First week of 2010. The one week of the year where I will eat well, exercise, clean my car out, get organized and feel re-energized and ready to charge into the new year. It will quickly fall apart by the middle of next week, when there won’t be time to exercise, staying organized will be too exhausting, and the temptation of McDonald’s french fries will be too much. But as a communicator, it’s always in this short period of self-improvement that I do my own annual relevance check-up and it always starts with the same question: How am l relevant to my audience? Is that relevance translated in my messages, brand and website?
WHY RELEVANCE MATTERS
Relevance and value. Either or both should come through in anything we are trying to communicate if we want our audience to pay attention. In this world of information-overload the only way to get someone to engage with your message is to make it relevant to them or to make it obvious they will get something out of the engagement. If it’s not relevant to me, or I get nothing out of it, chances are you’re not going to get my time. That’s the reality in today’s media landscape. No one reads anymore for the sake of reading.
What adds value or is relevant shouldn’t be loosely defined. Some writers will argue that there’s relevance or value simply because they wrote it. That may be true if you’re Hunter S. Thompson, but in most cases it’s not. The relevance and value should be as specific as possible. It’s clear to anyone who picks up a copy of REAL SIMPLE magazine that this brand is all about simplifying your cluttered life. There’s real value in that, whether it works or not. Could be why this successful magazine reached 1 million circulation faster than any other title and is now closing in on 2 million.
Tablet
Who doesn’t want help making their lives easier and simpler? This is what makes “Real Simple” relevant to a large audience.
TURN YOUR HEAD AND COUGH
Back to the relevance check-up. How are you relevant to your audience? If you can answer this quickly and in one sentence, you’re fine. But if you struggle to find an answer or it’s as long as an Hunter S. Thompson (second mention deserves a link) tale, then unfortunately you’re going to need some follow-up work.
To really gage your relevance you first have to know your audience. The more specialized or targeted the audience is the easier it will be to be relevant. Moms, for example, is a targeted audience and you can sum up what’s relevant to them very easily—raising happy, healthy children. Any message or brand that addresses that instantly gets their time, and moms don’t exactly have a lot of that. How targeted and easily definable is your audience? Knowing this is the first step in developing more relevance.
HEAR IT, SEE IT, FEEL IT
But just knowing how your brand is relevant to your audience is not enough. The next question is equally as important: Is that relevance being translated in the way you present yourself? Your logo, your business cards, your website, your newsletter? Is it obvious in what you are saying? Your social media strategy (twitter, facebook etc.), your blog, your presentations? One of the most common problems I see with clients is the disconnect between who they are and how they present themselves. Your identity must align with your message. Your time-consumed audience doesn’t have more than a few seconds to decide whether to engage or not. Make your relevance obvious. Make it easy for them to understand why they have to invest time with you.
Apple does a great job of translating their relevance in everything they do and say, from their product design to their web site to their stores. Apple is relevant to their audience because they’re slicker, cooler and easier to use than their PC Window’s counterpart. In the highly technical, “wired” world of personal computing, Apple talks to regular people and tells them we’re fun and we’re easy to use. Their “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” campaign translates this superbly by pitting the younger, hipper, laid-back “Mac,” with the stuffy, bespectacled, wrinkled and frustrated “PC.”
Tablet
In just a few seconds the audience visually “gets” that they’d rather associate themselves with the “Mac” who is more relevant to the way they want to be. Apple knows their audience and does a great job of selling their relevance to them.
RELEVANCE + TRUST = ENGAGEMENT
When you become relevant to someone, they learn to trust you. When they trust you they listen to what you have to say. When they listen, they’re engaged. Don’t get too far into the new year without asking these questions and making sure you are still relevant to your audience and that it comes through clearly in the way you present your company. Easier to do this than stay away from McDonald’s french fries, right?
So…how are you relevant to your audience?
The post The Annual “Relevance” Check-Up appeared first on Garcia Interactive: User Interface Design & Strategy.