You have probably heard the expression, “Preaching to the Choir!” or variants of that phrase?
So that we are on the same page, or to stay within metaphor — ’reading from the same hymnbook’…
Preaching to the Choir means that your audience is already convinced and is on message, therefore, unless you are objective is to reinforce the message and build deeper understanding and agreement, there is little more to be achieved. Good examples of this are the huge get-togethers that the likes of Apple, Salesforce and Microsoft hold (many others do so too).
When discussing Messaging for marketing, I build and extend this metaphor as follows, and to be clear, I intend no religious content or offence here either.
We can consider our potential audience as broadly divided into those ‘inside the church’ and those ‘outside the church’; the church being those who already agree with our Point of View and those outside are people whom we might want to convince to come inside.
Inside the church, the audience can be divided again into the Choir and the Congregation. Needless to say, the Choir are our strongest supporters; they need little attention to stay with us, yet often the Choir gets the most of our attention. The Congregation are also on message, but perhaps a little less dedicated; they need a bit more of our attention, however, if we treat them well and we meet or exceed their expectations, then they will stick with us too.
It does not take much to see our close communities as being inside the church; perhaps our leaders, employees, strategic partners and maybe our reference customers are all like the Choir? The Congregation would be made up of our customers, partners, suppliers, influencers and other supporters.
Most marketing messages and content I look at seem to be targeted at our closest two communities, those inside the church, and we are like a Preacher; delivering our messages to a willing, warm and receptive audience. We know how to speak to them, we have a common understanding and shared perspective. It is comfortable to do this and understandable. We certainly shouldn’t ignore these communities, after all, we do not want them leaving the church, especially when we are frequently told with another marketing cliché that “it costs many times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain existing ones.”
However, if we need to grow our market or extend our influence beyond these close-in communities, then we must venture outside the church. We must, in essence, take on the role of a Missionary!
The audience outside the church is vast and dispersed, and the further away they are from us the harder we have to think and work to reach them; this is part of the reason it costs ten times more! We need to spend time understanding their perspective; their values; what’s important to them; what and who influences them; where do they gather and very importantly we need to understand how to speak to them! We then need to spend time establishing our credentials; build trust and understanding; gain permission to talk to them about our message and why it is relevant and valuable to them.
Once we have invested the time and effort to understand who and where they are, then we need to ensure we use this knowledge when we decide what we want to say in order to engage and communicate. If we intend to be successful, then our strategy, tactics, language, and expectations must be very different from those we use to our first and second level communities who are already bought-in.
I use this metaphor when coaching to help to emphasise the need to challenge ourselves when creating marketing content with the objective of building markets or extending influence. If we use our own language, our comfortable jargon and terms of reference, then it will be much harder to reach our target audience, and we will drastically reduce the levels of engagement and subsequent likelihood of meeting our objective.
So my clear and obvious conclusion; if we want to reach new audiences, then we need to be more like a Missionary and less like a Preacher.