Writing For Your Audience

Picture this, you have written countless valuable content, yet despite your best efforts you can’t seem to appeal to your audience and convert them. One of the many mistakes writers do is assume that if they just write content, the right customers will come running to them. It’s not that easy, though.

In marketing and advertising, it is important to know who your audience is. Writing for your audience will be your key to success. Knowing your audience first will help guide you to develop your content strategy. They will be your core basis in determining topics you can write about, and help you organise information that makes sense to them.

Just like in creating a UX Design, your audience is the most important in content creation. Knowing who your audience is will direct how you express your copy for them. 

In simpler terms, the more you understand who your audience is, and what they want, will ensure that you are communicating with them properly. In return, your audience will give you your desired results. 

The first step of writing for digital is ensuring that you have researched your audience and understanding what they want. Once you have are clear who your audience is and what they need from you, you can finally figure out how to fulfill their needs through your copy. 

Basically, the steps are: figuring out who your audience is, figuring out the actions you want them to take or your desired results from them, and finally, knowing what information they need in order to feel confident in taking that specific action.

Researching Your Audience

Now, in your process of researching your audience,  you can use these two simple concepts: the audience of one, and personas. We’re talking about them in details below.

The Audience Of One

Traditionally speaking, audiences were thought of as a vast and vaguely defined crowd, according to Price and Price. Now, due to the advanced technology we have today, the worldwide web provides a voice to individuals and niche groups. The traditional concept of a mass audience is not disintegrating.

Additionally, Price and Price also argued that the Internet has led to an audience of one. And, what exactly does that mean?. It means that your audience is not a vaguely defined crowd.

The world wide web has made it easier for marketers and advertisers to target niche audiences who are used to being addressed as individuals. Hence, when you are writing your copy or any material, you need to identify the audience you are writing to an ‘individual.’ Investigate what that audience of one wants and write as if you are directly speaking to him or her. The individual that you have in mind when you are writing could also be called a persona. 

Personas

A persona is a profile that a writer creates to embody the characteristics of the target audience you are writing to. This is mainly based on the profile of your audience. When you are creating a profile, you need to consider the characteristics of your readers and their needs and wants. Here are a few things to consider when you are making your profile for your personas:

• Is your audience primarily male or female? Or is it a mixture of both?
• How old is your audience?
• What are their other psychographics and other demographics?

These are simple characteristics, you can ask yourself some more in-depth questions regarding your audience. Now, if your goal is to sell something to your audience, you should also include the following questions in consideration:

• How does your audience make purchasing decisions?
• Do they look at other service providers to compare before they select one?
• Do they often call in for assistance before making a decision, or are they spontaneous purchasers based on a special offer?

These are some of the important questions you need to consider when you are writing for your audience. These questions and considerations will help you create a good profile of your audience.

Furthermore, the profile you create will help guide you in the process of making your copy. It is crucial that you understand the reader profiles of your readers. From this, you can make the best copy you can, and get the answer you’re looking for form the long time you’ve spent finding out your audience.

Tailoring Copies Based on Audience

After you have figured out who your audience is and what their profile is, you can now tailor your copy to your audience. However, this does not necessarily limit you to just one persona. The best thing about the technology we have available today is that you can structure your digital copy so it caters to several personas.

You can divide and classify different personas and write specific copies to them with the same desired end results. Another important thing to consider is your various marketing channels – these may have different audiences. So it is vital that you ensure you have a persona for each main platform that you use. 

For instance, you are using Email Marketing, Direct Marketing, and Social Media as your marketing channels. These have different audiences in itself, so make sure you create a copy for each one. However, just as we mentioned, before you can write a copy that addresses these people, you need to spend some time understanding the needs of these audiences.

Hopefully, this article has helped you figure out how to write for your audience. Let go of the belief that you are writing to a mass audience. Instead, you should start researching your audience’s different personas and start tailoring your copies based on those. 

In the next article, we will go deeper into writing for digital and the different types of web copy you can create to get your audience to act. Understanding the different types of web copies you can utilize is also another important piece to the puzzle that will help you create the best content marketing plan. 

© Image credits to Steve Johnson