This autumn a team of us from Thissaway attended BrightonSEO one of the world’s largest search marketing conferences. We attended talks on everything from SEO, PPC and UX to PR, social media and content creation.
While we each came away from the conference buzzing with new ideas, one of the learnings that stuck with me the most was the importance of creating content with the audience in mind.
This might sound obvious to the educated reader – it’s something all PRs and marketers are taught from day one, but sometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of. Balancing the needs of a client and their KPIs with the right tone and messaging for the end user or consumer is definitely a skillset that we use in everyday agency life. It is important to take a step back and ask yourself – what is the end goal, and work backwards from there.
Keeping your audience in mind is essential as a PR – whether you’re developing pitches for a journalist or working on copy intended for consumers such as blogs or social posts – there is a definite nuance to the way you communicate the same message to each audience, whether it is to inform, inspire, or drive them to take action.
Here are our top tips for PR’s struggling to keep their audience in mind inspired by our experience at Brighton SEO…
Pitching journalists
When drafting pitches to journalists, there are two audiences to bear in mind – the journalist and the final reader. Pitches need to strike a balance between informative and editorial reflecting both what an end reader would want to read, while adding value relevant to a journalist’s piece – usually in the form of a newsworthy hook.
Pitches should make the journalists job easier, including all the relevant information such as relevant links, images, pricing and data, delivered in a timely manner to fit their brief, with hooks that are snappy enough to elevate your client’s pitch over the dozen other they’ve received in the last half an hour. As journalists are time poor, the more helpful and enthusiastic we can be as PR’s, the more likely it is that our efforts will lead to coverage.
For example, when pitching a client spokesperson as an expert, the comment you provide should be accurate, actionable and educational to increase the chance of being included.
It is important pitches say something that adds value or insight to a piece of journalism– and your journalist contacts will be all the more thankful for it if it ticks these boxes!
Campaign creation
There’s plenty of examples of campaigns-gone-wrong because PRs and marketers have failed to remember their audience when creating them. Whether it’s poor timing, bad spelling or complete failure to read the room, sometimes a campaign won’t always hit the intended mark or drive the coverage you hope it would. This is where having a collaborative ideation process is essential.
For example, often the best ideas come from those that aren’t directly involved in day-to-day activity as their fresh perspective offers an extra level of insight comparable in a way, to that of the end consumer.
Some top tips to avoid a Twitter-level campaign disaster include…
- Checking your sources – being detail-oriented is essential. If you’re using third party research or hooks, check the dates to ensure it’s still relevant and consider whether a campaign’s content will be easy to repurpose across other mediums, platforms or places.
- Understand any possible dangers – If it’s likely that your campaign could be misunderstood or mispresented, then it might be worth rethinking some elements. Make sure to sense check ideas outside of your usual echo chambers – sometimes it’s productive to play devil’s advocate.
- Proofread everything – Typos can discredit a campaign, or risk changing the meaning of your content altogether. It’s also good practise to double check that the intention behind your campaign shines through where messaging has been proofed and tweaked.
- Check your calendars – Be aware of world events, dates, and timings. When launching a campaign make sure you’ve kept an eye on the news agenda to be able to launch at the optimum time to drive your message home, whether that be with press or consumers. If it’s a busy news week, perhaps there might be a stronger hook a few weeks down the line that would work even better to land your campaign with your target audiences. Likewise, landing campaigns needs to be done sensitively, considering how it might be received in the current climate. For example, in January 2022, Ovo Energy made the papers after an email newsletter to its energy customers included tips on how to stay warm without turning the heating on was felt to be insensitive in the current cost-of-living crisis, and the company faced heavy criticism, demonstrating the importance of forethought and workshopping when it comes to content creation.
Posting on social
Social media is all about community – people follow and engage with accounts, influencers, and content that they are interested in. Therefore, it’s important to listen to your audience, involve them in your content and respond to them. Implement a social listening approach and dedicate resource to community management – both disciplines will help the content write itself and make social planning a breeze once your brand’s key pillars have been identified.
It is also essential to tailor content to the platforms you’re posting on. Vary the copy, vary the imagery, and vary the time of day that you’re posting. Remember that if someone follows you across multiple platforms, they won’t want to see the same post multiple times – people go to different platforms for different things, and it is essential that brands are creating meaningful touchpoints for their audiences by producing a variety of content that speaks to consumers at different stages of their journey.
While varying content formats is a must, it is also important to increase access to your content by using inclusive design. According to Scope (2022), 14.6 million people in the UK have a disability. Therefore, if you’re not catering your content for people with disabilities then that’s a large and important group of people that won’t be able to engage with you on social media. From alt-tags to image descriptions, subtitles to accessible fonts – there are countless ways that brands can make their content accessible to everyone; and in 2023, if your content fails to tick this box, brands can anticipate seeing the impact of this in years to come.
While the old adage that the customer knows best may be worn quite thin – when it comes to communicating client messaging, it does still ring true. BrightonSEO put in perspective for me how important it is to think outside the box and step back from the day-to-day to really drill down the ‘why’ behind the messaging we put out in the world as PRs.
Putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience can be easier said then done, but to ensure a message is communicated clearly, accurately and in a way that generates excitement for or consideration of a brand is essential for good content writing – whatever your medium.
