Some Less-Obvious Audience Profiling Techniques (Part Two)
Yesterday I talked a little about some of the more obvious ways you can segregate your audience. It’s essential to go through the process of building the ideal reader in your mind, because if you write for everyone, then you’re writing for nobody in particular. It’s all copywriting, but you want to get the most out of every sentence you write, and it’s better to know who you’re writing to before you start.
Yesterday we went for the low-hanging fruit:
- Men and women are different.
- People from different places are different.
- Introverts and Extroverts are different.
In this article we’ll go through some less-obvious ones. This won’t be exhaustive, but it’ll get you thinking about some other things to bear in mind and use in your target profiling.
Sensory Versus Intuition
Like the introvert/extrovert dichotomy, these are taken from the MBTI psychological model. In that model, not only are people either introverted or extroverted, they’re also one of two of each of the following;
- Sensory based or intuition based.
- Feeling or thinking based.
- Judgement or Perception based.
The first of these is sensory versus intuition.
A person who is sensory based will respond to information from their senses, and come to know things based primarily on their sensory perceptions. In essence they take their ‘reality cues’ immediately from the outside world.
An intuitive person takes longer to respond to “reality cues” because intuition in this system means that they inwardly generate their reality cues.
Does your target market in general conform to either, or , or both of these in equal measure?
Feelers versus Thinkers
The third aspect of a person (after introvert/extrovert, sensor/intuitive) is whether they’re a “thinker” or a “feeler.”
Obviously this doesn’t mean that there are two types of people – the masterminds and the bimbos.
Instead, it’s another way of determining how people synthesise information: Do they come to conclusions based primarily on data or do they come to conclusions based on consensus?
Important to note here: Everyone thinks they’re a thinker. Everyone thinks that they use data to come to their decisions. A lot of people don’t.
Another important note: Some people would try to tell you that thinker/feeler is equally split down into a convenient man/woman correlation – those people aren’t right either.
Judgement Versus Perception
The big problem with the MBTI system isn’t that it’s got a lack of versatility; it’s more a case that the labels give connotations that aren’t really there.
Judgement and perception will, depending on who you are, bring to mind authoritarian nuns judging you or whacked-out-of-their-mind psychonauts.
In reality, neither of those labels are accurate. It’s similar to thinking that all introverts want to live in the mountains or all extroverts live the Kardashian lifestyle.
If a person is judgement-based, they will seek information to gain closure. Essentially, they want the answers to questions they’ve got, and as a salesman/copywriter you’re providing them that closure.
If a person is perception-based, then they are seeking information as a means to open more doors, and get more questions to ask.
It’s a case of selling:
“I have the answer. Here is the one system that works.”
Vs.
“This system will literally open doors you never knew existed.”
Putting Them Together
You’ll have noticed that I keep trying to drill these things down to eradicate any baggage that isn’t relevant. That’s important.
Drilling these archetypes down to their purest essences are important because you need to stack all these things. For instance, you can’t say, “All women are feelings-based” and then come across a target market for thinking-based females. You need to eradicate the baggage because the strength of this system lies in its ability to stack:
A U.K. Female Extroverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiver.
All of those things have a knock-on effect on how you would write a sales pitch to this person, without necessarily interfering with any of the other pieces of the puzzle.
If you know how to sell to a perceiver, then you use those triggers. If you know triggers for all of these, then you’re creating a super-stack of copy of unimaginable hypnotic influence!
Or something.
Final Thoughts
This topic is more complex than I thought it would be. I honestly thought it’d be a single article when I wrote the first line yesterday. Instead, I feel like I’ve covered nothing.
Like, for instance, what to do with this information.
That’ll have to come at some later point though. In the meantime, perceivers amongst you, drop in any thoughts about where the past couple of articles have taken you.