Our on screen attention span has dropped drastically in the last two decades, from an average of two and half minutes to a mere 47 seconds – meaning that reaching target audiences and keeping them interested in what you have to say has never been more important. So how can you do this when your writing topic might seem a little too technical, specific or just unrelatable?
At Conscious Communications, we are fortunate to write for a varied client roster spanning science, technology, education, engineering, and more. As a result, we are tasked with captivating those sometimes relatively niche B2B audiences. And while battery technology, car dash cams and wind farms may sound too technical for your liking, this is certainly not the case for those who are electric car manufacturers, road incident survivors or offshore operation managers.
If you think writing about the management of offshore wind farms and oil rigs might be dry, this article in OilWoman magazine might make you think again. The inspiring article not only reaches the managers of large offshore operations around the world, but motivates women working in a male-dominated industry, serving as written testimony to the incredible work that remote medics do, day in, day out. The main takeaway? There really is no such thing as an unrelatable subject!
Copywriters have to tap into what makes their intended audience tick in order to master effective copywriting. Understanding your audience’s routine is a key place to start. Is your target audience spending time scrolling through social media, flicking through industry news sites, or reading the local newspaper? This will help to pinpoint the most suitable format for content, be it a social media post, newspaper article, or website page.
You also need to understand your audience’s goals, aspirations and pain points. Before sitting down to write we need to ask ourselves: Why would the reader be interested in this? Is this new to them? What problems can we help them solve? Every reader will have a daily headache they are grappling with – and copywriting, no matter its subject, can be a way to present a solution to one of those problems, when done creatively.
One of the simplest ways to identify good copywriting is to identify what we are drawn to ourselves as readers. For me, online food channel Mob Kitchen excels in distributing written copy that manages to hit the right note with me as a consumer – every time. As somebody with a full time job, and a love of food, I don’t always have time to do the amount of cooking that I would like in the evenings.Enter Mob’s daily email, which last week landed in my inbox with the subject line: ‘Easy ravioli recipe’ – I was intrigued. Could making pasta really be that easy? The digestible writing style in the email itself struck a chord with me: “There’s a number of things that become increasingly difficult to do during the summer. Things like sleeping. And exercising. And cooking.” In short, it works – the next day I found myself cooking up their easy summer ravioli. It’s a brand I’ll turn to again and again for inspiration – that’s a winning bit of copywriting right there.
To put it simply: visualise your audience and think about what issues they might be grappling with today. Are you able to help solve their problems in any way? Soon enough you’ll be on your way to banishing that dreaded writer’s block and producing winning copy, every time.
