Here is the most fundamental question of professional communication, and the one so many organizations fail to answer correctly:
Who is your audience?
Whenever you or your firm creates a communication piece, you need to think carefully about who you will be sending it to and why they would be interested and engaged by it. Far too often, organizations put together brochures, white papers, case studies or other pieces without giving the audience due consideration.
Why is this wrong?
Because in the absence of a specific consideration of audience, the tendency of an organization is to speak to itself. Consider a financial firm creating a website for itself. The person writing it probably has much more contact with his or her supervisor and colleagues than with the firm’s customers and potential customers. The natural tendency for this person will be to write to that internal audience, something that will impress them and make the writer appear smart. The supervisor may reinforce this attitude, in order to make his or her own department appear smart to those further up the organizational food chain.
The result? Overstuffed, hard-to-read communication pieces loaded with big words, inside jargon and convoluted sentences. What the organization doesn’t realize is that the exterior audience has far less interest and time for reading the piece than do those who are creating and approving it. With an exterior audience, you have to hold their attention, and you won’t do it for long by talking about yourself. You have to speak with clarity about THEM. You have to show that you understand their wants, needs and problems, and that your firm can address those effectively.
The more bureaucratic and the less entrepreneurial an organization is, the greater the danger that their communications will devolve into a case of the organization, in effect, having a conversation with itself. To avoid this pitfall, plan and execute your communication pieces with an explicit consideration of your audience. It’s not rocket science, but it will make your business take off.
