Why Connecting With Your Audience Is Key to Successful Marketing

by Haley Gray | Sep 16, 2024 | WhitePapers

One of the biggest challenges in both sales and marketing is making a real, genuine connection with your audience. For years, we’ve all been trained to be “professional”—to speak in a polished, highly professional tone, to keep our messaging clean and formal, and to avoid showing too much of ourselves. But the truth is, marketing has evolved drastically in the last few years, and simply sounding professional is no longer enough. Today, you must incorporate a piece of your heart, your personality, and your story into your messaging. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a small startup or a ten-figure law firm—you still need to connect with people on a human level, because ultimately, you’re speaking to a consumer. And consumers are people with real needs, emotions, desires, and concerns.

Professional, But Not Too Personal?

The traditional idea of professionalism in marketing often leaves little room for personality. We’re taught to present ourselves as polished experts, to write in ways that demonstrate authority but lack warmth or vulnerability. But here’s the truth: when your marketing is too sterile or “vanilla,” it completely misses the mark. Your audience reads your content, but it doesn’t stick. There’s nothing to connect with, nothing that grabs them at an emotional level. Instead, they move on to the next piece of content that might speak to them more personally.

I’ve been there. I can tell you from personal experience that one of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my own copywriting was not including enough of me. I was hyper-focused on presenting myself as the perfect professional—brilliant, polished, all the things I thought the world expected of me. But the problem was, my writing was dry, formal, and frankly, it didn’t connect. I was missing the key ingredient that makes people stop, pay attention, and care: authenticity.

Authenticity and Connection: What Marketing Is All About

It wasn’t until I started putting more of myself into my writing—my voice, my personality, my own thoughts and experiences—that I saw a real shift in how people responded to my marketing. Because, here’s the thing: people buy from people. Even if you’re a business leader selling a highly technical service or product, at the end of the day, you’re selling to other humans. Humans connect through stories, emotions, and shared experiences.

This idea is especially important now, with marketing evolving at a rapid pace. The consumer landscape has changed so much that customers expect and demand realness in the brands they interact with. Whether you’re selling a product or offering a service, the people you’re trying to reach want to feel a personal connection. They want to see that there’s a human behind the brand who understands their challenges, who can offer them more than just a generic solution.

AI and the Challenge of Connection

This is also why writing compelling information with AI tools, like ChatGPT, can be a challenge. Don’t get me wrong—AI can scrape the universe for information, structure, and even tone. But at the end of the day, AI can’t be you. If you don’t feed it personal stories, core values, or your unique point of view, it’s going to produce flat, generic content. It can give you solid, factual information, but it won’t connect on an emotional level because it lacks personality. That personality is what takes your marketing from “just okay” to something that actually resonates with people.

The truth is, information alone doesn’t convert. It’s not enough to have well-researched, polished facts if they’re not infused with heart. That’s where a lot of marketing strategies fall flat. When content feels robotic, it leaves your audience cold, and they’ll often move on to the next thing. Professional tone is great—if you’re writing a research paper. But if your goal is to make a connection and convert leads into clients, your content needs to reach people on a deeper level.

When Professionalism Isn’t Enough

Professional writing is fantastic for certain contexts—like research papers or formal reports—but that’s a very specific audience. If you’re writing for a research journal, chances are the people reading it are other professionals in your field, and that’s where technical, dry language works. The .01% of consumers who might read that research paper are likely already connected with you through other means. They’re already familiar with your brand and what you stand for. But if they haven’t made that initial connection, reading your research paper isn’t going to convert them. It’s brutal, but true.

On the flip side, when you’re writing marketing copy that needs to connect with a broader audience, personality matters. The polished, professional tone is important for credibility, but too much of it and you lose the human element. Connecting with people on a nerve or cellular level requires a completely different approach. You need to let go of the fear of sounding too casual or too personal and focus on telling stories that resonate.

Writing for Connection: A Practical Example

Whenever I write blogs for clients, I make it a point to go back to content they’ve already created. I look for the parts where their personality shines through and try to weave more of that into the new content. If the client hasn’t given me something personal to work with, it’s a real challenge to make their writing less mechanical. Even when I’m not using AI, it’s hard to create compelling content if there’s no personality to go on. When the content lacks personality, it often lacks results too. It’s frustrating, but that’s the reality.

Here’s a great example of how personality can make all the difference: I recently worked on blog posts for Carolyn Pistone, a business leader who is deeply connected to her work. All of the content I created for her started with her own writing—her own voice, her own personality—and you can feel it in every post. No matter how I edited or reorganized her content, the heart of her message was there because it was personal. It resonates because it’s real, and you can’t fake that kind of authenticity. It’s what sets her apart, and it’s why her readers feel connected to her and her brand.

The Bottom Line: Put Yourself in Your Marketing

At the end of the day, if you want to make a real connection with your audience, you have to show up as yourself. Let your personality come through in your marketing. Tell your story. Speak to your audience like real people, because that’s who they are. You can still be professional, but don’t be afraid to be personal. The human touch is what turns good marketing into great marketing. It’s what takes your messaging from “just information” to something that moves people.

So, whether you’re writing a blog post, crafting an email, or working on your website copy, ask yourself: Am I connecting? If not, it might be time to let go of the stiff professional tone and start showing more of who you really are. Your audience—and your bottom line—will thank you for it.