Writing to Reach Who?

5 Steps to Writing Targeted Copy

If you plan on writing the copy for your website yourself, it’s critical that you consider your target market before you begin.

Why? Because you need to engage the right people and communicate the benefits of your product or service specifically to them if you want to maximise your online sales.

So how should you go about writing targeted copy for your website?

1. Do you really know your target market or just think you do? Don’t make assumptions about your market; the only way to really find out about them is through research. Online surveys are a great way to gather data on who is actually buying from you rather than relying on guess work.
2. Create a typical customer profile – once you’ve got your data, it’s time to create a typical customer profile based on the results. This will help you write copy that appeals to your target market rather than focusing on your company, like so many other websites do. Your customer profile should be as comprehensive as possible in order to achieve the best results.
3. Problems and benefits – it’s also important to think about the problems or difficulties your target market is facing and how your product or service will directly benefit them. Listing the features of your product or service is all well and good but it’s the benefits that really help to sell and the more relevant these are to your market, the more sales you’ll achieve.
4. Using the right language – if you’ve done your market research in step 1 and found that your target market is 50-60 year olds with a high level of income for example, then you need to write your copy using language they’re familiar and comfortable with rather than just using a general tone that doesn’t actually appeal to anyone.
5. Get feedback – if you’ve written your own copy aimed at a specific group then it makes sense to get feedback from someone in your target market before publishing it online. This kind of feedback is invaluable when it comes to fine tuning your website copy.