Whether you’re pitching to a general market or a niche audience, the process is pretty much the same. You begin by mining as much data as possible, whether that be via email marketing, social media, or even old-fashioned face-to-face outreach. Once you’ve got your data, you need to decide what you’re going to use it for. The answer to this generally involves segmenting your data, and then using the resulting segments to create buyer personas. From there, you can tailor your messaging to trigger the desired response.
Prospective Buyers Weigh In
Include surveys or polls where you can. This is a tried and tested method for getting real-life examples of how your product or service will be used, and can give you a good indication of how effective your messaging is. For example, if one of your surveys shows that your target audience does not feel that they’re adequately equipped to buy your product or service without expert help, you might want to rethink your strategy.
Segmentation
With so much competition, knowing how to segment your market is a great way to standout above the rest and attract the right kind of leads to your business. Using the data you’ve collected, construct a buyer persona and target audience profile around it. Your segments will generally be determined by the type of product or service you sell and where you are in the buying cycle. For example, you might want to segment potential buyers into Small Businesses and Mid-Market businesses. A small business is one that has fewer than 10 employees, and a mid-market business has 10 to 99 staff members. As a copywriter, you’ll be working with businesses of all sizes, so it’s important to segment and prioritize accordingly.
Keywords And Phrases
The next step is to flesh out a list of keywords and phrases that your target audience might use to find what you offer, and which contain the same information as your buyer persona and target audience profile. For example, if you’re working with Financial Services businesses, you might want to review the following keywords and phrases:
- Business finance
- Corporate finance
- Banking
- Financing
- Corporate budgeting
- Asset management
- Liquidity analysis
- Mortgage
- Equity finance
- Emerging markets
Once you’ve got your list of keywords and phrases, you can begin to add them to your headings and subheadings of your copy. Remember to keep your language concise and easy to understand. If you can, avoid using big words that your average person won’t understand.
Keyword And Phrase Research
You’ll need to do a bit of research to ensure that your chosen keywords and phrases are indeed popular, and to see how many times they’re being used on a daily basis. The best way to find this information is to enter your chosen keywords and phrases into the search bar of a search engine (like Google). Once you’ve entered your search query, you’ll see a chart (or tables in some cases) at the top of the search results. These are known as keyword and phrase research reports, and they’ll give you an idea of the popularity of your chosen search terms.
Converting These Leads
Now that you’ve got a good list of leads to pursue, it’s time to move into conversion. You need to decide what you’re going to do with these leads, and how you’re going to follow up once you’ve gotten their attention. The first step is to analyse the data you’ve collected and seen as a result of your keyword and term research. Using this information, you can create a conversion path that will get you to the desired outcome. In the next step, you’ll develop a strategy to close the deal.