Would you agree that every product or service has a primary target customer? I hope so, because it’s true. Beer is targeted primarily at males between the ages of 18 and 35; tablet PCs are aimed at the Technorati; boy bands clearly market to teen and preteen girls. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Successful marketers know there’s a specific demographic most likely to benefit from a particular product or service. Thus, most of their marketing is aimed specifically at that target group. If you aspire to being a great writer you must adopt the same principle every time you put pen to paper. Whether or not your entire body of work proves to be successful is highly dependent on whether or not you know your audience and write to them.
Appropriate Content
Knowing your audience means providing content appropriate to their way of
thinking. For example, if you’re writing a weekly blog on major sporting events you need to stick primarily to the most popular sports in your target area. A U.S. audience will be most interested in football, baseball, and basketball. While it’s perfectly acceptable to give coverage to less popular sports, keep them in proper perspective unless your blog is specifically aimed at one of them.
Going one step further, each particular sport has its own demographic as well. Focus your football writing on those types of people most likely to follow it regularly. Do the same for all the topics you cover, keeping in mind that there’s no point in writing content for people not likely to read it. This practice requires a lot of research, but it will pay off in the long run.
Appropriate Words and Phrases
Regardless of your content and target audience, every topic has its own
vocabulary and phraseology that those familiar with it understand. Great writers learn the topic-related words and phrases and effectively incorporate them into their content. The idea behind this is to make your reader as comfortable as possible so that he’s able to think about what he’s reading.
One of the temptations here is to try to insert topic specific words and phrases without really knowing what they mean or how they apply. Make sure you fully understand usage and context before you attempt to insert them into your writing. Failing to do so will make you look like a middle-aged parent trying to speak the modern, hip lingo with a teenage child. Not cool!
