Ask and answer four questions before you communicate whether it’s an email, a presentation or a conversation with a customer. The answers to these important questions will help you customize the communication and significantly increase your opportunity to engage and persuade your audience.
1. What is my goal for this communication? Is it to simply inform my audience? Get buy-in on something? Get them to take a specific action? You’ll want to share your goal right away.
2. What is my most important message(s)? Ask yourself, “If my audience only walks away with one thing from this communication, what do I want it to be?” Begin with your most important message, reinforce it, repeat it at the end.
3. Who is my audience? What do they know about my topic? How do they feel about it? Do they have biases for or against? What do they know about me? And the most important question…
4. Why? Why will my audience care about this topic? Why does it matter? What’s in for them?
When you have good, clear answers to these questions, then and only then sit down to write, create, prepare. Let’s use an example. If you’re an HR Director and you want employees to sign up for the new 401 (k) program, you would write an email something like this:
We have a new 401 (k) program and we want all of you to sign up asap so you can take advantage of this great opportunity to prepare yourself for retirement.
What is the goal? To get people to sign up for the program.
What is the most important message? There’s a new program and we want you to sign up.
Who is the audience? My employees who don’t currently have a 401 (k) plan.
Why does it matter to them? Their retirement will be better because they invested in the plan.
Of course, you’ll write more than just a sentence. You’ll provide details on how to sign up, when and what’s next. But too often, I see communications like these begin with rambling background statements or context that’s not very important.
If you ask yourself the four key questions and begin your communication with the answers you’ll significantly improve your ability to influence your audience.