How to write copy to your demographic?

[Testament]

Hey all!

I've been struggling a lot recently trying to write my copy to a product I'm on right now. The problem is that I can't seem to really grasp how to write copy to a specific demographic. Two of the different demographics that the product is marketed toward are college aged girls and mothers of young (5-10) children.

I've been trying to read up a lot on the various copy threads on the forum, and what I've been doing so far is finding out where those people hang out and then finding out how they speak so you can write copy that will speak to them.

So with that in mind, I went to the Facebook page for Cosmopolitan.

I could barely stomach it. Almost literally nothing but gossipy, trollish comments, and endless flame wars. From many, many, maaaany different women (and a small portion of men).

I then went over to the Facebook page for Oprah's magazine, which had a quality of comment that was much friendlier, but still seemed to lack anything I could really use for writing copy that spoke to them. I've been trying to figure this out for the last few days and it's starting to drive me bonkers.

So my questions are:

How do you all write copy that speaks to your specific demographics? Do you go to websites that your demographic frequents? How do you find those websites? What's your general strategy for learning this?

Cheers!

 

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[TheTruth]

- read 2 copy-writing books (i.e. the ultimate sales letter & cashvertising)
- find 3 products that are similar to yours and look at their copy structure

Use the structure of your competitors with the advice from the books and you have yourself some copy.

One thing those books might not mention, is creating a customer avatar (so you are speaking to one person when writing the copy). Do this combined with the other 2 points and it becomes easy.

Don't convince yourself it will be hard, because then it will be. Keep it simple.

 

[Testament]

Hey Truth! Thanks for the response man, that clears a lot of stuff up for me. I was curious about the avatar though.

Is the avatar a real person? Or a fictional one that you create that fits the average person of your demographic?

I read a post by zen******* that mentioned the avatar as well, the relevant quote is here:

"what we have done in the past is create an AVATAR
name
who they are
demo graphic info
hobbies,
fears
desires,
work,
habits,
relationships
age
beliefs
affiliations

and once we have this avatar, we can focus all our attention on making this person our target for our marketing.

overlaps will happen from there.
Z "


I'm not exactly sure how he came up with all of that information for the avatar either. Is the avatar a common practice in attempting to market to a demographic?

Thanks again for the recommendations, I'll try to search the forum a bit as well and see if I can demystify this avatar concept...it sounds totally fascinating.

*EDIT: How do you typically find your competitors to grab copy from? I'm going on Amazon.com to try and find related prdoucts, but I'm wondering if that's a poor way to do it *

 

[Lauryn]

You can also read comments and product reviews, and google forums pertaining to the subject or product you like. The language is found here also.

 

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[Lauryn]

Hey Truth! Thanks for the response man, that clears a lot of stuff up for me. I was curious about the avatar though.

Is the avatar a real person? Or a fictional one that you create that fits the average person of your demographic?

I read a post by zen******* that mentioned the avatar as well, the relevant quote is here:

"what we have done in the past is create an AVATAR
name
who they are
demo graphic info
hobbies,
fears
desires,
work,
habits,
relationships
age
beliefs
affiliations

and once we have this avatar, we can focus all our attention on making this person our target for our marketing.

overlaps will happen from there.
Z "


I'm not exactly sure how he came up with all of that information for the avatar either. Is the avatar a common practice in attempting to market to a demographic?

Thanks again for the recommendations, I'll try to search the forum a bit as well and see if I can demystify this avatar concept...it sounds totally fascinating.

*EDIT: How do you typically find your competitors to grab copy from? I'm going on Amazon.com to try and find related prdoucts, but I'm wondering if that's a poor way to do it *

Amazon is a great way to go.

 

[100k]

Outsource

maybe find a single mum or a college mum and have her write the article, then use your copy skills to turn it from an article to a copy.

 

[TheTruth]

The Avatar - This is a fictional character you make up which represents your ideal customer. When writing copy, you use this fictional character as your focal point of interaction (i.e. you ONLY talk to that one person).

This concept is best explained in this video (make sure to watch the whole thing and take notes):

Competitors - Look at all of the marketplaces you can find: websites, amazon, fb, google etc. This is really just "grind work". No right path to figure it out.

Hey Truth! Thanks for the response man, that clears a lot of stuff up for me. I was curious about the avatar though.

Is the avatar a real person? Or a fictional one that you create that fits the average person of your demographic?

I read a post by zen******* that mentioned the avatar as well, the relevant quote is here:

"what we have done in the past is create an AVATAR
name
who they are
demo graphic info
hobbies,
fears
desires,
work,
habits,
relationships
age
beliefs
affiliations

and once we have this avatar, we can focus all our attention on making this person our target for our marketing.

overlaps will happen from there.
Z "


I'm not exactly sure how he came up with all of that information for the avatar either. Is the avatar a common practice in attempting to market to a demographic?

Thanks again for the recommendations, I'll try to search the forum a bit as well and see if I can demystify this avatar concept...it sounds totally fascinating.

*EDIT: How do you typically find your competitors to grab copy from? I'm going on Amazon.com to try and find related prdoucts, but I'm wondering if that's a poor way to do it *

 

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[Testament]

Thanks a ton for all the replies, guys! That really puts everything into perspective. I've been taking all of your suggestions to heart and really focusing on writing out great copy today. It looks pretty bad so far (heh ) however it's looking significantly better than what I had before this. So...hooray for progress! Haven't gotten a chance to check out Ca$hvertising yet, but am downloading the kindle version ASAP.

I also found a bunch of helpful resources for creating an avatar:

Here's a cool and easy to understand intro article I found on the concept of an avatar - http://shaebaxter.com/customer-avatar-attract-new-customers/

And one on making a persona yourself - http://www.ux-lady.com/diy-user-personas/

Here's an example I found of one: