Writing for Your Target Audience

Let’s be honest; content for tech companies can get pretty dull. Customers shopping around for the perfect piece of hardware or software often feel like companies just create copy to have it on their sites and not to have an actual conversation.

But tech copywriting doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, by just trying to understand your audience and finding out what makes them tick, you can be on your way to creating that killer blog post, web page copy or email campaign that sticks.

Today, we’ll explore how you can use a few easy tips to shift your focus to your audience.

Why it All Matters

It’s easy to get in a groove when crafting copy from the same industry or related verticals. Especially when it comes to areas like SaaS copywriting, you can get lost in a sea of software.

For example, MailChimp is a hugely popular email client used and beloved by many. But other companies, like Sendinblue or Constant Contact, offer a similar service with slightly different features and benefits.

If you’re coming up with a basic overview of what you can do with MailChimp, you could effortlessly use the same description for those other services as well. If you’re talking to a fresh audience with no clue what email marketing software can offer them, this would probably be your best route.

But, email marketing is nothing new. Most users already know about MailChimp. So what can you do to differentiate your brand from this popular service? First, you want to know who you’re talking to.

Who’s Your Audience?

Before we jump into how you can find your audience, let’s explore the difference between a target audience and a target market:

• Target market — This is a general group of people who might benefit from your product or service. They are potential customers and will more often than not like what you’re offering.
• Target audience — More specific than your target market. These will be your ideal customers for your marketing message.

Going back to our email client example, your target market is people who need to manage their email marketing. Your target audience may be the users fed up with MailChimp and are looking for alternatives.

So how do you find your target audience? A powerful marketing tool is creating a customer avatar. Basically, your customer avatar is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Plenty of companies will use this method using demographic information and analytics, but for our purposes, we need to dive a little deeper.

To help give you insights into your target audience, ask the following questions of your ideal customer:

• What are their pain points and frustrations?
• What kinds of challenges do they face in their day-to-day life?
• What are their values?
• What about their lifestyle? Their emotions? Their needs?

By creating a customer avatar and analyzing customer behaviors, you can identify ways your service or product can cater to their specific needs. Instead of just boring your audience with a basic overview of your product, you can talk directly to them and craft your copy to appeal to them more precisely than a general audience. 

Tailoring Your Copy and Content

Now that you have your ideal customer avatar, what’s next? Well, you’ll need to tailor your copy for them.

First, learn the language. If you’re writing for B2C, unnecessary jargon just won’t work. If your ideal customer is the head developer looking for a PaaS to help with software creation, you’ll want to establish domain authority — meaning those techy-sounding words might hit home.

Next, understand their needs. Back to our email client example, if your ideal customer is already a seasoned marketing professional, talking about how easy it is to create an email campaign on your platform might not be as important to them.

They might be looking for a company that puts customer service first as they’ve been burned by similar brands in the past. If you can relay that message directly to that customer, you just might get the conversion.

Lastly, learn how to state the benefits of your product effectively. Sure, some benefits are fairly universal; saving money, saving time, improving your life, they all hit the same euphonic notes. But, if you can dig a little deeper, you can use your customer avatar to refine your benefits and make an impact.

Let’s say you're crafting copy for a complex technology. What a potential user might be looking for is a simple, no-fuss method to use that tech. Talking about how your software makes their company money will only get you so far — but highlighting how your specific product will remedy their specific problem might make a huge impact.

Finding Your Voice with Expert Help

Creating engaging copy that crawls right into the hearts of your target audience is a bit of an art. Navigating how your potential customer might think, their frustrations and how their needs affect their decision-making should be an active part of your writing process. For tech copywriting sectors like SaaS, IT or blockchain, it can be the edge you need to cut through the boatloads of content your users see daily.

Are you hunting for a world-class team to take your tech copy to the next level? Here at Hire a Writer, we’ve trudged through the trenches to refine a streamlined process to get you the copy and content that hits your customers right where they need it. If you’re looking to get started, make sure to contact us today.