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Focus on Your Audience’s Emotional Needs When Posting Social or Blog Content

Your social media posts and blog articles can inspire a potential member to attend your club meetings. By informing potential members about the problems your club solves, you are providing a value.

Knowing this, it’s important that you devote the attention necessary to content creation. Engaging content will continue to promote your message and expand your reach long after your initial post.

Know Your Audience

Before we continue, its important to step back and talk about knowing your audience. This should be top of mind, but there are many who don’t believe that understanding who their member is and what made them reach out to Toastmasters is important. The best posts speak to one audience and their specific issue (their pain points, wants and needs).

If you haven’t already, make a list of exactly who you’re trying to appeal to. Build your list from the insights gathered in asking questions of new members and every guest that attends your meetings. Who are they – exactly? High-level identifies on your list could include approx. age, where they live and work (or go to school), goals, or milestones such as getting married or new job, their problem (pain point), and what they want to change.

Knowing who is coming to your club allows you to better direct your content. Having a focused message will increase the success of your social engagement.

Emotional Connection

Once you have an idea of your audience, create an emotional connection through your posts by giving them what they will want to read. For example, if you consistently hear from guests that they are looking for a new job, write about interview tips.

Clearly define what it is that your club can do for them. Demonstrate through your posts that you listen to understand, and you want to help them fix it. Show them how they can achieve their goals.

Behavior and Motivation

Knowing your audience is a simple but powerful concept. Also knowing that everyone is emotional is equally powerful. People tend to buy based on how they anticipate feeling as a result of enjoying a particular product or service.

For example, when you were shopping for your first car, you might have had visions of freedom of an open road, no cares, heading someplace exciting; your new car a magnet for attracting a beautiful person to your life; and you looking successful driving it.

Ultimately, we looked forward to the feeling we expected to enjoy with our new car. We anticipated our purchase would solve all of our needs and wants.

This is exactly the same way you choose an item on a restaurant menu, or when you shop to buy clothes, or a gift for someone. Everything you do is done in anticipation of the feeling that you experience if your purchase decision is successful.

Entering into a purchase decision cycle means that the person is not happy with their current situation. There is a gap between their current situation and the ideal situation that they want to be in and enjoy.

People Buy Solutions

Going back to our earlier discussion about the target audience, what is it that your potential members want to change in their life? They are dissatisfied with something in their existing situation, and that’s why they visited your club.

Focus on the gap. People buy solutions to their problems. Where are they at? Where do they want to be?
If you are a closed club and doing posts internally at your company, you may want to target the decision makers and what they want to accomplish. What is the gap between where the employees are and where management wants them to be?

Posts centered on problems that the potential member might have will hold your reader’s attention. The more questions you ask to find their problem (their pain point), the more interest your reader will have in your post, and the more attention you will generate for your club.

When you approach your blog article and social content creation with this in mind, your readers will know they are being helped to improve their lives, and will be more likely to seek out your club.

By positioning your posts as helpful how-to’s, you will showcase that your club is the ideal place to solve a pain point, satisfy a need and achieve a goal.

Created by Nancy Movrin DTM Public Relations Manager 2021 – 2022