Understanding audiences and relevant content

By Dave Graham

People are bombarded every day with thousands of messages. Today, the only messages anyone will see and hear are the messages they choose to see and hear. We're living in a culture of self-publishers and content creators who opt-in to their media channels.

The one way to get positive attention in this environment is to create and deliver great content — media that is relevant, informing, entertaining, on-brand and timely.

Most website and intranet communications strategies fail because they don’t communicate with the intended audiences. Developing a communications platform requires more than great design and technology — it requires a creative and pragmatic approach to maximizing the impact of its content. It is vital to understand key audiences and their available/existing channels to deliver relevant and timely content to them. Telling stories that people want to hear, stories that engage audiences and connect them to an organisation helps to leverage unique points of difference and to realize business benefits and services.

"Organisations that communicate well online are those that work hard to understand and embrace their audiences and that harness these behaviour patterns to the mutual benefit of the organisation and the viewer."

Here are four tools that help you as an organisation succeed:

1. Understand your users, audiences and target groups. With impact mapping, you have a tool that helps you better understand your users’ needs and combine them with what you would like them to know and do.
2. Locate your core narrative, develop your own best stories, and pinpoint the ways those stories should be told across digital channels in your content strategy. The most compelling content should reach people wherever and whenever they need it, in whatever format they choose.
3. Construct a solid foundation for a communications platform - with the help from e.g. card sort exercises, company history, services, business goals, cultural elements can be brought together with product attributes and promises/values.
4. The proliferation of new media — from websites, intranets, and social media to iPads and the constant stream of new portable platforms — is generating insatiable demand from audiences for engaging content. A strategy for how to use your channels can help you to create better integrated, planned, and executed content across multiple digital channels.

These four tools can help you define, tell, and disseminate your story — the story you tell internally, the story you tell partners and stakeholders, and the story you tell customers. And if you don’t want to do it on your own, we can help you – be it a content strategy, content structure or channels strategy.

Get in touch or read more about our content services.