How to Dig In and Find the Right Marketing Voice that Resonates

Lisa Stiles / Aug 5th / Comments

During a recent writer’s conference, the instructor gave us a good tip for getting into a character’s head. The problem that arose was how to find a character’s “voice” if you’ve set a story in the third-person point of view. When you write from a third-person point of view, as in “John felt scared,” you’ve got a bit of a distance between you and your character.

But when you switch it to the first-person point of view, “I shook; I was so scared,” you get right into the character’s head and see the world through his eyes. Sometimes writing from that perspective for practice, even if you don’t use it, can help fine tune a character.

That’s when it really hit me that in marketing we ignore this point of view often.

Yes, we constantly try to craft messages and themes and solutions that meet a targeted audiences’ needs and perform research to figure out what compels them to act in a certain way, make a particular decision, and move them closer to choosing your solution.

But too often that research is outwardly focused on a potential audience. We court them and search for them and believe our one-on-one conversations are yielding a rich mine of information.

But we quite often neglect one of the best resources we have at our disposal – our own clients. Whether it is something as formal as conducting primary, qualitative research with a telephone interview, or more simplistic with an e-mail survey asking for their feedback, we need to constantly be aware of the reasons why someone chose us, why they continue to stick with us, and especially why someone would decide to leave us.

That last point is important. Regularly taking your client’s pulse – checking out things from that first-person point of view – can prevent departures that come as a shock to the company later on. Don’t just ask your client if they are satisfied and would they refer you; try to dig deeper than that.

If you are in an ongoing relationship with them, ask them why. Would they do it all over again if they could? Regardless of how you got them on board to begin with, ask them what spaces they are occupying now – what media they read, what has changed in their habits, what magazine or Web site do they no longer find value in? What new challenges are they facing? Could you help them with those?

It gives you a chance to walk around inside their head and view your service or solution through the eyes of the people who use it every day. And in checking out that first-person point of view, it helps you develop the right “voice” your marketing messages need.