In our last instalment of burning questions, I called for all your questions about copywriting, an often overlooked aspect of marketing, yet one that could spell the difference between and failing and successful business.
Yes, your website copy can directly influence your prospects decision to hire, despite the fact that most design firms aren't solely hired based on how good their website looks. But first impressions matter and sometimes getting the job hinges on one little thing... like the copy in your marketing.
This time, it's the question send by long-time reader and client Nathan Stewart picked my interest:
"I want everything I write to be a projection of me - my beliefs, my convictions... but i worry that i am writing 'out' the average potential client who may not resonate with it (which also clearly means I am speaking to a very specific audience and hoping to catch their attention!).
Do i write it for ME or do i cater to a larger 'general' audience?"
Nathan, this is a great questions that also touches on a few discrete elements of copywriting, so I'll try my best to break it down and then come up with an answer for all your very valid points.
Any marketing effort aims at doing one thing: bringing together a seller (or marketer) and a buyer in the hopes that a deal will be made. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about buying a Snickers bar or 6-figure professional services.
That you want your marketing and your copy specifically to resonate with who you are and what you believe in is perfectly natural and may indeed help you with a certain type of client who share the same beliefs, but the risk is that this type of clientele is too narrow a niche to sustain your business.
Instead, what I would suggest is that you proudly display your convictions, but when engaging with prospects, make your copy about them and what kind of painful problem you can solve for them. You see, psychology tells us that people want to know that you have the ability and experience to solve their most intractable problems, while not always explicitly telling you what these problems are.
Copywriting, in some sense, anticipates what those pain points are and preemptively addresses them before they come up. If at the same time you can sneak in something that speaks to your beliefs and convictions, even better.
To explicitly answer your last point, you have to know who your audience is before you write for them. At a basic level it can be done through empirical observation and informal polling of past clients or if you have the means, engage in proper market research, but that's very expensive.
Once you know who they are, you have to find out (If you don't already) what their biggest pain points are, whether it's aggregate information on your general market segment for the people who buy your type of services or just by talking to past and existing clients and ask them why they hired you, or more specifically what problem they hired you to solve for them.
In short, the best marketers speak to their prospects goals, aspirations and fears first and find ways to link those latent desires to their own personal preferences and beliefs.
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Thanks Nathan (of Escape Designs) for the pertinent question (don't forget to claim your gift)!