Have you ever attended a wedding and been lumbered with the table bore or had a first date that dragged on and on?
What usually links these types of memorable events is one key failing: the person in question talked mainly about themselves and – crucially – believed you were fascinated. It’s a common affliction.
Me, myself and I is the topic we know the most about, so it’s only natural that we are the most comfortable telling people about it in depth, with complexity and authority.
It’s also why biographies are so popular, regularly topping bestseller lists. Our stories are the ones we like to tell the best.
However, there is a keen difference between the dinner party bore giving intricate detail about his trip to Costa Rica (“You should have visited before mass tourism spoiled it”) and the gripping tale of a plucky East End urchin who grows up to captain England.
That difference is understanding the audience, and the first step towards this is to appreciate that there actually is one.
What the table bore or the nervous first date don’t realise is that any story, anecdote or piece information has to be relevant to who’s listening. It needs to reach out to them and strike a chord.
The vast, overwhelming majority of the material sourced to write biographies ends up on the cutting room floor. Only the most significant events or those that will really resonate with the reader are kept and deftly woven into the narrative.
This careful crafting builds up – or reinforces – a multi-faceted picture of the subject, allowing the reader to relate with either compassion or revulsion, as the writer intends.
The same needs to be true of any commercial, marketing or thought leadership content.
The reader needs to recognise, pretty much instantly, that you both understand a specific challenge they face and may have a solution to help them meet it.
Yes, they need to know your credentials for providing that solution and how long and with whom you’ve been working to get it. They also need to know your heritage and develop a sense of reliability and trustworthiness.
But the key is to create a rapport with the reader so the fleeting moments you might grab from them do the job for which they are intended. Otherwise, from 30-second video scripts through to 16-page white papers, you’re wasting everyone’s time.
It’s important to recognise that it’s not only the time of the reader you’re trying to engage that’s wasted, but that of the whole chain of colleagues who have been involved in its creation. How better could that time have been spent?
Happily – and the reason for Rhotic Media’s very existence – not only marketing and comms teams, but their directors and C-suites are latching on to the value of clearly defining both specific audiences and the messages they want them to hear.
Over the past five years, we have seen a growing willingness within financial services to tone down the presentation of top-class credentials and accolades in favour of a more accessible and awareness-driven approach to client communications.
The skills, solutions and stature of a company mean nothing if a potential – or existing – client is not shown how it’s applicable to them.
Being impressive does not necessarily translate into sales.
That’s not to say that these hard- earned honours or innovative products should not be put on display – far from it. Rather, what they all mean to the reader (or person within the reader’s organisation with buying power)
needs to be paramount.
Luckily, those being charged with creating and implementing content strategies across financial services are grasping the importance of getting this message across. This is leading to a rapid and exciting evolution in content.
This evolution has the power to change how companies all across our sector engage with their public, and as times are increasingly volatile and uncertain, it has not come too soon.
Sadly, the same cannot yet be said about wedding breakfast bores and first dates, but we have to start somewhere.
Elizabeth Pfeuti is the chief client officer of Rhotic Media