Who Are You Actually Talking To With Your Website?

When someone asks you who you’re targeting with your website, what do you say? “Well, everyone interested in our products or services, of course! We want to sell to anyone – ideally everyone!” But are you sure that’s the right approach? The market today is incredibly broad, and targeting everyone may not pay off even for larger companies. A more effective path is to find a specific audience and address your website copy directly to them.

How to Write Website Copy Effectively

Satisfying all potential customers at once with a one-size-fits-all approach is practically impossible. You offer a service or product at a given quality and a given price. Not everyone will like that, and not everyone will welcome it. So rather than filling your website with generic statements and universal copy that seemingly anyone could understand, focus from the very start on a clear and specific goal.

Your marketing efforts will be far more successful when you target a defined segment of the population – a single target group. Narrowing your focus allows for a more effective approach and delivers more reliable results (and revenue) than trying to be everything to everyone.

Practice backs this up. Most good salespeople, sales representatives, and sales team members will confirm that the most important thing is to first get clear on who your target audience is.

A Classic Example

Take car manufacturers. When developing marketing strategies, they leave absolutely nothing to chance. Working alongside psychologists and drawing on financial data, they define the ideal buyer for each car model. They’re incredibly precise about it — nothing slips through the cracks.

Every car sold counts. Take Swedish automaker Volvo, for example. How do they use targeted communication aimed at a clearly defined group? Their ideal customer for model XY is a working mother with two young children.

So what are the key product benefits they highlight in their marketing? Safety — because every mother today is conditioned to prioritize it. Reliability — because a car that breaks down in the middle of nowhere is every woman’s nightmare. Ample storage space — because with small kids, you always need to pack everything plus a backup of everything.

Then there’s effortless driving, presented in a way that suggests you could almost breastfeed your youngest while behind the wheel. And of course, it wouldn’t be complete without: showcasing the model in a stunning, eye-catching color that perfectly matches nail polish!

The goal, then, is to define one type of recipient that all future marketing efforts will focus on. And you’ll see how the whole process of content creation becomes significantly simpler.

Website Copy and Personas

Try to picture your typical customer — or the customer you want to reach — and put that image down on paper. Then create your website copy in a way that speaks directly to them.

It’ll be easier to write if you describe them in precise detail — and feel free to give them a name! Paint a detailed picture of a fictional reader of your website: someone who regularly subscribes to your newsletter and who will one day become a loyal customer.

As a mountain bike retailer, you might have John Black, around 21 years old, a high school graduate, no kids, a total outdoor enthusiast with a slightly reckless attitude toward life, who loves nothing more than riding his mountain bike off-road through all kinds of terrain.

Or for a company offering accounting software, it could be Jane White — a resourceful, active mum of two school-age kids who, on top of taking care of them, stays up at night doing bookkeeping for several clients and building her own business from the ground up.

Or perhaps you’re an importer of plus-size hosiery — in that case, you might have Rose Blue, a well-rounded lady in her fifties who gets through three packs of butter cookies a day and is happiest when she doesn’t have to take a single step on foot.

How to Work With Personas

Put yourself in her shoes. Play out a little scene with her. Have a conversation — try to get someone to act it out with you. Imagine John sitting with you in a café. What would she tell you about her everyday life? Or picture bumping into John at a bowling alley after a long winter and chatting about the new bike brands that just arrived in your shop for the upcoming season.

What is John interested in? What questions does he ask? Which details matter to him? Or perhaps you offer your colleague Rose a lift home from work, and during the ride she discovers that the tights she picked up at a Tesco promo event have already split after lunch.

How to Create a Persona?

There are many different approaches and methods, and what works best depends on the nature of your business. Here are some key questions to start with:

• Are they more likely to be men or women?

• What age group are they in?

• Where do they live, work, and spend their time?

• What level of education do they have?

• Are they employees or business owners?

• What is their approximate annual income?

• What will they use the product or service for?

• Under what circumstances will they make a purchase?

• How much of an impact will the purchase have on their budget?

• What are they hoping to get out of the new product or service?

Getting a clear picture of who your website content or email campaigns are meant for isn’t enormously complicated. It does, however, require some careful thought about the fundamental questions and sufficient professional attention when putting it together.

We’d be happy to help you create compelling copy for your business — professionally, reliably, and efficiently.