“Merry Holidays!”

Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Holidays. Happy Festivus. How exactly is it that you wish your neighbors a festive holiday season?

Because the fact is, when we speak to different individuals we tend to alter how we address them. If you’re in church you’re probably going to say, “Merry Christmas.” If it’s a business setting, and you’re not sure what the religious sensibilities are, you’re probably going to use “Happy Holidays.” And if you’re out with your friends, discussing an old Seinfeld episode, “Happy festivus” may find its way into the conversation.

So What Do We Do When Writing to Numerous Audiences on One Website?

Experienced marketers find the way to do the same when addressing potential customers. You could call it code-switching if you want. That’s when a speaker is able to switch back and forth between two or more languages in a single conversation. In marketing we shift back and forth so that the particular audience we’re speaking to is more comfortable with how they’re being addressed, and so therefore more receptive to our messages. And sometimes numerous “voices” need to be used for the same client.

Code-Switching in The Real World of Marketing

An example of this strategy would be a recent website we built for a client of ours. I’d name them, but we’re under NDA. I didn’t get any hush money. I promise. Just know they’re an IT services provider. Which means that if it’s digital, it’s probably in their wheelhouse. Phones, computers, routers, servers, etc. They’ll both get your company hooked up as well as provide managed services for you once your infrastructure is up and running. They provide these services for very large corporations. Forty of the Fortune 100 are clients of theirs.

Now, the people in these big corporations who make the decision about who exactly they’re going to work with when it comes to IT services pretty much care about one thing. They just want the technology to work. They want the phones in their customer service centers to ring. They want their employees to be able to go online, to get their text messages, to share their files with other employees, as well as have face-to-face video conferences with their counterparts overseas.

Are they interested in software defined networking? Source code? TDM and VoIP trunking facilities? Sorry all you IT geeks out there, but the answer is No. That’s a language they’re not comfortable with. You start chatting about how, “OSI firewall models provide a better modality of controlling inbound data at the expense of performance” and their eyes are gonna gloss over and roll into the backs of their heads.

Now all that said, when these people approach their internal IT professionals and say that they just want the technology to work, the IT people hear something different. They start thinking, “Oh man, this is probably going to involve some software as a server situations, some desktop and data center virtualization and the it’s highly likely we’re going to be needing some kind of hybrid cloud solutions as well.”  (FYI: I’m making all this up, but hopefully you get the point.)

Well, this new website needed to speak to both these audiences. Our client needed for the managers to be comfortable in deciding to pull the trigger and choose to work with them. They also, however, needed for the internal IT staff, of these very large corporations, to be able to look at what our client was offering on their website and say to the person pulling the trigger, “Yep, these guys have what we need.”

So when we were developing the site we made sure that the high level pages were accessible to individuals who aren’t comfortable discussing the nitty gritty details that come with keeping a company’s digital infrastructure up and running. These web pages discussed and approached IT services in a very broad “30,000 foot view.” It’s why the first line of copy on the homepage of the website simply states, “You just want technology to work.” It was all very friendly and intelligible to the uninitiated.

Then there’s the individuals who can “speak IT.” If you’re not using the language they’re comfortable with, they’re gonna start thinking things like, “I’m not sure these guys really get it.” So on the lower level pages of the website you’re going to find phrases like “we apply proven reference architectures and consistent, repeatable methods drawn from our experience with IT strategy solutions” as well as, “Reduce the cost and complexity of your environment while still meeting SLAs for availability, performance and data protection.” (FYI: I’m not making this part up.)

We addressed each audience in a manner that is familiar to them and in such a way that, while they both have a very different day-to-day vocabulary, they both could come to the same conclusion: These guys can provide us with what we need. We gave both of these audiences a reason to believe that if they choose to work with our client, it’s going to be a very joyous holiday season indeed.

Now, not all brands have two distinct audiences with such divergent vocabularies, but if your does the best way for you to connect with them is to address them in a voice they’re familiar with. As they say, when in Rome… don’t speak French.