Who’re You Talkin’ To?

January 5, 2010

When you write your website copy, marketing materials, articles, blog posts — or even when you Tweet on Twitter or update your Facebook status — who are you talking to?

Sitting at your computer staring at a blank screen, knowing you’ve got to fill it up with words that will invite your audience to become customers, is often a daunting task.

You can make it easier.

Not by taking writing classes (though if you’re insecure about your writing skills, getting help is always a good idea). Not even by studying all the vast quantities of marketing and copywriting how-to available on the Internet and in bookstores.

You can make it easier by writing directly to your audience.

And you do know who that is: it’s your ideal, most favorite, most loved client. It’s the customer you wish you could clone a hundred times over, because he or she is so completely the person you do your best work with, and who responds most willingly.

But when you’re staring at that blank screen, it’s easy to forget — especially when financial pressures or other deadlines are breathing down your neck.

Here are a few ways to remind yourself — and a few techniques to put yourself in your customer’s place.

Create personas

Personas are “pretend people” who share key characteristics of your audience in a condensed form.

The concept is heavily used in software and website design, where teams of analysts and usability experts create various personas that represent the primary users of the systems they’re testing.

You don’t need a team — or usability expertise — to put your personas together. However, it’s a good idea to spend time not just thinking about who your customers are, but hearing their own words about why they need and want what you do. Next time you email or talk with a client, ask questions! You’ll almost certainly learn something surprising — and you may end up with a few testimonials as well.

Using this new insight into your customers’ experiences, plus your own understanding of what you want to experience in working with them, write two or three little stories. Give your personas names, childhoods, families, jobs, communities, hobbies, and pet peeves.

The more you understand these personas, the clearer you’ll be about how to communicate with them — and thus the clearer your message will be for your current and potential customers.

Don’t worry about getting them perfect; they never will be. Instead, allow them to develop and change naturally over time, just as your experience of your work develops and changes.

Listen to yourself

With your personas in mind, read your writing aloud and listen to what you’re saying when you talk with people about your work.

Reading your articles and other written material aloud is a terrific way to discover where you may not be making sense (it happens to everyone!) or where you can reword something to be simpler and speak more directly to your audience.

When you can observe yourself talking — at networking events, on the phone with customers and prospective customers — you’ll hear where you sound uncertain and where you sound powerful and confident.

It’s not always a comfortable exploration. Remember that everyone makes mistakes and fumbles their words every now and then — and remember that you’re doing this not to beat yourself up, but to get better at connecting with the people who need you.

Wear their hats

Personas are a great tool to start with, but sometimes you just need to channel your actual customers.

One client was feeling not-quite-comfortable about the message we were conveying in his website copy. He consciously set aside his own desires, wants, and needs, stepping out of what he thought his goals were for the website. Then, reading through the copy from the perspective of his best clients, his unease crystallized. We’d been creating too much description for people who want information brief and to the point — and we’d been overdoing the marketing to people who are &ldquosold at” all the time.

Editing the pages with this perspective in mind created a far more powerful message for his market. And it reinforced the reality that not every message works for every customer (or persona)!

As an interesting additional benefit, it also helped him realize that what he’d initially thought was his goal for the website — wasn’t.

Be patient with yourself

In the beginning, this may feel like a lot of work. And you may feel resistant to becoming this clear about your audience.

Be patient with yourself and with the resistance. Remember, for instance, that any persona you create doesn’t have to be perfect — and you don’t have to always use personas in your writing. Sometimes, after all, a blog post or Twitter tweet is simply about sharing your experience without worrying too much about your audience’s response.

But if your messages, whether in articles, on your website, or in person, aren’t having quite the results you’d like — give this a try and see what happens.

You may even find yourself enjoying it!

“A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a real group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.” Wikipedia entry

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