A good writer knows that in order to produce effective written pieces, you must target your audience. Failure to identify a target audience can result in garbled messages, inefficient advertising and a poor conversion rate, rendering your marketing pieces ineffective. Small businesses, especially, want the most for their advertising dollar, so they may be tempted to commission a very general piece that’s not targeted to anyone. While this blanket approach may serve to convey information to a large group, it rarely serves to give someone incentive to contact the company or try the product.
1. When you target your audience, you set the tone for your publication.
Tone can be one of the trickiest technical aspects of writing an article or marketing piece. Tone in most copywriting and marketing materials serves to establish the writer (whether ghostwritten or not) as knowledgeable about the subject, and trustworthy to the reader. If the writer can’t convey that message, the reader has no incentive to believe the writer or feel motivated about the piece. Therefore, tone is central to the success of your written pieces.
The link between tone and targeted marketing is: your audience. If you’re writing to executives and CEOs, you’ll want to use professional language and industry terminology. If you’re writing consumer pieces, you’ll need to dress your language down and speak to the masses, avoiding insider vocabulary and giving complete explanations for concepts that are already familiar to executives and CEOs. If you try to address both executives and consumers in the same piece, you face a quandary: for whom do you write? Do you write to the lowest common denominator, and force your executive to sit through lengthy explanations of concepts he already knows? Or do you write to the executive, and hope the consumer is interested and savvy enough to research the concepts he doesn’t understand?
2. When you target your audience, you can implement a more effective marketing objective.
If you’ve got a very general audience, it’s impossible to identify a specific marketing objective. The marketing objective for a very general piece is probably something along the lines of “Inform people, and work to establish our brand.” When you target a specific audience, you can be much more specific with your marketing objective. Instead of a general “inform and brand” objective, you can create a piece of writing designed to outline the problems that your target audience faces, and address why your product is the key to solving them.
Consider the executive and the consumer again. The executive may want to know that your product can help him generate quality leads, capture a high conversion rate and present important branding messages to consumers. The consumer may want to know that the product can help him find the best mortgage rates, evaluate fees and loan terms and provide company information for industry leaders. These are two very different messages for the same product, so it’s essential that you target your audience so you convey the right message to the right people.
3. Targeting your audience tells you how to present your piece.
Even the best marketing piece is useless if you can’t get it into the hands of your audience. Targeting your audience immediately narrows down possible sources to reach them, and gives you a leg up on submitting to the right places. If you want to get your message in front of banking executives, for example, you might submit an article to a banking magazine such as US Banker Magazine, Banking Strategies or The Banker. If you’re trying to reach well-qualified consumers, you might target a personal finance magazine, such as Kiplinger or Money, or an even more general publication, such as The New York Times. By identifying a target audience, you automatically self-select ways to reach them, and are much more likely to get your written piece in front of the right people.
4. Targeting your audience gives you a way to measure ROI.
One of the most difficult aspects of spending marketing dollars effectively is to determine the return on investment of specific pieces. Even when you ask your clients how they found you, you get a polluted reply. They could contact you through your website, but may have found out about your product through a magazine or online article. Clients typically aren’t picky about differentiating points of contact, so it’s difficult, if not impossible, to effectively gauge the ROI of specific marketing pieces.
When you target your audience, however, you can get a much clearer idea of which markets are effective for you and which ones don’t produce good leads. If you’re getting a lot of banking executives but no consumers, you know that your banking executive piece is effective. You may want to expand your marketing in that niche. Conversely, you’ll be able to see that your consumer piece isn’t performing as well, and change your approach or pull the piece entirely. Targeting your audience helps you allocate marketing dollars more effectively, and capitalize on a campaign that works for your product.
5. When you target your audience, you can build a more effective brand image.
Maybe you can be all things to all people – but it’s far too complicated to try to explain that to them. When you target your audience, you can focus on presenting your brand image relative to that audience. The consumer probably doesn’t care that you can generate quality leads for banking executives; the consumer just wants to know that you can help him evaluate the best mortgage rates.
By focusing on your brand image relative to your audience, you can establish yourself more firmly in their minds for the things that matter to them. When you dilute the brand image by trying to be all things to all people, your audience may not equate you in their minds as the “go-to” company for X need. In some cases, it’s a very subtle distinction, but focusing your brand image with your target audience will help you make a stronger impression and ultimately result in a higher conversion rate.
Target your audience, and reap the benefits.
The first thing you should do when you sit down to brainstorm a new written piece is to determine your audience. From there, you can look at marketing objectives, delivery methods, tone and content. By writing to a specific audience, you create much stronger pieces, and the response will reflect that.
Businesses: instead of commissioning one piece, consider two or three (or however many it takes!) to more effectively target your audience. You’ll pay more up-front, but the benefits of writing targeted pieces should translate to higher conversation rates, and ultimately to more profit.
Writers: the first thing you should do in an intake interview is determine the audience for the piece. This dictates many important technical considerations, and helps you to write a piece that serves your client more effectively.
