Three Key Steps To A Buying Audience

The key thing when it comes to writing good copy is writing for the correct audience – or understanding the audience you’re tasked with writing for.

You can write the most persuasive copy in the world, but if it’s got nothing to do with your target, it’ll fall on deaf ears. If you don’t write the most persuasive copy in the world, you’ll be blown out before you start.

For instance, this morning, I opened my inbox. People had spammed the following:

1. Russian girls want to date you.
2. Buy these themes for your WordPress site.
3. Get your guide to investing right here.

Based on those titles, I never even opened the emails. They got deleted. (Sorry Katarina.)

The method behind spam emails is the reason they fail – the same template is sent five million times to whatever email addresses can be scraped together. The idea is that if only 1% of people get hooked, then you’re making a profit.

The problem is that 1% of people will not respond to an email sent out to five million people.

It simply isn’t going to happen. There’s no targeting.

Targeting consists of three steps after you’ve got a product.

1. Find audience.
2. Find audience triggers and work out the angle.
3. Deliver the offer to them at a place and time where they want it.

(Alright, each of those steps could be broken into about fifty different steps, but we’ll go into more depth on another day.)

Say you’re trying to sell perfume.

There’s no point in spamming men. Maybe if you tried it on the night before Valentine’s, you’d get a couple of bites, but otherwise, it’s not going to happen.

Your business “Women’s Perfume for men” is probably not going to take off unless you’ve got a really good angle.

So we know it’s women.

All women?

Not at all. Most women don’t care about perfume most of the time. To get decent copy, you need to drill down… Is it a single woman’s perfume? What age? What race?

It’s specific, and you’ll probably think it’s too specific if you’re writing a niche review for shaving cream or something, but is it really?

In that example, only men are going to be interested in shaving cream adverts. That’s 50% of the population gone already.

Only a certain amount of those are going to care about shaving cream.

Only a certain amount of those who care are going to be looking online for reviews of shaving cream.

Only a certain amount of those are going to be responsive to copy… so you need to get the wording right.

Triggers

Finding the triggers is a fun game. In fact, it’s so fun I’m definitely going to write more on this topic in the future.

But I’ll truncate it.

People have hooks that will make them buy. Different demographics respond to different things.

For instance, if you take the perfume example, there are girls who pride themselves on their non-conformism. You will write a different advert for that audience, and you’ll use triggers specifically relating to that non-conformism. It could be as simple as:

“No other girl in your class/office wears this perfume.”

But something you wouldn’t write would be:

“Do you want to be admired by everyone?”

Because that is the opposite trigger: A non-conformist wants to get attention, not validation.

A really good example is fitness websites.

Bear in mind that most fitness websites are aiming to attract people who are out of shape. (Or, they should be, because it’s not like Arnold Schwarzenegger is reading bodybuilding.com articles for advice.)

Yet you go on every cookie-cutter fitness website and it’s all about “living it to the extreme.” It’ll have things like, “The 52 best hip-extension exercises you can do to go from 4% bodyfat to 2% body fat.” It’ll have the commenters at the bottom of the articles saying, “If you are more than 15 years old and you can’t bench 68 plates on either side, you should fucking quit or buy some XEW EXTREME PROTEIN” and it’ll have endless gags about how fat people are barely human.

…let’s zoom out.

Target audience = slightly out of shape girls and guys who just want to “tone their abs.”

What message is the bodybuilding site above giving? The opposite of what it should be. It’s throwing away the target market by using triggers for people who are never going to read the site. (incidentally, this article is getting really long in the tooth-now, so I can’t dwell on this – but this is the reason that sites get that “circle-jerk” phenomena; wrong triggers mean the people who should be there aren’t, and the triggers become memes for faux-superiority.)

Alright, skipping ahead.

Point three: Giving the audience the trigger at the right time.

We are not all receptive to offers at every moment.

The girl who buys perfume will do it because she’s got time to think about the guy she’s trying to impress, or she’s got a wedding anniversary coming up and she wants to smell nice or whatever.

Virtually no guy is going to turn down a hot Russian girl, but that doesn’t mean he needs spam at 9:05 a.m. in his inbox.

You have to see where your audience congregate when they’re actively looking to buy (Or when you’re more likely to be able to convince them.)

You have to give them your offer when they’re receptive. I could use a new example, but to re-iterate a point from above:

You could only sell perfume to a guy at Valentine’s.

The real-world triggers align for you. The copy writes itself.

“If you’ve forgotten your girl, click here for the best Valentine’s Day Gift RIGHT NOW”

I Haven’t Written About Publishing For A While

I haven’t written about publishing or writing (as in authorship) for a while. This topic is no exception – it’s more on the copywriting side of things.

However, publishing is an industry like any other. (Although, if you spoke to people involved in traditional publishing, they’d probably laugh at you and say, “Nope, you wouldn’t understand!” Incidentally, that’s why traditional publishing is going the way of the dinosaur.)

Picking the right audience is crucial in any industry, and publishing is no exception, so we’ll use it as an example.

Three mistakes:

1. Guy writes his memoir about life in a sleepy town, then his hilarious exploits at college (like that time where he stole a traffic cone! And then how he toured bars with his band whilst working in an office with Excel spreadsheets.)
2. Girl decides she’s going to write a guide on “how to pick-up guys.” She follows the blueprint laid out by Eben Pagan and spends a thousand dollars a day advertising on YouTube.
3. A guy writes the world’s best science-fiction novel, then markets it to sports fans because it’s so awesome it’ll attract a wide audience like Harry Potter

Those three mistakes are all audience based.

They might be the absolute best books on the planet on their subject. The first guy might be witty and endearing, but nobody is going to buy a memoir about a guy with an average life. The second girl might be inspired and have immense knowledge about how to seduce guys, and she might know that there’s a massive industry online for pick-up guides for guys, but that success won’t transfer because a female audience and male audience work differently. The third guy has written the best book but he’s picking the wrong audience to market it to.

Closing Thoughts

I’m running low on time and this is a bit of a ramble, so I’ll come back to this. To reiterate though, the three stages for finding your audience are:

1. Find audience.
2. Find audience triggers and work out the angle.
3. Deliver the offer to them at a place and time where they want it.

The best bit is that you can turn this whole process into a game.

I intended that to be the article I wrote about, but I had to explain the background information above otherwise it’d make no sense.

The beautiful thing about doing this process is that it actually benefits your life in all sorts of ways, far beyond copywriting. It helps you understand people.

Anyway, more on this another time.