Get Smart: Play to the Intelligence of Your Audience

September 12, 2007

In an earlier post, I’ve shared an improv technique and how it relates to online marketing. Today, I have another nugget of improv wisdom to pass along. This one comes from the late improv guru, Del Close: “Play to the top of your intelligence.”

Improvisers, especially when they’re starting out, have a tendency to not trust that an audience will understand what they’re performing. So they’ll talk about what they’re doing it while they’re doing it. (i.e. “Hey, I’m running in place.”)

Or they’ll worry that the audience won’t understand a relationship, so they’ll introduce characters at the beginning of a relationship. Is there anything more boring than the initial contact between two people? The exciting stuff is in the kiss, the punch, the confession - in other words, it’s in the middle.

In marketing, it’s easy to fall prey to the same insecurities that improvisers do. I see this a lot during the site planning process. It’s tempting to want to cram everything on the home page. There is a concern that a visitor won’t find their way around the site. Ironically, visitors have a difficult time finding what they want on a site that’s too busy while others enter the site through internal pages.

So, how do we avoid these pitfalls? Yet another lesson from improv kicks in. Don’t overthink! When improvisers think too hard, they get stuck and end up doing nothing. It’s so easy for organizations to get stuck in site planning and lose months of leads and conversions over petty matters.

Trust your audience’s ability to keep up with you. That very idea should bring a sigh of relief. Your work just got more interesting. Now, you have the ability to conduct smart marketing campaigns that will carry a high level of appeal to consumers.

Technorati Tags: web design, site planning, online marketing

Posted in Site Planning by Nathania Johnson