Context Cues 🎯
Hello Reader,
In my marketing strategy assessment, the second most common answer is "Address Your Audience." This tracks with my experience working with clients as well—once folks successfully define their framework and the transformation they facilitate, the next challenge is ensuring they're speaking to the right people.
This is a VERY common obstacle that we uncover—I call it an offer-audience mismatch.
It's super fixable, but it's also incredibly frustrating nevertheless. If you've ever had an engaged audience that cheered you on and loved everything you do, but never made a purchase, that's an offer-audience mismatch. You will also see it when you have frequent "ghosting" of proposals, or inquiries that never book a call, or lots of "when I have the budget" responses to your sales calls.
(Important: offer-audience mismatch isn't the only reason for these symptoms, but it's a very common diagnosis.)
How do you right this ship? Well, you have two options:
- Change the offer; or
- Change the audience.
While door #1 is often easier, it's also rarely the right answer for my people who tend to be in a growth stage of their businesses. So, we look at door #2, changing the audience.
One of the unsung, yet powerful, heroes in this audience shift is deploying the use of context clues in messaging.
While context cues is a broad psychological subject, in marketing strategy we lean on context cues to help people understand if we're talking to them (or not!).
We can do this in a lot of ways.
Here's an example: I've had several clients who've made a shift from B2C (business to consumer, ie solopreneurs or individual consumers) to B2B (business to business), particularly pursuing startup SaaS brands (software as a service—think Airtable or Notion type companies) for their services.
In order to ensure that their messaging speaks to that audience, we may adjust the following:
- Using verbiage such as "beta launch" to make a pilot offer instead of "experiment" or "testing;"
- Infusing wording the signals understanding of SaaS funding cycles such as "Series A Funding" into marketing language; and
- Adjusting the visual design of a services page to appear more "SaaSy" (ha!) and include elements such as pricing tables, which feel familiar and comfortable to this audience.
Another example of my own is that I'm careful to use the lingo "practice areas" when I talk to attorneys. It's a signal that "Hey I know how you think about your business."
It goes without saying that context cues can be used for nefarious or exclusionary purposes as well (as I often say, I have seen some stuff!), but that's not what we're talking about here.
How do we find these context cues?
- Actively listening to our audiences and noting their language
- Eavesdropping on them through podcasts, forums, and social media (pay attention to the comments especially)
- Industry articles and publications
- Networking events—listen to those speakers and the language they use
There are lots of other opportunities to learn those cues, but the theme here is research and listening.
Have you thought about how to subtly make it clear to your audience that you "get them" without getting bogged down in jargon? What are some of the little context cues you could add to your marketing to make it clear you are for them?
Talk soon,
Sarah