You are at the podium about to give a well prepared speech. As you survey the audience you notice that they seem to be dressed less formally than you expected. As you begin to speak, members of the audience slowly get up and walk out of the room. Obviously something went wrong. It must have been something you said.

Writing content for an internet audience is like standing up to give a speech. The difference is that you can’t see people “walking out of the auditorium” as your words miss the mark; rather they scurry to the Back button or the “X” to close their browser, all the while your aimless content yammers on. Developing a sophisticated understanding of your target audience should preface even the first landing page keystroke. Since complete digital marketing strategy ensures your content hits its mark, exhaustively mapping your target audience is always the first step.

Welcome to Their World

Take a trip to your audience’s world. Step out of the plane and imagine what it looks like. Although this world is foreign to you, this is where they work. Think about how a normal day might be for them. You may be in an air-conditioned office, but they could be out in 100-degree heat supervising workers pouring concrete. You need realize that this affects how they relate to your writing, so your writing should be relatable to their world. Implement this in your writing by penning something like, “working all day in the heat isn’t easy, but our product gets the job done faster.”

Critique Their Culture

Ask yourself what they think is funny, engaging, or interesting. You may make a joke about how a rough day is not having doughnuts brought to the break room, while they think a rough day is when the hydraulic line on the backhoe busts and the boss yells at them because of a day’s lost work. If they don’t feel like you can understand what they deal with, then chances are that they will stop reading and lose interest in what you have to offer.

Another way to engage their culture is to use analogies that they can relate to. For a car mechanic, the analogy that “finding the right tool for the job is as hard as taking a rusty bolt off an engine mount” will work. For an office worker on the other hand you might say, “finding the tool for the job is as hard as working online when the internet is out.”

Ponder Their Present Pain

If you can sell an air conditioner to someone from Antarctica, you are a great salesman but terrible at targeting. It’s obvious you don’t know what their pain is. Turn up the heat on your strategy by finding the toughest thing they face and then specifically communicate how your product or service eases that pain point. For instance, if you are selling shoes to a construction worker, you are going to write differently than if you were selling shoes to a fashion designer. For the construction worker you would highlight how your boots offer steel toe protection with all day comfort and durability. For the fashion designer you would emphasize how the footwear is right on the cusp of fashion with a sensational flair for this year’s trendy palette.

The Wrong Target Doesn’t Count

Hitting the wrong target audience isn’t even like hitting the bullseye on the wrong target – it’s just a miss altogether. You’ll need a different kind of target practice. At Blueprint, our content team specializes in writing in a way that targets potential customers and draws them in. We do this through talking to them with our writing in a way that understands their needs. This increases engagement with your website and brand. Contact Blueprint and find out how we can help your company by targeting the right audience as we write content for your website.

By: Caleb Longenecker