I recently wrote about how to copywrite like a president and mentioned that the first thing you need once you’re ready to market is to understand your customers inside and out.
Nothing will help your copy and consequently your offers convert more than knowing exactly where your customers are coming from. This includes:
- The basics about them as a person (age, gender, income, ethnicity, marital status, occupation, interests, and location).
- Their motivation.
- Their fears.
- Their world-view.
- Why they are listening to you in the first place.
- What they are missing, and how your offer can fill that void. (Remember that your offer might not fill that void as it is now, in which case you need to adjust it.
- Why has everyone else let them down, and why can you help them when nothing else has.
- What are their expectations from you? Once you can identify these, you can get to work over-delivering on both your offer and your copy to capture their attention so that they’re all but won over.
All of this boils down to learning how to think like your customer. This is easier said than done, because 99.99% of our lives we think like ourselves. We see the world in our own way, we have our own opinions about everything, and we’re generally pretty settled in them, especially as adults.
This is why so many marketing campaigns fall flat without our ever realizing why. We put the onus of the failure on the offer or the product itself or that we didn’t spend enough on advertising to get the word out.
All the while we never stop to consider our understanding of our audience is the kink in the hose.
Don’t make any mistake about this:
Copy can be well written as hell, but if it’s not written for the right audience, it will fail no matter how clever it is or proud we are of it.
It’s a dangerous pitfall because we generally don’t see it ahead of time; we think to ourselves that this copy perfectly appeals to what I’m thinking, my emotions, my desires. We might even trick ourselves into saying “if I were my customer, I wouldn’t be able to refuse this offer” because we’re still in our own heads.
The problem with that is that it’s still OUR thinking, OUR emotions, OUR desires, yet we don’t realize it. This explains why we’re blind to our marketing and specifically the language we use during it when everything fails.
We’re so trained into thinking one/our way that initially it’s nearly impossible to liberate ourselves from that mentality to the point to where we can ACTUALLY think like someone else.
Of course our livelihood being on the line is sometimes the ONLY thing which can extricate ourselves from the same old status quo thought process to get us to the point where we can rewire how we approach marketing when all else has failed.
Think like your customer in your marketing. Don’t think that you’re doing it. Know that you’re doing it. Better yeah, the more you do it, the more you’ll see your craft improve.