How to craft content your audience cares about

Messaging can be tough, and it’s easy to get stuck. Whether you’re working on a company introduction, product launch, or messaging revamp, I suggest you can blow through writer’s block by writing these eight letters across the whiteboard: WHO CARES?

The answer, very often, is no one outside that room.

Consumers and business buyers are busy. Unless you’re one of the very hottest brands, they don’t automatically care about your business, your new product or your life. They’re not waiting for you to settle on just the right adjectives for your offering. You need to help them care. And you can.

Asking who cares is the key. Although marketers might understand intellectually that no one cares, they too often get so involved with their own projects they lose perspective. The CEO and the board care a lot, which helps a marketer imagine that everyone outside the company is yearning to hear from him or her. Yet, when marketers fully accept that that no one in this busy and cacophonous world actually does care, they are on their way toward relevance.

So, how do you help your target audience care?

You make yourself matter to them by concisely:

Bring it together in an elevator statement—the whole argument for the existence of your company, product or initiative in one, or maybe two digestible sentences.