistency and clarity of your message at any given point in time. As an organization, some things are not going to drastically change, primarily the services that you are providing. From this point, defining who your organization is and what you want to represent helps present your services and your professional practice to the public attracting new clients with whom share similar values and common interests.
When you begin to determine what direction to take your content development, ask yourself, “What questions do I get asked the most?” This might sound ridiculously straightforward but when considering the day to day juggling that takes place during all of life’s demands, how often have you stopped to really give this some conscientious thought?
Life is not intended to be taken too seriously. If there are day to day antics that seem to naturally enlighten the mood of your team, there’s a good probability that your clients might find similar. Think about what entertains your team during the few slower (quieter) moments you get to experience throughout the workday? Use this as a cornerstone or starting point to develop your website content around.
Knowing your audience and the manner in which they communicate is imperative when developing content that will effectively deliver your intended message. Any content that you choose to publish will become a part of your branded message. This carries both short-term, impressionable implications but also helps establish the trajectory for known and unforeseeable long-term implications.
It’s important to remember that ultimately the reason you are present in your client’s lives is to provide the services that you offer. However, also know that you can have fun and use the development of your content to help sort out all of the thoughts and ideas swirling in your own mind, helping to establish direction for your organization moving forward. Like the age-old adage states: get in on paper.