You’ve probably read the title. You probably think, “What a stupid title.” Hopefully you’re a little intrigued though, because this topic is potentially going to be awesome.
In fact, I’ve already mentally planned a book on the topic I’m writing about today and I only thought of it about thirty-five seconds ago. That’s how good it is.
Something that you can read hundreds of copywriting books about is how to use words to get into your readers’ very souls, mind-controlling and tricking them into buying whatever nefarious scam product you’re selling.
You’re pulling the money out of their brains, you devil.
However, it’s pretty difficult to find good information on how to write words for audiences; the best advice you’ll get is to stalk the target market, infiltrate them and use the power words they use in order to build rapport.
That’s great advice and a good idea. The problem is that it’s time consuming and once you’ve done it once you’ll have to do it over and over again whenever you’re trying out a new customer-type or new market.
That’s inefficient, and inefficiency costs you time and money.
The answer then is to make stalking the target market a lot easier.
Terminology, Political Correctness, And Other Stuff (Before We Start)
Firstly, I’m going to put some disclaimers in here.
Terminology-wise, I hated using the word “stalking” above. In a business course, they’d call it “market research” which is essentially the same thing. In a noir thriller they’d call it “getting inside his head” and that’d be the same thing. When I make mention of “stalking people” or whatever, don’t go and steal their underwear or anything.
Political Correctness-wise; When you’re trying to codify and profile people for sales purposes, the worst thing you can do is be a political correctness type.
If you think you’re going to sell to women in the same way you say to men, you’re going to have a bad time.
If you think you’re going to sell to different races, religions and cultures irrespective of those things, you’re going to have a bad time as well.
If you’re going to try and sell to rationalist introverts in the same way as manic pixie dream fairies, you’re going to have a bad time also.
People are different, and if you take a “politically correct, everyone is the same” mentality about copywriting, you’re probably not going to do as well as you should do. If you feel guilty about this, just think; you aren’t detaining someone for eight hours because they wear a turban and you aren’t shooting a black guy because he looked shifty.
As a final point and final disclaimer: profiling people won’t save a terrible product from being seen as terrible, and it won’t save bad copy.
Profiling People
After a bit of a tangent, let’s get onto the topic at hand: building a reliable profile of people.
Like I said, copywriting manuals tend to tell you to “learn about your target market” without really going into too much detail. Luckily, there are other avenues – some of which I’m going to discuss below – to profiling people based on their sales. A lot of them are really simple. (Some of the trickier ones I’m holding back … for reasons.)
Grouping People By Really Obvious Stuff
This is the low-hanging fruit and first filter you should put your copywriting through.
Country
You are going to have to use different language for different locations. Even though a lot of you reading this will be US based – and understand my words perfectly – there are key differences between UK and US culture despite the same language.
For instance, the other day I found out that in the USA, you guys don’t have electric kettles. Some of you make tea in the microwave.
That might mean nothing to you, but in England that’s absurd.
To put the shoe on the other foot, I wrote an article about home security for a US client last week. My client was absolutely livid at me for certain things. I used the word “hoodlum” and referred to “urban environments.”
Apparently this was racist… now I’m not sure if the client was being a PC person like I mentioned above, or those things are considered racist in America. Either way, in the UK neither the word “urban” nor “hoodlum” has a racist connotation.
But there we go… nationality is something that invokes subtle differences in your copy.
Girls Versus Guys
Another sore point for a lot of people is that sales works differently for men and women. It does, and it’s unavoidable. If you’re writing a gender specific product, then you’ll have to write gender specific copy.
Introvert Versus Extrovert
We’re getting a bit more specific here, but this is still fairly obvious. Introverts and extroverts respond differently to copy. Not in the sense that either are less swayed by copywriting itself; merely that you need to use entirely different triggers.
Copy that talks about how a person is going to be the centre of attention really doesn’t work so well if you’re talking to an introverted crowd. Similarly, you wouldn’t use imagery that denotes isolation in any way to an extrovert. Whilst that seems obvious, you might open a lead-in by saying,
“Imagine you’re alone on a perfect beach. It’s hot yet not too hot, and all you can hear is the wind and the sound of the surf.”
That is going to turn off an extrovert. You’re asking them to enter a non-ideal situation. The effect will be subtle, but it’ll be there.
Final Thoughts
This article is a lot longer than I thought it’d be, so I’ll leave it at those three things.
If you wanted to start from scratch and learn a system which categorises and profiles everyone, then you could do worse than following my advice from the other day and buying some old psychology text books. Most of these are gold mines of different ways of categorising people and understanding how their internal mechanisms work.
You can drill down very deeply with this.
You can use it in copywriting, or you can use it in face-to-face sales. You can also use it outside professional stuff as well. It’s worth talking about some more, so I’ll definitely come back to it at some point.