Zia Reddy

People act when something feels personally relevant.

This comes up quite often when you start refining messaging. There is usually a concern that narrowing the focus will mean leaving people out or reducing reach. It can feel like you are saying less and limiting who can engage with what you are putting out.

What tends to happen in practice is that people only engage properly when they can see themselves in what they are reading. If the message is broad, it may make sense, but it is easy to move past. If it reflects a situation they recognise, it holds their attention for longer and feels more worth responding to.

There is strong research behind this as well.

For example, the Elaboration Likelihood Model by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) shows that when something feels personally relevant, people are more likely to process it more carefully. Meaning that, if your customer finds your message specifically relevant to them, they'll be more open to what you have to say.

If you look at your own ads or content through that lens, applying this becomes quite practical. Instead of asking whether more people could relate to the message, focus on whether the right person would recognise themselves in it immediately. That usually means being more specific about the role, the situation, or the problem you are speaking to, and allowing that to carry the message rather than trying to include every possible audience in the same space.

In most cases, improving the performance of your marketing campaigns comes from making it easier for someone to see that the message applies to them, rather than trying to make it apply to more people.
Source:

Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Kao, C. F., & Rodriguez, R. (1986). Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: An individual difference perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), 1032–1043. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.1032.

I spent some time last week reviewing a few campaigns where everything looked like it should have been working, because the message made sense, the problem was clear, and you could see how someone reading or watching it would relate to it.

And then you get to the end… and nothing happens.

In both cases, the issue came down to what the content was asking of the audience. What was the CTA saying?

In one case, they were asked to download something, but there was no explanation of what they would get or why it mattered. In another, they were asked to request a quote at a point where they were still trying to figure out what was going on in their situation.

The step didn’t fit the moment.

If you want to check this in your own campaigns, take one piece of content and write down:

What the content is doing for the user
What the CTA is asking them to do

When those two things don’t align, people will not take action.

I’ve unpacked this a bit more in this week’s article at https://www.ziareddy.com/post/where-good-marketing-stops-working.

Where Good Marketing Stops Working Why your campaigns aren’t converting. Learn how to fix misaligned CTAs and guide users to the right next step in your marketing journey.

Not all leads want the same thing.

It’s easy to treat leads as a single group once they come in, because they sit in the same place and go through the same process. But how someone arrives usually tells you more than the fact that they arrived.

I saw this recently while working on a campaign where enquiries were coming through, but they weren’t turning into anything meaningful. All the technical elements were there. The ads were running, the traffic was good, the form was collecting details, and follow-ups were being sent.

But when we looked more closely, the issue was in the messaging after the submission.

People were coming in at a specific point with a specific need, and the message they received didn’t fully reflect that. It spoke more broadly because it's always easier to do one thing that covers a lot of bases than to narrow down. BUT, that made it harder for someone to see how it related to what they were trying to do.

And that gap in messaging is easy to miss, because the lead itself looks the same in the system.

Two people can fill in the same form and appear identical, but their intent can be very different depending on where they came from and what prompted them to take action. If the message doesn’t take that into account, the follow-up becomes less relevant, and that’s where things start to drop off.

A useful way to look at this is to take one source of leads and ask what someone was likely thinking at the moment they decided to engage.

What were they responding to, and what would they expect to happen next based on that?

Once you answer that, it becomes much easier to shape the message so it meets them in the right place, rather than expecting them to adjust to a more general narrative.

And that tends to have a direct impact on how those leads move forward, because the message feels like a continuation of what they’ve already started, rather than something new.