How To Write For Different Audiences (Ones You Know Nothing About)
When you’re a freelance writer, copywriter or other wordsmith looking to maximise the smile on their face (via increased funds,) you’re probably going to have to write for different audiences at various stages in your career.
Whilst it might seem impossible to some, writing for different audiences isn’t the trickiest thing in the world. You might be a forty year old man writing for fourteen year old girls, or an eighteen year old girl writing for sixty year old men. This is possible, it just requires attention to detail and the ability to step outside yourself.
However, there are a ton of writers who think exactly the opposite: They think that they can write for anyone, anywhere because their writing is so amazingly brilliant that writing for different audiences is not their concern; everyone is going to love them. These people are also wrong; you can be a genius with the greatest lyrical writing ability in the world and people will still get bored. (Ask the average person what they think of Shakespeare.)
Finally, there are the people who don’t want to learn how to write for different audiences because they think that they’re going to concentrate on one thing for their whole writing life. Writing for different audiences isn’t going to be something they need to do because they’ll always have their niche. (It’s usually fitness, lifestyle, making money or all the other topics that everyone thinks that they’re going to be the best at.)
Needless to say, all of these people are wrong in their own different ways. Luckily, this article will give you the why and the how-to for writing for different audiences. If you want to learn how to write for different audiences, strap yourself in and let’s get to it.
Why Learn How To Write For Different Audiences?
There is a finite amount of writing work available at any one time. You can make a great living writing in one niche, especially if it’s lucrative. You can make a living writing one type of content as well. I can’t tell you whether or not the particular type of content you’re looking to write is going to make you a living, but I can tell you that it’s better to learn how to write for different audiences and turn that one thing you can write about into many things.
If you’re writing on freelance websites, then you’ll notice that there are millions of jobs available. Sure, some of them are posting on relationship forums and some of them are writing technical manuals for building firms, but someone has got to do them. Someone is going to earn money doing them. If you have the attitude that you’re only going to write about one thing for one type of person, then only one thing is guaranteed: The person earning that money won’t be you.
When you learn how to write for different audiences in different genres, you’re guaranteeing you’ll have work consistently that pays well. I don’t care if I’m writing for a relationship website or a building website. I don’t care if I’m writing for a Russian company or an American one. Why? Because I’ve learned how to write for different audiences and I can do one job just as easily as the other.
That then creates a knock-on effect: If you learn how to write for different audiences, you’ll get more work, better paying work and you’ll get better at writing full stop.
Enough of why, let’s talk about how.
How To Write For Different Audiences
Writing for different audiences isn’t tough, but you do need to do certain things in order to get it right. I break it down into a few simple steps. Whilst these steps are simple, they may or may not require a lot of research and planning, depending on what you’re going to do.
Research: Psychologically Profile Your Readers
I’ve written about this before. Essentially, writing for different audiences requires… different audiences.
A lot of the things you’re writing will be for obvious target audiences. Are your target male/female/introvert/extrovert/rich/poor etc.
Here are two articles I’ve written about profiling these obvious things:
- How To Make Copywriting Gold By Pretending To Be A Serial Killer Hunter (Part One)
- Some Less-Obvious Audience Profiling Techniques (Part Two)
I won’t repeat myself, because that’s boring.
Let’s assume you’ve gotten to the point where you know who your audience is. Now we’ve got to figure out what they want.
What Do The Audience Want? (And, What Do They Have?)
I remember having to work with a client who was writing dating products. That’s no real oddity if you work on freelance websites. Dating is a massive niche. The problem with this client was that they were doing something massively wrong.
Background: They were writing dating products for women.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Girls need to find love too, and they consume a lot of material about it.
The problem with their business was that they were guys targeting the dating market for girls in exactly the same way that a dating product for guys would be targeted.
For those lotharios among you that have never seen the marketing for guy’s dating online, I’ll explain it.
Usually, you’ll have a long form sales letter (more recently, this is in video form) where a guy goes from zero-to-hero with his dating life, and is consequently surrounded by a harem (either officially or unofficially) of beautiful women. Usually, this is sprinkled with other factoids about how he’s now more successful in business and life too.
Now, I’m not going to devote a huge amount of time to the ins and outs of this market. It is what it is, and it works to the extent it works. (Hence its prevalence.)
What I am going to argue is that you absolutely cannot approach dating for girls in the same way.
Firstly, if you say to guys, “Do you know that feeling… being jealous of the guy who sleeps with all the girls?” You’re probably going to get a unanimous “yes.”
If you ask the same question of girls, “Do you know that feeling… seeing the girl who sleeps with all the guys and wondering why that isn’t you?” You’re going to be off to a bad start.
Girls start from a very different world in terms of dating to guys. They have different expectations, different goals and they will have different challenges. (For instance, I can’t imagine many girls get turned down flat for not having a car… whereas seventeen year old guys? Sure.)
Secondly, the “happy ever after” in the example above will be completely different for guys and girls.
This isn’t intended to be some sort of “all guys think the same, all girls think the same” because they don’t. And that’s the point.
Once you’ve found your audience, you need to know where they start from and what they want before you can start writing for that different audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a sales letter for a hairdryer or a Bentley.
Only when you’ve done that can you move on to the actual writing part of writing for different audiences.
How To Write For Different Audiences: The Writing
Writing for different audiences starts with reading for different audiences.
Jamie, with his nerd-speak and analytical style, is not naturally suited to writing a make-up ad for a firm in Shanghai. So what does Jamie do?
Firstly, you need to Google out where the people hang out. At the very least, you should spend some time browsing one of the many subreddits that are on Reddit.com
Make up? Not a problem.
Shanghai? Not a problem.
Girls? Not a problem.
You won’t find a subreddit for Shanghai girls make-up, but you will get a cross-section.
The second step is to mirror their language. Whatever your target market, there’ll be idioms, expressions and sentence structures that are pretty unique. Have you ever noticed that every forum you go on has its own lingo? That’s what you want.
Don’t be a stereotype, but make a mental note of how the target market speaks.
The next step is to add that to what they want and where they start from which we talked about above.
By this point, you’ll have a pretty solid piece of copy that will fool most mere mortals into thinking that you’re one of them.
After that, it’s just a case of business as usual; hit the triggers, demonstrate the reasons you’re an authority, AIDA, etc.
Remember, it’s worth doing all this because a large part of the buying decision comes down to social proof. Social proof, in this instance, is gained by writing like a member of the clan.
If you do these things, then you’ll write great copy for different audiences.
Final Thoughts
This is an article that was difficult to write. When I started, I struggled at the 200 word mark thinking there wasn’t anything to the topic. When I got to 1400 words, I realised I could go on forever.
The weird thing about writing for different audiences is that you enter a different mental space when you’re doing it. That’s then very difficult to describe in an article like this.
(Hence, and my apologies for, this article being a mess structurally.)
The point is though that learning how to write for different audiences is fun, profitable and it’s not too hard once you get the basic gist of it down. Ergo, you should do it.