Reaching Your Target Audience: Closing the Gap Between Mission and Market
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At EnticEdge, we are healthcare and wellness business consultants dedicated to helping companies clarify and align around their competitive advantage, which we call your authentic edge! Our team brings 30+ years of healthcare expertise in strategic advising, value mapping, business consulting, client experience, team and cross-departmental alignment, and more, all tailored to helping teams achieve mission-driven growth.
Ensuring that your mission reaches your target audience is invaluable for any organization aiming to make a meaningful impact in its market and increase client conversion. Positioning and communicating your mission as a solution to meet your target audience's specific needs is an essential strategy for growth. We began the conversation around crafting your messaging in our blog, "The Ultimate Guide to Messaging: Crafting Your Company's Voice for Impact and Alignment," but today, we'll be doing a deep dive into strategies for customizing your messaging to communicate your mission to your target audience! When your mission resonates clearly with your target market, it differentiates your brand in your market sector and amplifies resonance and engagement among your audience. Visualize your audience's and your mission's needs as two separate puzzle pieces. Your mission might be the missing piece or solution that customers have been looking for in your market, but by shaping your mission to align with and speak directly to their needs, the pieces will fit together in a way that leads to client conversion. What's the solution? Strategic messaging. In essence, strategic messaging is not just about communicating your mission; it's about strategically framing your mission and objectives around the customers' needs. This alignment between your mission and customer needs creates a perfect puzzle match, driving brand growth and customer satisfaction.
What’s the Gap Between Your Mission and Messaging?
So, before we dive into the best approaches to customizing your messaging strategy, let's talk about how the 'gap' between your mission and messaging often arises in the first place. It presents itself for several reasons, but the primary one is that resources, time, and effort are disproportionately allocated to defining other aspects of company branding without a strategy to communicate the company brand and mission to its market. Even with an incredible company mission, you need a roadmap for reaching your target audience and implementing strategic messaging to avoid client conversion falling flat. Think of strategic messaging as a bridge (metaphorically and literally); on one side of the river is your mission, and on the other is your target audience. Even if your mission objectives are precisely what your audience needs, you can only reach your audience by building a solid strategy to bridge the 'gap' and get that audience! So, how exactly do you create that strategic messaging roadmap? Well, let's dive in!
Bridging the Gap: The Value of Strategic Messaging
As we said, the 'gap' is the disconnect when your company's mission only partially resonates with its intended market. Still, it's important to note another important reason why you might struggle to reach your target audience…You might be considering the consumer as the last factor for your messaging, when in reality, shaping your messaging around your client's needs will ensure that your mission objectives are communicated as solutions to your customers' or clients' needs. Valuing your audience in your approach to your mission and messaging is crucial for meeting your audience's needs! So, let's unpack this with an example.
Let's say that your mental health company specializes in early child/adolescent therapeutic services.
You've been relentlessly trying to reach your target audience by speaking to all of the values you provide to the children you work with and support, but you're not bringing in the client retention you had hoped for, even after investing in your branding and digital presence…
Alright, here's the kicker: even with the best logo or website design, your mission has to go beyond the visual attributes and comforting care-centric tone associated with your company branding. Ask yourself, do your digital presence and mission speak to the right audience?
In this example, you've been speaking about the value therapy can provide to children. Still, after a strategic analysis of your target audience, you might discover that the audience you need to speak to is the parents paying for the care. Now, that might change the objectives you talk to when communicating your mission! With that new framework in mind, your messaging will more strategically reach your audience and increase client retention while still serving your mission to support children/adolescents at your practice.
With the correct target audience in mind, your mission-driven messaging might answer new questions: How can your services reduce stress at home for both the child and the parent? How can your services alleviate parents attempting to juggle the high work demands while trying to support their child? How can helping this child support a stronger child-parental relationship?
See? It has the same mission but more strategic messaging! In this case, you have now proactively considered the needs of your target audience and can work from the outside in, bringing the parent into the core of your communication and framing your messaging around their needs (while still ensuring that your mission is centered around the child/adolescent you aim to help)!
Strategies for Building Mission-Market Alignment:
1: Identify Your Target Audience
Employ regular market research to gain a strategic understanding of your target audience, including their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Understand that these needs will evolve and shift in your market, so this market research should be relevant and regular so that you can stay up-to-date on adapting your messaging to meet growing market demands. (Better yet, let EnticEdge do it for you and get started with a Value Mapping session to ensure you successfully leverage and communicate your unique value proposition to your target audience.)
2: Reframing and Refining Your Mission
Refine your mission statement to ensure it's clear and concise. You want to make your mission impactful as efficiently as possible. After all, consumers will form an impression within the first 7 seconds of interacting with your company—that's a small timeframe to capture your audience, so be strategic with how you use this time to communicate your key differentiators.
3: Aligning Values with Your Market
Ensure that your company values are in harmony with the values of your target market, reinforcing a relatable and personal connection between your brand and your customers. Resonate with your audience's goals and aspirations, and communicate your company mission as the solution to market demands.
4: Leveraging the Right Channels
Identify the most effective channels for reaching your target audience. Where are your consumers spending the most time? What platforms speak most effectively to them? Is it social media, email marketing, content marketing, or blogs? A mix of both? Tailor your content and messaging for each channel to maximize impact while still ensuring consistency across all digital touchpoints.
5: Feedback and Adaptation
This one is often the more underrated, but arguably most important aspect of your mission-driven messaging strategy! Fostering a culture of feedback, encouraging customers to share their experiences and suggestions is critical to continuing to refine your messaging to meet evolving customer needs and market changes.
Use customer insight as a tool for adjusting your messaging strategy regularly. Don’t be afraid of productive criticism—better yet, lean into it!
Building a roadmap for mission-driven messaging strategies is critical to connecting to your target audience and increasing client conversion. Regularly refining and reevaluating your strategic messaging ensures that your mission reaches and impacts your market while adapting to changing and evolving market demands! Messaging is not just about ensuring that your mission is being heard; it's about communicating your value in a way that resonates with your audience and positions your company as a solution to their needs. The first step to building your mission around your target audience is considering their needs when developing your messaging strategy! In a saturated market, the ability to communicate your mission effectively is not just an advantage; it's a necessity for those looking to make a lasting impact and accelerate growth.