Training Your Audience What To Expect

After initially attracting the attention of your prospects and getting them into some medium of regular communication, they are going to learn what it is that they should expect from you. Do you write one blog post a week? Are you communications dry and formal, or personal and quirky? Do you produce audio? Text? Video? Infographics?

Regular actions made by the marketer mold the prospects behaviour. Take the current crop of superhero movies - anyone who is a fan will sit through a two hour movie, then watch every single credit roll up the screen for an easter egg right at the end.

This is now so pervasive that they have names for it: a post credit scene (and sometimes now a mid credit scene). The fans do this because they’ve consistently been receiving these short teaser clips for more than a decade of blockbuster movies. Or in other words, the audience has been trained to expect these clips and the real fans stay for the whole thing.

Sending fourteen emails a week with dull content will train your prospects to ignore/block/unsubscribe or mark your message as spam. Messaging them once every six months may have similar effects (considering that they won’t remember who you are).

Training your audience is something that happens, regardless of your intentions. If you have a strategy, the audience will be trained to respond to that. If you constantly throw different things at the wall to see what sticks, the audience will be trained to expect that.

It’s not that the lack of a fleshed-out plan is bad. Experimentation is part of finding out how to connect with the right prospects. What is bad is not realizing that not making a plan is still ‘a plan’.

Or put another way, if you don’t put some conscious thought into the kind of message you want to project, you will land on some kind of message by accident. Maybe one that, in retrospect, you wouldn’t have wanted your audience to receive. It’s tantamount to planning out your road trip versus putting on a blindfold and stepping on the gas.

Or falling asleep at the wheel.

There are plenty of websites with fluff content that gives their readers a hit of entertainment. There are plenty of websites with evergreen content that readers will continue to revisit for years. Some go very niche, and some go very general. Some give elaborate ‘how-to’ descriptions, and some give hacks.

Consider the idea of the “customer avatar” - the idealized personification of your intended audience. Step inside their head and ask, “What does this person want? What will keep them returning again and again for years?” In some cases that can mean creating unique content, in others, it can mean curating interesting content from around the web.

When you land on a formula that works, get into a rhythm. Possibly one that you explicitly communicate - like telling your audience you’re having a Q&A podcast that comes out every Friday.

Do this consistently and you’ll find a specific audience will gravitate towards you, and others away. Want to change that mix? Train your audiences to expect something different.