We’ve all had the occasional suspicious message we’ve gotten from a friend or family member. Do you respond to those messages, or do you contact your friend on another platform to let them know you think they’ve been hacked?
Personally, I tend to choose another platform, but that’s not what your prospects will do if they see a message coming from you that doesn’t look or sound like the brand they thought they were coming to know and love.
They’ll just click away to engage with another brand with more consistency.
Maintaining consistency throughout your content can be hard enough when you’re talking to just one audience, but what about when you’re trying to attract multiple audiences?
How can you maintain consistency while speaking to different segments of your audience who are interested in different things and talk and think about them in different ways?
Whether you’re a growing business looking to break into a new market, or you’ve already started working with people in a different segment, figuring out how to market to all segments of your audience without sacrificing consistency in your messaging can be easier said than done.
The good news is it can be done with the right strategy and intentionality behind your marketing.
Table of Contents
Define Your Segments
Before you can market to all segments of your audience, you first need to define those segments.
Sometimes it’s obvious, such as a realtor marketing to both buyers and sellers. There’s a clear distinction between each of those markets and what drives them to look for a real estate agent.
Other times it’s trickier, such as a restaurant trying to attract both vegetarians and meatlovers.
That’s when it’s more important than ever to start asking yourself some critical questions about your audience:
- What are their demographics?
- What are their psychographics?
- What problem are you solving for them
- How are they thinking about that problem?
- How are they talking about that problem?
- What steps are they taking to address that problem?
All those questions need to be answered before you can start marketing to any audience, and if you’re trying to market to different audiences, the answers will be different for each audience.
You can learn more about how to define each segment of your audience in this article.
Find the Through-Line
Consistency in messaging doesn’t have to mean all your content is identical, but it does have to be recognizable as coming from the same brand. Think of them as siblings: they don’t have to be identical twins for people to see that they’re related.
Going back to the example of a realtor trying to market to both buyers and sellers, the through line there is pretty obvious: you need someone who knows houses (or offices if you’re looking for a commercial realtor) and they have to understand the marketplace if they’re going to help you get the best result.
Other times you might have the opposite problem: you have a suite of services you can offer to all your clients and you need to figure out how to talk about each service to help your audience understand which one they need.
Regardless of how your audience is divided, the key to consistency in your messaging is to find the through-line that connects all your content.
Maintain the Brand Voice
One of the keys to maintaining consistency in your marketing is to make sure all your content sounds like it came from the same company. Everything from your website content to your social media posts to your emails all needs to sound and feel the same to ensure prospects know what to expect.
If they get one vibe off your social media, a different vibe from your website, and another vibe all together from your emails, they won’t know what to expect from you next. That confuses them, and confused prospects don’t buy. They click away to find a company that provides the same experience every time they interact with it.
A brand guide can help ensure consistency across all your messaging by defining your brand voice, creating guidelines around your marketing, and defining your marketing personas.
Once your brand guide is created, it’s important to keep it handy so you can use it as a reference every time you create content for your brand.
While there are bound to be differences in the topics you cover and the platforms you publish on when targeting different audiences, your brand voice should always remain consistent so everyone knows which company the messaging is coming from.
And if you want a professional to create your brand guide for you so you can create content with confidence, I can help.
Create a Content Calendar
When creating your marketing content on the fly, it can be tempting to write about whatever’s right in front of your face.
That’s not always a bad thing. If something has grabbed your attention lately, it has probably also grabbed the attention of your audience. Or it’s something they’re not thinking about, but they really should, which is why they need you to tell them about it.
The problem with marketing on the fly is that it’s a great way to miss things … like segments of your audience.
We all have segmented audiences, but we also tend to work with one segment more than another. When we do our own marketing and we do it on the fly rather than planning it out ahead of time, that can lead to one or more of our market segments getting ignored while we’re busy creating content for the segment that’s constantly top of mind for us.
A content calendar avoids that problem by planning out what topics you’ll cover and when.
If you’re doing your own marketing, I recommend creating a plan for your marketing at the beginning of every month. That gives you enough time to plan, but it’s not so far out that something can crop up in the marketplace and make your topics seem outdated.
When you’re creating your monthly content calendar, make sure you’re creating content for each of your audience segments at some point in the month. You don’t have to give equal representation to each segment (they’re not your children, so it’s OK to play favorites here) but you do need to make sure every segment has some representation in the month.
This will prevent your audience from getting whiplash when you suddenly remember to market to that segment you haven’t thought about in four months. Remember that one of the keys to successful marketing is consistency, which means you need to consistently market to all your segments to keep your funnel full of high-quality prospects.
Need help with your content calendar, I can help.
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