audience Archives | Zarywacz @ z2z.com

Who is your audience?

28-Oct-13 by robert

Who do you want to hear your story?

Is it one group of people or more, eg young people and pensioners?

Different groups could be interested in different aspects for different reasons. They are likely to read different publications.

If so, you will need to tailor press releases for each type of publication to emphasise what interests individual groups.

If you don’t know who you want to reach, you won’t know what they’re looking for and so won’t necessarily be providing what they want. It’s also a waste of resources to send press releases anywhere as they are unlikely to get published without a clear focus.

Perhaps your audience is small and limited to a specific sector served by just a few publications. Or else it could be much bigger and include large numbers of consumers who read different publications according to their age, interests, etc.

Knowing your audience enables you to target your resources more effectively and gives your press release a bigger chance of success.

Tell a spellbinding story

26-Oct-13 by robert

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Everyone enjoys a good story. Stories are the best way for businesses to get their messages across to customers.

As a business journalist, I often get people calling me saying they’ve started a new business with no idea of what to say about it. I’m always interested in why someone starts a business, especially in these tough times, so I ask them what inspired them.

This simple question is often the key to unlocking the story of their business. They tell me about their life, the barriers they’ve come up against, their dreams and how they’ve pursued them, and a lot more.

Suddenly, they’ve gone from being just someone who’s opened another business to someone with an interesting story. It usually says a lot about their business too, revealing their ethos and how they operate.

Not all journalists are ready to put the work in to discover the story, so it’s good to discover your own story and tell it for yourself.

What drives you to run your business? What has happened along the way? What thoughts struck you so you decided to make your business that bit different from everyone else?

Capture the imagination of your audience as you tell the story of your journey to success.

Pause . . . for thought

17-May-07 by robert

In our quest for continuous detailed instant information, so much simply gets lost.

Often, we need to slow down . . . to pause . . . to take stock.

What have we missed that could have been of value to us?

Whether you’re writing text for the page or screen, or speaking to an audience, the pause is an essential tool.

When we’re writing, it helps to break up long sentences, while splitting long passages into shorter paragraphs can help readers to digest content more easily. When we’re speaking, pauses can help to slow us down so that people find it easier to understand what we are saying; they can also help to emphasise key points and to hold the audience’s attention.

So don’t try to fill every square inch of paper with text or every second of a speech with your voice, add pauses to improve your writing and speaking.

Robert Zarywacz