Making Your Company Relevant

How to develop a focused strategy that will win new customers

Making yourself, your services or your company relevant to your target market can certainly be challenging in today’s economy.   With all of the messages flying at people every day, it is important now more than ever for organizations to focus on offering something that meets someone’s specific needs or wants.  When something that you do equals something that someone wants, you have now become relevant.

“Relevance is used to describe how pertinent, connected or applicable something is to a given matter.  A thing is relevant if it serves as a means to a given purpose.”

The following are three tips to making your company relevant:

1.  Find out to whom your business is relevant. This can be achieved through online surveys, market research, focus groups, social media and internal meetings to determine if your audience has shifted over the past several years.

2. Tailor your message to your target audience, and make sure they understand what you do and what you are trying to get them to buy or use.

Many companies often tailor their messages to their competitors or use industry language that is hard to understand.  They are missing the mark on how to make their business relevant to those who are interested.  A public relations professional can help you tailor your message to make relevance a reality and to help you achieve your goals.

3.  Make sure your firm hones in on its core strengths, and uses them to their full advantage.  Don’t try to be all things to everyone.  Also realize some audiences are more relevant and useful to you than others.  Focus your efforts on the most beneficial audience and speak directly to them, finding out what they want and making yourself relevant to them.

And here’s one more tip, it’s one that I have written about before but believe is so crucial today – be visible so your audience can find you.  Have an effective website that displays your key messages and exactly what you do, have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile so people searching your firm can find you and make sure all your marketing materials and PR outreach speak to who you are trying to reach, not those that work within your company.

JustRED it here.

“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present and future.” – Susan Sontag