Speak to Your Audience by Speaking Like a Human
This is a contributed post and may contain affiliate links. The thoughts and ideas expressed may not be exactly what the ghostwriter Scott Sery believes. But he did read it, and signed off on it, so it’s at least pretty close.
Most of the service providers we use don’t expect us to be technical experts to deliver their products and offerings. Few of us have financial literacy regarding every single fiscal concept or understand every single kind of mortgage on offer. Yet we trust our banks to handle our money, keep them safe, and do so within appropriate regulations. Now, historically speaking, that might not be the most foolproof notion, but in general, it works well enough from day to day.
If you’re operating a business, however, you can inspire trust in your audience by helping simplify technical concepts that explain what you do, allowing newer people to onboard and do so confidently. For example, you might not list the entire anatomy of your innovative new product straight away, but you can use deliberate language to help explain why your new improvements are so exciting. Or, maybe you need to showcase just how diligent you are via your research and development by explaining the digital pathology resources you used for success.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to simplify that understanding by making technical business concepts accessible:
Lay The Foundation
Good communication starts with speaking like a real person. Your technical work matters, but people will only care if you can explain it clearly, which means ditching the industry jargon for now and sharing the real story behind your work.
Think about what makes your product or service special and try to hone in on that to lay the groundwork. That means stripping away the complicated details. Answer a few questions – what problem do you solve? Why did you create this in the first place? Those are the pieces that grab people’s attention, and when this groundwork is created, you can run a small explainer for how it’s possible.
Set Up a Resource Center
It’s good to assume that people want to learn but don’t want to work hard to do it. Create resources that feel welcoming to explain how your process works, those that can be searched by keywords or will be indexed in chapters for easy referral. This way, even digital pathology resources can help non-specialists understand why this process is essential to your brand. From there, a quick video might explain something better than a lengthy document, and a simple graphic or two can break down complex ideas faster than paragraphs of text.
Set Your Main Narrative Intention
Technical understanding, or rather its broad strokes, can be narrated to provide more context and purpose, even if the inner workings can be understood this way.
For example, you could highlight an issue you solved based on an adjustment to your technical process and thus showcase the results in hard data, clearly visualized. This way, you give context for technical data so the target audience can understand and use it – such as by knowing the product line and its wider specifications.
Understanding your audience is the key to being able to simplify any concept. The more people you speak with, the more you’ll understand what they already know and what you’ll have to explain in further detail.