#MarketingMondays: Knowing Your Audience

Happy Daylight Savings, American readers (except those of you who live in parts of Arizona, Hawaii, and the territories), and Monday to everyone else! 

I have a degree in Public Relations, which means I spent the better part of four years learning one basic principle: You cannot succeed without knowing your audience. The art of persuading an audience to your side is older than Socrates, and used to this day by every single person on the planet throughout their lives. While the sophists of Ancient Greece and Rome were eventually condemned by Plato in a very interesting game of ego and hypocrisy that anyone interested in should look up, their purpose holds importance today. 

Sophists specialized in public speaking and swaying the opinion of the crowd with their skills. You, as a person in marketing something to the world, wants to do the same thing, usually through the internet. Many of the principles used by those ancient opinion spinners and the philosophers and students of communications use today are necessary to understand how to reach the people who matter most. 

To start your journey to understanding your audience, you should try talking to them. Your family, friends, coworkers, even people on the street are people who might be interested in what you have to say and what you can offer them. The key is figuring out how to get that message to them in a way they will want to hear. So talk to them! Ask them questions! And listen to the answers. Incorporate those answers into your approach to the next person. Take notes. Identify who benefits best from what message. Not every message will reach every single person the same way. After all, you wouldn’t ask your significant other to do a chore in the exact same way you would ask a five-year-old. 

So listen, learn, and look up Plato and the sophists, because it’s kind of a funny story.

– Maggie

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I’m thinking of writing a book…