Welcome to CreativeDemand Copywriting Tips, I’m Anna, a professional copywriter. Today we’re asking the question, “Who’s reading your copy?” This is a really important question, because it affects everything you write. 

Maybe you’re writing for a business and they say, “We want to create a landing page that will sell our flagship product.” You have information on the product, you understand the brand, so you get started.

How Target Audiences Affect the Way You Write Copy

But the problem is, there are a number of different types of target audiences who could be hitting this landing page. Here are just a few: 

• People clicking through on PPC ads. PPC stands for pay-per-click, and those are the ads you see at the top of search engine results. These people may be completely unfamiliar with the company, the brand, and the product. They’re a cold audience. 
• People who are hitting the page because they clicked a link in the company newsletter. This is a warm audience. They’re already subscribers to the company email list, so they might already be familiar with everything you’re talking about. 
• People who click through to this page from browsing on the company website. These people might be warm or cold, we don’t know. 

Those are just three sample audiences you might be writing for when you develop this landing page. Does that matter? Absolutely it does. It affects the kind of information you put on the page and how you speak about the company, the brand, and the product. 

The more focused your copy can be for a specific audience, the more effective it’s likely to be. So a landing page you use for pay-per-click ads might be different than the one you create for a newsletter audience or people who have purchased from the company before. 

Writing Within the Context of the Sales Funnel

Apart from understanding who is coming to the page, you also need to know where people are meant to go after that. When you have an understanding of the whole sales funnel, you’ll know how to…

• Continue to develop your reader’s interest 
• Clue them in on what’s going to happen next
• Prepare them for the sale or the post-purchase process

You are never writing sales copy in a vacuum. You can’t make assumptions about who’s reading your copy or where they’re going next. If you’re working for someone else, ask questions. Get context on where your copy fits in the sales funnel or the company’s marketing strategy. 

If you’re working for yourself, be intentional about your customer’s path (see step 4 in this article for quick how-to) so you have a clear idea of what to say and when. 

Interested in Learning Copywriting?

In my Transformation Copywriting™ course, we talk about the importance of knowing who you’re writing to and how you should be appealing to them. If you want to learn more about that, I encourage you to check out the course. Thanks for reading!