As I wrote yesterday, I’ve been doing some research into a new project. This might be a short topic, but it’s one that might never be as fresh in my mind as it is now. It’s about a mistake that businesses seem to make. I’ve been coming across it quite regularly over the past couple of days.
There’s one huge mistake which we’ll get to in a little while.
Audience Matters
Before you start any piece of writing, you need to think about the audience. It sounds too simple to state, but it’s related to the big mistake.
If you don’t have the right audience, then you aren’t selling anything to anyone. You aren’t getting people to share your page and you’re not going to get loyal followers.
If you don’t have the right audience in mind, then you aren’t going to be able to work out what your “in” is. For instance, selling basketballs to teen boys is going to be very different to selling basketballs to the teen boys’ mothers.
You’re not going to get the language right either. Again; selling to a teenager whose life revolves around pop culture and the Machiavellian nightmare that is teenage socialising is going to evoke different words than selling to their parents, whose lives revolve around paying the bills and (hopefully) thinking about the future.
You HAVE To Make Sure You’ve Got The Right Audience
Whenever I’ve been to business courses in the past, they’ve always involved someone talking endlessly about doing a survey before you start any business.
I think surveys are pretty weak, because people will say things that they don’t mean. But the reason that business courses do this is because people don’t always know who their target audience is.
If you’re one of the people who is reading this and thinking, “It’s really obvious!” then you might need to think again. People get the idea that they are their target market, and that everyone in their target market thinks like they do. This isn’t always correct.
For instance, traditional publishing is failing. Traditional journalism is going through a crisis as well. I am not privy to the inner-sanctums of these industries, but I can tell you something about both of them: They are not aware of their target markets.
Traditional publishers laughed at the idea of e-books. They thought it was for people who weren’t good enough to get published traditionally. They didn’t (and still don’t) understand that their market is filled with people who want the ease of downloading a book, the ease of having a single device to house their library, and the ease of holding a 5mm thick device as opposed to a book that won’t fit in their handbag. The audience the publishers think they are targeting their mass-market paperbacks to is people who love books and not what’s in them.
Journalism is a sob-story. Every night there’s a “Press Preview” after the news. It has two figures from the journalism world – senior editors, writers or directors from newspapers. Those people are ridiculously out of touch with their target market.
Why?
Because they don’t realise that the person who buys a tabloid newspaper is a working class, middle-aged man or woman who wants political issues given to them in a voice they’d use themselves, celebrity news if it’s entertaining and sports/other entertainment stuff they care about.
That audience is not looking for “revolutionary ideas.”
That audience does not want a journalist to give them some philosophical spiel about how we should all be anti-car or get all our fruit from a farmer’s market.
That audience doesn’t care about what flavour sandwich a politician eats on their day off.
Yet the press seem to think they’re appealing to a totally different market; they repeatedly act holier-than-thou when it comes to the opinions their readers have. They talk as though they’re edgy fifteen year-olds or act as though their newspapers are going to sell to the ideological student (hint: School kids and students don’t buy newspapers. Completely wrong market.)
Two examples of industries in trouble = two industries who don’t even know who their market is. That’s not a coincidence.
The Biggest Mistake
The biggest mistake that I see regularly is people talking to an imaginary audience; or, ignoring the audience that is there.
There are web developers who write endless technical details about their service. If a person knows about all the technical details, they can probably do the web design themselves.
There are people who write blogs about starting a business to people who’ve already started a business.
There are companies which insult their competitors whilst providing a practically identical service.
There are writers who think that the average reader cares about academic literary concepts.
Do not allow yourself to become one of the above. Make sure your target audience is the one you’re targeting and writing for.