Who Are Your Audience And What Do They Want?
I gave the game away with the subtitle, but here’s the story to go with it.
I have various projects on the go. As I’m prone to overthinking, overplanning and over-reliance on developing systems, these projects tend to get more complicated in scope as time goes on, becoming impossibly huge tasklists that I will never realistically finish.
This morning, I decided to go back to my direct response writing roots, and think about how I’d approach it if it were a client asking for these projects. And the answer is the simple two-step solution posed by the subtitle’s question.
Who Are Your Audience?
Project creep tends to occur in the first instance because you’re trying to please everyone or anyone, in any way or every way. This is how you go from a small product, say, Malinois Puppy Training For K-9 Response Handlers to How To Train Your Dog.
While there’s the tendency to assume you can help everyone and therefore you should take everyone into account, this is a Fool’s Gold approach to the problem. You’re better off with specific tailoring that excludes everyone but a niche, and then softening or modifying the material later for wider appeal.
Remember, stuff like Star Wars was made with absolute geeks in mind, and became wildly beloved by everyone. Originally, virtually all the technology we use today from the internet to your mobile phone to the electric cars we’re all going to have to drive were developed purely for military purposes.
Niche down first. Even if your audience is arbitrary, it makes everything clearer.
High IQ Guys That Want To…
What Do They Want?
If you have a clear idea of who the audience are, then you’re onto a winner. Because after that, it’s a simple case of giving them what they want.
Except in a lot of cases, we still end up with an empty page, a list of ideas that aren’t so brilliant, and more importantly, offers and marketing copy that doesn’t pop.
In reality, this is obviously a case of knowing your target market intimately, and then thinking about a list of things that they want. A helpful exercise is to simply jot down a list of things which, if you wrote as a simple email header or blog post title, your target market would find it impossible not to click on.
The kicker here is that, in accordance with what we learned in step one, you should try and word those things in such a way that people who you’re not targeting will not click on it. This will give you clarity for your offers and your marketing.
It’s a simple example, but, “Simple Method to Lose the Freshman 15” tells your audience a lot of things, successfully fragments a potential audience and even retains some universal appeal while offering no confusion as to who it is and what it promises to do.
Final Thoughts
This exercise is simple on the surface, but deceptively powerful as well. The more you think on these ideas, the better you’ll get at forming offers, writing copy and making a tangible change in the lives of your audience.
You want your products to solve their issues. You want them to feel a connection to what you’ve created. Finally, you want your copy to sing to them through their mindless scrolling. Everything you write should go bang! in their mind. I need this.
So give the exercise a go and let me know what you come up with!