Not getting enough comments or feedback on your content? Make sure you’re speaking the same language as your clients.
Blog posts are some of the most powerful tools in digital marketing. Despite the emergence of different strategies and trends over the years, blogging remains a vital part of every brand’s success.
Posting content allows organisations to share helpful information with their audiences. The better the posts, the more engagement they drive. This builds authority, attracts new followers, generates leads, and ultimately drives up sales numbers.
However, blogging or sharing content in any form is easier to get wrong than most people think. Numerous businesses and brands invest time and resources into their content. And yet their results show the content they put out is still ineffective in bringing in more clients.
This can be a severe problem as the failure to engage audiences can lead to potential customers shifting their focus towards competitor brands.
But how could a business that regularly posts blogs still fail to engage its audience?
Well, it comes down to using the wrong language. If you want to avoid this, the following guidelines will help you learn to speak your ideal customer’s language and create engaging content.
How to Speak Your Clients’ Language
Someone could be telling you a highly engaging story, but if they’re telling it in a language you don’t speak nor understand, you won’t be listening. The same is true for your clients.
So, in order to keep your audiences engaged and interested in what you’re saying, you have to speak their language. Here’s how:
Listen and Learn From What Clients Say to You
Not all brands or marketers listen to what customers have to say. After all, customers are not experts in a particular niche or business, so why should their opinion matter?
This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
Consumers look at things from their own unique perspectives. They apply certain life experiences to their decision-making process.
Over time, your customers develop specific terminology they use to talk about business, clients, products, and services.
To run a successful business, you must engage your audience. To engage your audience, you need to take some time to learn their language.
Once you understand it, you can adapt it and make it a core part of your branding messaging.
So, what does this mean? Well, it means you need to:
- Learn the most commonly used words and phrases used by your audience
- Learn how your ideal customers talk about competitors
- Learn how consumers talk about services, products, and even their own approaches to conducting business
Take the opportunity to conduct interviews, post questionaries, and talk to people one-on-one. But instead of taking the lead, sit back and let others do the talking so you can take notes.
Create Client Avatars That Define What Language Each Type of Client Prefers
Every business creates customer and client avatars. You need to know who you’re selling to before working on a targeted marketing campaign.
A similar thing can be done when it comes to language.
You can develop different personas or avatars that clearly define what various audience segments prefer. Each avatar will likely use slightly different words, metaphors, phrases, jargon, etc.
This is usually easy enough to accomplish once you’re clear on your customers’ fears and aspirations. The things that resonate with them often dictate the language people use.
Don’t Complicate It (Unless You Speak to a Knowledgeable Audience)
Sometimes you can try too hard to appeal to your target audience. When you lack a sense of direction or don’t fully understand their language, you’ll try to cheat your way to amazing content.
How do most businesses do this?
By turning to generic statements and jargon that might seem appealing to an audience.
However, if you’re unfamiliar with the language, you risk focusing on meaningless buzzwords. This is a quick way to clutter your messaging with fluff and confuse your audience.
Personalising your messaging is great, but you don’t have to overdo it. When in doubt, do more research. Customers will appreciate you for going the extra mile.
They’ll feel heard and important to your brand. This will ultimately help forge stronger relationships and even increase the average lifetime value of your most loyal customers.
You shouldn’t try to overcomplicate things even when dealing with a knowledgeable audience. People will quickly pick up on your shortcomings if you don’t fully understand their language.
Monitor Clients on Social Media to See How They Talk
Where can you learn how your clients and customers speak? Well, everyone spends a ton of time on social media these days, so that’s an excellent place to start.
Monitor the activities of existing and potential customers on their favourite social platforms. Using data from your CRM should help you identify online gathering hotspots.
Look for the most commonly used words, phrases, hashtags, and other linguistic elements. Twitter and Instagram are great platforms for this due to the shorter nature of the messages and posts.
However, you shouldn’t dismiss LinkedIn either. Many discussion boards or liked articles can give insight into the language your audience prefers to use.
Find Challenges Your Clients Share and Pinpoint Them
Sometimes you’ll find yourself targeting customers from different sectors and industries. That doesn’t mean you can’t identify common challenges if you look hard enough.
To really understand how your customers speak, you must learn more about their troubles.
Everyone deals with industry-specific concerns. Look for them and try to empathise and connect over shared challenges.
Better yet, shine a light on whether you share the same challenges. Pinpoint them to grab your customers’ attention and make your brand more relevant in their eyes.
Interact to Test the Language
Say you studied how your target audience speaks and why they talk in a certain way.
Is that enough to be able to create engaging content? Not exactly.
Just because you’re aware of the language doesn’t make you an expert in using it. Language is about nuances.
To make your content shine, you have to ensure you fully grasp the details of what makes the language unique to your audience.
How do you do that?
Through practice. Learning your customers’ language is done in a similar way to how you learned to speak as a kid.
You have to use it often and try it out in different environments. This is why it’s crucial to interact with your customers.
There’s only so much you can learn as a passive bystander. Make it a habit to talk shop with various segments of your audience.
Frequent their most popular hangouts and get in front of them with every opportunity you get – whether it’s replying to messages, hopping on sales calls, etc.
The more you use your customers’ language, the more you’ll master it. Hitting the right blogging notes will be easy once you’re comfortable with how your audience speaks.
Create a Feedback Loop
Customer feedback is crucial in understanding the needs and expectations of potential buyers. The more you learn, the easier it is to create a satisfying customer journey experience.
But getting this right involves making consistent adjustments. So, it’s a matter of getting plenty of relevant information on an ongoing basis.
This is where feedback loop systems can really improve your marketing results.
You’ll want to follow up with both happy and disgruntled customers. Give out surveys and invite people to complete them so you can better understand them and improve your service.
This can be set up in various ways, from calls to emails and CTAs.
Automation Agency can help you create feedback loops by designing and automating your forms, email communication, installing review plugins, and a wide range of other tasks.
Explain Jargon and Acronyms
Using slang can make or break your brand messaging. Your content will feel more familiar to your audience if you get it right. It will be more engaging.
However, mess it up and you risk losing followers and potential customers.
You want people to understand what you’re conveying. So, you should emphasise clarity above everything else.
If you’re using new jargon, take your time to explain it, especially to newer audience members.
The same thing applies to acronyms whether you’re in the business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) space. It’s very tempting to want to use shorthand in various situations. But you must also show a certain level of professionalism when curating content.
Don’t think it’s beneath your status to spell out terminology before resorting to acronyms or using jargon.
These are easy things to miss when you start writing. And unless you’re specifically asking for feedback on the matter, your audience might not tell you what to fix.
Check Your Pronouns
Why does anyone create and share content?
They want to tell the world about something. It can be an idea, experience, product, service, you name it.
But even something as simple as pronouns can take your content in a very different and unfortunate direction.
When you want to share something, it’s tempting to talk about it from your perspective.
However, if digital marketing taught the world anything, using a consumer-centric approach is the most efficient way to grow a brand and gain followers.
That’s why people generally respond better when spoken to directly.
Your list of pronouns should include far more readers’ pronouns than your own pronouns. Opting for the latter will only make your content seem self-centered.
So, don’t let your “I’s” and “us” outnumber the “you, your, yours” in your messaging. As a general rule of thumb, using two times more reader pronouns will make your content more palatable and engaging.
Learn From Your Clients’ Emails
There’s no shortage of ways to learn how your audience speaks. Every email follow-up sequence can offer a wealth of information.
Given the popularity of email communication, this is an excellent medium to probe potential and existing customers. Get people to talk about what motivates them, their challenges, fears, and other things that are relevant to your interactions.
Absorb that information and analyse speech patterns to assimilate their language.
Engage Your Audience
You can’t thrive in the modern business environment without hitting all the right notes with your digital marketing strategy. Like it or not, blogging is a vital component. Nothing generates more traffic and leads and helps conversions, like sharing relevant and valuable content in a language your readers understand.
Learn to understand the nuances in how people speak and refer to various things based on who they are and what motivates them.
Apply those nuances to your messaging to be more relatable. Once you can show understanding and empathy, your content will resonate. If you can do that, you’ll have no problem engaging your ideal audience and scaling your business.
And since this is a tricky area to master, we’d like to extend our help. Reach out to our Concierge Service if you want to increase your traffic organically through high-quality content. Let us help you take your blogging game to the next level.
