Highlighting the expertise of staff members — “subject matter experts” — can be a great way to gain the attention of your target audience. To ensure that your organization receives maximum benefit from this approach, follow these steps.
The most important thing to ensure that survey responses guide your communications effectively is to act on them. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of identifying what your audience members want, make sure you reap the benefits of providing them with what they want.
When it comes to learning what current clients, prospective customers, association members or others want to know, nothing beats going straight to the source. By surveying a representative sample of your key audience, you can obtain a breadth of insights quickly and at relatively low – sometimes even no – cost.
The “360 Degree Process” is an easy way to get story ideas for your non-profit blog, corporate Intranet or association Web site. Simply stand in the middle of your office, rotate in a circular and make careful observations about everything you see.
More people in your audience will “get the message” when you treat the first portion of your communication as the only portion audience members are going to read, see, or hear.
If your communications are only, or even primarily, focused on meeting your needs, they likely aren’t meeting your needs because they aren’t winning the attention of your audience. If you want people to read what you write, write what they want to read.