// Knowledge base
What has your target group already heard 100 times?
By Mitchel van Luit
2 min read
Many companies are shouting exact copies of their competitors, and that doesn't help you stand out. This article will make you think: do you know what your target audience has already heard a hundred times, and how do you cut through that with your message?
In short
✔ Be aware of what your competitors are saying before determining your own message.
✔ The first interaction with your target audience is all about grabbing attention.
✔ A message your target audience has already heard 100 times won't cut through the noise.
“Attention target audience.” “Now with a discount.” “This offer will never be back.” Recognisable? Your competitors are writing it too. And your target audience has read it a hundred times already.
That is not necessarily wrong, because this sort of phrasing works up to a point. The problem is that they no longer stand out. And in the first second of the first interaction, standing out is all that matters.
Why repetition becomes invisible
People scan. They don't read first and decide afterwards; they filter first and only read once something gets through that filter. That filter works on divergence: what looks like what you already know gets no more attention.
A sentence that your audience has seen a hundred times confirms precisely the pattern that the filter recognises. The message is not rejected, it is not even evaluated. That is a more important distinction than it seems: you are not losing the argument, you are not even getting into it.
First find out what is already being said
Before you determine what your message will be, you need to know what the standard is. That takes an hour and it is the cheapest research going.
- Find the five biggest competitors and note down their homepage headline and their adverts. On Meta, you can see what is live via the ad library.
- Write down literally what promise they are making. Usually, after three competitors, you can already see that it is the same promise in other words.
- Look at your own texts after that. Is there anything in there that doesn't fit that list?
If your own promise is interchangeable with that of your competitor, the promise isn't the problem with your marketing. Then it's your marketing.
How to get through it
There are three routes, and they are all more specific than “we are the best”.
Name the real problem, not the category. “More applicants” is a category. “Your vacancy has been open for six weeks and the candidates applying are not a fit” is a problem. Anyone who reads their own situation back literally stops scrolling.
Be concrete where others are vague. A number, a term or a limit does more than an adjective. Not because the number makes an impression, but because it shows that you know what you are talking about.
Also state what you are not in favour of. Demarcation is rare and therefore credible. Whoever dares to say for whom something does not work is more readily believed about for whom it does work.
Where this goes wrong
Most companies know this and still don't do it, for an understandable reason: being specific feels like giving away audience. After all, you are appealing to fewer people.
That's also true. It's just that that smaller group actually reads your message, and the larger group wasn't reading it anyway. What happens when you try to appeal to too many people at once we've written that down separately.
marketing psychology
The summary at the top (the “in short” block) lowers the barrier to entry: anyone who sees the core message first is subsequently more likely to read the whole article.
// Frequently asked questions
Questions about this subject.
How do I know what my target audience has already heard often?
Look at the headlines and ads of your top five competitors and write down their promise word for word. On Meta, you can use the ad library to see which ads are live. After three competitors, you will usually already see the pattern.
Is standing out the same as being loud?
No. Capital letters and exclamation marks are precisely the pattern everyone uses, so they won't make you stand out. You stand out by being specific: naming the real problem, mentioning a concrete figure, or defining who something is not for.
Won't my reach become too small if I get more specific?
You speak to fewer people, but those people actually read your message. The group you lose filtered your message out anyway. With a small budget, that is also an advantage: you no longer pay for impressions to people who are never going to respond.
// Read more
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