The taggers get extra credit in their circles for placing any of their handiwork in areas that are difficult to access. A good example of this are those taggers who place graffiti on overpasses or in high-security areas.

Content providers or people who, like me, write for money mainly for corporate clients, can also get extra credit for writing materials that reach readers who are difficult to reach.  It’s a common request I get from many of my clients: We want to reach doctors, but they get so much mail already. We want to reach hospital administrators, but they are hard to access. We want to talk to our patients, but we just don’t know how to get their attention.

So a skillful tagger gets his writing in a danger zone and a skillful content provider figures out ways to access people that are difficult to access.

How can you write something that will capture attention of a difficult-to-interest group? That is a topic that could fill a book, but here are a few pointers.

1. You have to write something that your target audience will care about. If you’re trying to capture the attention of a group for something that interests you but not them, you’re doomed to fail. You have to know your target audience and figure out (a) what they are desperate to know, find out, or learn and (b) how they generally like to get their information. That’s a job for research, not your intuition or best guess.

2. You have to offer real content which in most cases is going to mean real answers, real solutions, and real products. If you deliver fluff to your audience, they’ll be mad at you. It’s actually more productive not to reach an audience than reach an audience only to annoy it.

3. You have to be willing to get outside of your comfort zone. If you could reach these guys doing the kinds of things you usually do (working in your comfort zone), you wouldn’t have this problem. Clearly, you’re going to have to try something new. This may mean new media (video, audio, online content) and new vehicles (YouTube, Twitter). It may mean going back to old-school stuff (an offline newsletter, a classified ad). It may be a hybrid (try a classified ad that offers a free report they can get by calling an 800 number or going to a website).

4. You can’t give up. Rome was not built in a day. Those who reach tough-to-reach audiences do so because they tried lots of different things and were willing to give themselves permission to fail. Permission to fail means having some money and time that you are willing to risk as you try to achieve your goal. Just learn from your mistakes along the way.

5. Find ways (before you start) to measure your success. This may be a clicker on a website or a coupon or some kind of direct response. Work with your marketing guys to figure out a way to measure results and determine in advance what might be considered successful. Then track your numbers.

6. Encourage your writers to learn, learn, learn. Groups that are hard to reach are hard to reach because they do not find much useful in the usual places. This means that the usual approach to writing is going to turn them off. In most cases, this writing is not useful to them because the writers do not offer useful, valuable, practical, realistic information. The way to achieve success is to offer information that will help these people; give them information that they not only want, give them the stuff they are desperate to know. This means that writers have to do lots of research. Don’t keep your writer in a cubicle and expect them to address a difficult audience effectively. Let me them out to roam and learn the nuances of the market.

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