Talk to Your Target Market on Their Level
Technical writers and marketing copywriters are so valuable primarily because they know the lingo — they know how to speak to their audience. If your target market doesn’t understand you, or if they feel you are babying them, it will turn them off and they will lose interest in your product.
This is meant to be a funny video, but it’s clear that it’s making fun of golf instruction that is far too technical for the intended audience:
Like I said, it’s completely over the top, and it’s obvious that the guy is poking fun, because his “tip” is such a jumbled string of technical term after technical term. But he’s also demonstrating how important it is to tailor your message for your intended audience.
In technical writing it’s referred to layman’s terms, and it’s essentially a technical writer’s job to take a technical topic and write it so anyone can understand, just as it is a marketing copywriter’s job to write in language that has been proven to convince people to buy.
So with the video above, you might expect some technical jargon like that if you were, say, pursuing a golf associate degree, perhaps with the intention of looking into golf careers, but not for a golf tip aimed at the casual viewer.
The incentive to write to keep your target market in mind should be obvious — if you don’t, you could turn off customers and lose sales.
Comments
5 Responses to “Talk to Your Target Market on Their Level”
Leave a Reply
I’ve had instruction like that directed at me and I was so confused. I was getting technical support for my computer and the person trying to help me may have said what that video did, I understood them about the same. Finally got a friend to fix the problem.
My boyfriend is a technical writer and has tried to explain things to me several times. It really is best to just use the most watered down, simplified explanation possible. That way the people that know what they are doing do the fixing and people like me dont try!
That video is hilarious. I am a golfer and rewatched it about 5 times to try and understand everything that was said. I was able to piece little bits and pieces together but most of the message was lost on me. Definitely have to target the audience!
I could see using a video like that for the pros but showing that seriously to beginners will just confuse and discourage people. Showing this would probably turn people away because they wouldnt understand.
I think if people want to understand it they will look it up. Of course you can’t go all out like the video but you dont have to simplify it too much.