Right up there alongside, “providing value,” on the list of overused and under-applied marketing buzzwords is the idea of “serving your audience.”

Listen to a random selection of online marketing podcasts and you’re likely to hear the phrase pop up at least a handful of times. And then, because I’ve pointed it out to you, you’re going to start noticing it everywhere. #sorrynotsorry

As you start to notice the phrase, you’re also going to notice that its usage often seems to be untethered to any sort of real meaning. Rather, it’s become something of a euphemism for simply “doing business”.

“Serve your audience” has begun to feel like a cliche inspirational poster hung on the wall of every up and coming online entrepreneur, or an easy addition to a list of company values when you don’t actually know what your company values are.

Businesses that truly understand what serving their audience means rarely talk about it. To them, it’s almost too obvious to mention, baked into the center of how they operate and make decisions both internally, and when interacting with their audiences.

Service is an essential part of any business and any marketing that’s going to stand out from the crowd and build an audience. But to find out how you can really apply and live by the principal in your work and your interactions with your audience, you actually need to know what it means.

Service Starts With Empathy

At the foundation of successful marketing is empathy for your audience.

If you want to speak in a way that resonates with them, you first need to see them for who they are, acknowledge their current circumstances, what they’ve done to get there, and where they’re looking to go.

By understanding their story, hopes, dreams and fears, you’ll be able to create products, content, and messaging that resonates with them, and you both win.

To truly serve your audience, you must start here. Get curious and dig deep into getting to know your audience. There’s no way to serve them if you don’t know where they’re looking to go and what’s standing in the way of getting there.

Navigating Zero-Sum + Non-Zero-Sum Games

If you’re serving your audience with empathy, you’ll find that most of the time you’ll both win.

You create an offer based on what would be useful to your them and present it in a way that resonates, they pay for it, and the cycle repeats.

While you both will generally both benefit in this non-zero sum game, however, you may not always benefit equally.

There will almost certainly be times when you have a choice between two offers to present to your audience.

Both will benefit your audience and both will benefit you to promote to your audience. One, however, skews the balance of benefit in your favour and the other in that of your audience’s.

The offer that skews in your favour may be a marginal improvement over an existing offer, maybe it’s a solution that will move your audience closer to their target, but it’s not the best solution for them, or maybe an incomplete solution.

It’s not that these offers are scams, they do benefit your audience in a real way, and sometimes, especially early in your business, these products and services might be essential in allowing you to get some income so you can keep working on the ideal solution to your audience’s problem.

Where it veers away from serving your audience, however, is when you make a deliberate choice between two valid options and choose the option of lesser benefit to your audience because it’s easier to produce, has higher profit margins, or allows you to win bigger in some other way.

Zero-Sum Games

While most of your interactions with your audience will be non-zero sum, allowing you to both win, occasionally, you may be presented with a circumstance in which only one of you can come out ahead. Promoting something you know won’t help your audience to make up for increased expenses elsewhere in your business might be an example.

If you’re truly seeking to serve your audience, you should never be the winner of a zero-sum game.

We all need to take a hit, absorb a loss at some point in our work, and trying to avoid those losses at our audience’s expense hurts us more in the long term than it helps in the short.

Find the Balance

Keep in mind that your audience winning at your expense isn’t the goal here either.

Giving away your time and work for free might benefit your audience immensely in the short term, but if you’re then unable to afford to continue to create new offers that will help them continue to move closer to their goal, you both lose.

Neither is the goal to never release an intermediary offer and spend years working on and perfecting the ultimate solution to your audience’s problem

Serving your audience is about providing them with the best possible solution for their problem that you have the capability of creating and offering with what you have available to you.

This solution takes into account their individual goals and circumstances and is created and presented generously, with the understanding that while you may create better, more complete solutions in the future, right now, this offer will allow you both to take one step closer to your destination, and continue on your journey together.

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