In the first of a three-part blog series on ‘The Art and Science of Crafting Persuasive Messaging’, Jamie explores how targeting the right audience is key to successful persuasion. He shares how investing energy in the most receptive audience first can create a ripple effect that influences others and makes persuasion more effective.
You’ve done the hard work. You’re ready to roll out your proposal to the world. You’re about to face your audience. Now, the only difference between success and failure is one persuasive message.
We saw the importance of persuasive messages during the pandemic when governments worldwide tried to get the public to comply with mask mandates and lockdown orders.
Businesses depend on persuasive messaging to gain the support of governments, get customers to sign billion-dollar contracts and to get consumers to try their new products. And individuals depend on persuasive messages to manage their boundaries at work, get stakeholder buy-in for important projects, and even convince decision makers to give them that promotion they’ve been seeking.
When the stakes are high, a persuasive message is not something to take lightly. It can make the difference between general compliance or all-out riots, years of business or bankruptcy, or between getting the support required to move things forward or losing all momentum.
Most of the workshops I deliver are focused on helping teams craft persuasive messages; the challenge is by far the most in demand. I’ve helped charities bid for funding, sales teams pitch to customers and senior leaders get important stakeholder buy-in. And ’m going to walk you through the process I take people through in those workshops.
Persuasive Messaging: Start with the Right Audience
The most counter-intuitive thing most people realise when I help them is that they are trying to persuade the wrong people.
Persuasion is essentially about getting people to agree to think, say or do things. So, think about your audience as being on a scale of agreement, from Completely Disagree to Somewhat Disagree to Somewhat Agree and to Completely Agree.
For example, your business is experiencing productivity issues after most people started working from home during the pandemic. Communication has slowed, decisions aren’t made, and different teams are increasingly siloed.
So, you’ve decided to ask people to come back to the office for several days a week to hopefully facilitate more collaboration. However, acceptance isn’t as widespread as you’d hoped. Many people are comfortable working from home and they don’t want to commute anymore; some live really far away. Persuading people is becoming quite the challenge.
If you look at the scale of agreement, you will have people at all points on the scale. And given that those who completely disagree with coming back are the most diametrically opposed, it makes sense to start with them right?
Well, no.
Start here
Think of it like this: the more they disagree, the more time and energy it will take to persuade them, whereas the more they agree, the less time and energy it will take. Your time and energy are finite resources, so invest them where you will have the most impact, which typically is going to be with those who either Somewhat Agree or Completely Agree.
For example, some people miss the office, or already live really close to it, or they are so frustrated by the productivity issues that they desperately crave more opportunities to sit down in the same room as their team. These kinds of people will hardly require any persuasion at all. Ask them to return to the office and they will leap at the opportunity. You invest a minimal amount of energy and get a maximal return.
Furthermore, as these people return to the office, other people start to notice. Those who hadn’t returned to the office just because it was always empty, those who had occasionally reminisced slightly about getting out of the house more, or those who had gotten a bit tired of awkwardly dancing around the clunkiness of Microsoft Teams just to have a chat with a colleague, will see more people returning to the office and now be more motivated to return themselves.
Now, we are just left with the people who Completely Disagree. These are the people who were hired on a remote-only contract, who live 400 miles away from the nearest office or whose teams members all live in completely different countries. These are the people who, frankly speaking, have not much reason to come back to the office. Of course it’s going to be challenging to persuade these people.
But because you focused on the easy wins first, you’ve already earned a return on your energy investment, achieved some success and gained momentum. Now, you are free to invest the rest of your energy into this more challenging segment of the population if you choose to.
Persuading the completely disagreeables requires a lot of time, a lot of communication, and some creativity and even compromise. There generally is no quick win here; sometimes you will not succeed and sometimes you are better off not even bothering.
If they were hired on a remote-only contract, is persuading them to come to the office worth the time it takes to negotiate a new contract with them and risk losing them? If they live 400 miles from the nearest office, is it worth risking their morale and burning them out? If none of their team members live in the same country, how might it affect their morale if you force them to come into the regional office?
Think of persuasive messaging as an investment of your time and energy. Which audience will you get the highest returns from? Focusing on those who already somewhat agree with your message can yield quicker wins and build momentum, while attempting to persuade those who disagree entirely can be a bad use of time and energy. Use your resources wisely.
