A rather long Maths lecture in my school was making most students impatient. There were yawns, impatient shuffling, and an occasional glance at the clock on the wall. The first benchers were enjoying it, or at least pretending to. We all wanted to get on the ground – the boys wanted to play football, and the girls wanted to play volleyball.

Finally, one kid, who couldn’t take it anymore, raised his hand and, in the bravest tone he could muster, said, “Miss, can we go to the ground and play?”

Mrs. Shinde (name changed), the Math teacher, obviously hiding her frustration, said, “No, my dear. Math is a life skill. We should all look to build it.”

Did it work? No. There was more groaning. The sad part is that the teacher may have been onto something. Math may be a life skill. But we wouldn’t have any of it. Why? Because there was no alignment.

The same thing happens with our Marketing message

We want our Big Idea to resonate with the audience. We know it’s important. And yet, the audience doesn’t want anything to do with it as it’s not aligned with their goals. The kids in the math class didn’t want to learn a life skill. They wanted to have fun and play football. Our goals and the teacher’s message were not aligned.

1. Shared Goal is the first step

‘Goal alignment’ is an important first step in message creation as it signals to the audience that we care about them. The audience thinks of us as allies who ‘get’ them. The resistance drops, and they are open to our message.

But it’s not always easy

It happened to me a few months back in a client meeting. I was helping the CEO build a Personal Brand, and for some weird reason, on that day, I decided to steer the conversation toward ‘getting more leads’. I assumed that if the client got more leads, he would be happy.

“But I don’t want leads. That’s a very transactional way to think about a personal brand. We already have a Sales team for that”, the client said.

It hit me like a truck. The alignment was missing. I didn’t fully know their goals. They were looking to build thought leadership while I was thinking of leads… which is completelyyyyyy different.

2. The Shared Goal Statement

How do we align with our audience’s goals?

Here’s a statement that can help us – “We can all agree that we want to ……”

(Hat tip to Tamsen Webster for this. I have stolen this from her)

Some examples –

If you are launching a course for Marketers, you could start the interaction by saying – “As marketers, we can all agree that we need to build trust with our ideal buyers.”

A weight-loss coach could say, “We can all agree that we want to lose weight without making any radical changes to our lifestyle.”

If you help First-time Founders build the prototype of the product, you could say, “We can all agree that we want to build the first version of our product quickly without losing a lot of time.”

These statements work because they are aligned with the audience’s goals.

If the audience hears the goal statement and nods in agreement… that’s a success. If they don’t, we must return to the drawing board.

3. But I don’t know what my audience wants

Conversations, Sales calls, Reddit forums… every interaction with our audience can help us identify their core ‘wants’ and ‘beliefs.’ Audience research is a big topic that is outside the scope of this article. But a couple of tools would help identify and frame what the audience wants… and lead us to the goal statement.

A. The Want Pyramid

The want pyramid helps identify the current stage of our audience and points us toward their most urgent wants. While the pyramid may not apply to all kinds of businesses (and won’t apply to many B to C businesses), it is still a good starting point.

Depending on where your audience is at, you could frame their wants. Is your audience at the Bear Grylls level (Survival Mode)? Surely, they want more revenue. Are they in the ‘Bottleneck stage’? Undoubtedly, their wants would be around scaling.

B. The different emotions

Every human being has a bunch of emotions that they want to feel. I learned this from Seth Godin during the Marketing seminar. Seth also went on to share a list of emotions –

Safety

Health

Belonging

Adventure

Respect

Power

Sex

Security

Good looks

Learning new things

Avoiding new things

Peace of mind

Revenge

Control

Friendship

Romance

Community

Sympathy

Delight

Luxury

Tension

Freedom of movement

Freedom of expression

Nostalgia

Affection

Participation

Reassurance

Creativity

Obedience

Reliability

Strength

Physical activity

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a good start and can point you towards drafting the shared goal statement.

Summarize

Our message will be ignored if we don’t align with what our audience wants to achieve. A good statement to draft this shared goal is – “We can all agree that…”. To fill this statement, we would need to understand and frame what our audience wants.

I wonder if the Math teacher would have said, “We can all agree that we want to have fun while learning something. Let’s see how we can use Math to make our games on the ground even better.'”