Figuring out what the audience wants is no easy task. This becomes even more difficult to judge when it comes to written material. Whether written for informative or promotional purposes the most important thing for the writer is to keep in mind who they are writing for.
How do you do that? It surely isn’t easy to determine what it is exactly that your audience wants to read. However, there are certain ways of judging it and one of the foremost ways is to talk to them. Asking them what they want is the most effective way of delivering closest to what your audience wants.
Every marketing process starts by defining your target audience. So that when you ask them what they want you will be able to make proper use of it. Consider contacting them in a way that will gain their trust. Use platforms like social networking sites to engage with them.
The process of determining what the audience wants to read begins by first determining who your audience is. To start this process you will first need to understand the following characteristics of your target audience:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic Location
- Educational Background
- Lifestyle
- Social Status
The demographical characteristics help you determine the level of language that you need to use. Other psychographic characteristics will have deeper implications. Their lifestyle will determine the kind of material that will interest them. Their social status will be an indication of how strong their word-of-mouth is.
However, there are also some general rules to writing that would make the content readable for the maximum number of audience. Some of these rules followed by most of the popular copywriting agency are:
BE ENGAGING
Written material that is engaging is preferred by the readers. Try to adopt a writing style that will keep the readers engaged in what you are trying to convey. One of the tricks for doing is to make is sound like what you are telling the reader is very important to them. Talking about them and how what you are telling them will improve their lives is a proven writing tip.
MAKE A CONVERSATION
Conversational content writing style is highly preferred when it comes to writing for blogs and social media websites. Another advantage that it has is that it attracts more readers and tends to have a longer retention period as compared to a formal writing style. Overly sales-pitched sounding reading material is also not seen as a good form of writing.
INFORMATIVE
Readers want to be able to extract some information from what they read. That is why it is important that they feel what you are writing is providing them some sort of valuable information. Being informative does not mean that you need to fill up your writing material with facts and figures. Even an idea or an opinion can also be considered as informative as it broadens a person’s perspective.
CURRENT
What you write should be of the current times and not of the past. People are not really interested in past trends, but rather in the current ones. Discussing history is another matter all together.
EXCLUSIVE
Every writer tries to keep their material exclusive. That is why it is important to cite something when it is being quoted. The audience does want to read about things that interest them, but when it is exclusive that just adds to its charm.
With some general writing guidelines and some specific relative information to the target you can produce a very useful piece of reading material.
If you really want to go all the way to make sure that you understood the target audience correctly, share some sample work with a test focus group to get their opinion. That will help you ensure that you are on the right track and with some tweaking you will probably know exactly what your audience wants to read.
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