How to Tailor Your Copy for Different Audiences

When it comes to creating marketing assets and designing campaigns that will deliver strong returns, there are many things for businesses to think about.

One of the most important priorities of all is creating content that will make an impression on different target audiences. This is particularly important in your written content, which will need to be engaging and relevant if you want people to take the time to read it.

You should therefore be thinking about the most effective ways to tailor your copy to resonate with the specific audiences you’re targeting.

1. Know your audience

Knowing your audience is extremely important and highly valuable in all areas of marketing. Where written content is concerned, having a strong sense of familiarity with your various target markets is essential to crafting and tailoring copy that will achieve the desired results.

Developing a strong understanding of your audience is not only about knowing who they are (their typical age, profession, interests, motivations and so on), but also their reasons for reading your content and what they hope to get from it. Building up this clear picture will help to inform your copy and ensure it interests readers by offering solutions to their problems.

So what can you do to improve your audience knowledge? Firstly, it’s vital to dedicate adequate time to research, with a focus on the demographics that are most relevant for your business.

Other methods that can prove effective include:

• Creating detailed buyer personas
• Looking at what your competitors are doing
• Getting feedback and guidance from existing customers
• Monitoring discussion on social media and online engagement platforms

2. Give the reader something of value

Once you feel confident that you have a clear picture and a strong understanding of your target audiences, you can concentrate on tailoring your copy so it’s genuinely valuable and beneficial for them.

Before writing any piece of content - and during the production process as a whole - repeatedly ask the following questions: Why should someone read this, and what will they get out of it?

Maintaining this sharp focus on what is important to your customers and how you can help them achieve their objectives will help to ensure that your copy is always interesting and relevant.

Ensure you avoid focusing excessively on your company and the value of its various products and services. People have little interest in reading copy that feels like one long advert.

While it might be tempting to incorporate some sales content into your writing, the real advantages of well-crafted, relevant copy are audience engagement and brand awareness, which should naturally lead to revenue generation.

3. Keep it structured

Using a clear, detailed structure is one of the most dependable ways of ensuring any piece of writing you produce is coherent, compelling and makes an impact on whatever audience you’re targeting.

As part of the planning process, you should devise a structure that helps you to cover all your key points while keeping your written content concise and readable. This will minimize the risk of people losing interest or wondering exactly what point you’re trying to make.

The exact nature of the structure you decide to use will depend on the specific audience and the information in your buyer personas. If your prospective customers are likely to be put off by large chunks of text full of jargon, use a structure that will keep your writing tight and easily accessible.

Finding the most appropriate structure for particular audiences and sticking to it will help to ensure your copy captures people’s interest and drives engagement.

4. Get into the right mindset

One of the strongest strategies that can help you tailor your content to certain audiences is getting into the appropriate mindset and trying to think how your customers think.

Put yourself in your target buyer’s position and imagine that you’re reading the copy for the first time from their perspective. How can you tailor it to have a more immediate and powerful impact? What are the most effective changes you can make to deliver more value for the reader?

There are various techniques that can help you change your mindset and take a different approach to your writing. Look for another piece of content that you consider effective or successful and take inspiration from it. Reading about current trends and challenges in your target audience’s industry can also help you get into the right headspace.

By combining these different methods and strategies, your business can boost the effectiveness of its marketing and realize the full potential of written content to engage customers.

5. Spy on your competitors

Keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing plays a key role in any content marketing strategy. You can’t always be the first to come up with great ideas for tailoring copy to different audiences, and there’s no harm in taking inspiration from what other companies are doing.

Routinely visiting your competitor’s websites and social media pages is a great way to stay on top of current trends and spot content gaps that you can fill. Knowing what brands with similar offerings are doing to engage their audiences can also help you to find areas to differentiate yourself and stand out.

There are plenty of tools available for observing the competition, such as Buzzsumo and Ahrefs, but you don’t necessarily have to invest in software for this.

6. Ensure your landing pages are dynamic

Landing pages should reflect who your customers are and where they exist online. Each one should meet the needs and interests of the buyer personas you’re trying to target.

To make certain your landing pages are doing their job effectively they need to be dynamic. This means that they adapt to user behavior and ensure that when a customer clicks one of your links, they find what they’re looking for immediately.

You don’t need to create content from scratch in order to reach different marketing segments. Instead, make small tweaks by tailoring aspects of your landing pages to cater to different consumers.

Here are some optimization tips to make certain that your landing pages are dynamic and targeting the right visitors.

• Ensure your headlines are informative and straightforward, featuring dynamic keywords that relate to the ad copy.
• The body copy should also feature more instances of the dynamic search term linking the user intent to your landing page.
• Call-to-action (CTA) buttons are essential and can be personalized for different messages or offers depending on the user and should direct them to the next step.
• Replace images based on the dynamic search term so that different users see distinct imagery when they land on the page. This helps to improve relevancy.
• Localized information can help to target customers in a specific location. This can increase the likelihood of the visitor taking the next step.

7. Personalization is your friend

Personalization is key to ensuring your message is seen and received by your target audience. According to Statista, 90% of US consumers find marketing personalization very or somewhat appealing. Alternative findings from SmarterHQ discovered that 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.

Make sure your website is highly personalized with your target customers in mind. The design and layout of your website can play a huge role in attracting consumers to your website and reducing the likelihood that they’ll abandon their shopping carts once there.

Consider the customer’s journey and intent. Guarantee that the message you’re trying to communicate resonates with their needs and provides value in the form of entertainment, offers or a solution to their pain points.

To effectively personalize copy for different audiences, take a look at the data you have collected about your customers. Armed with this, you can outline buyer personas, segment audiences and create tailored content. But the personalized experience shouldn’t stop there - be certain that your website exposes different customers to different content, offers and messaging to appeal to them directly.

8. Tailor content to each social media platform

Not all social media platforms are equal. Although most people have accounts on more than one social network, each one attracts a certain type of visitor. It’s important to understand the differences between platforms and to keep up with trends shaping how users interact with them.

For instance, it’s common knowledge that Facebook is the most widely used social network. However, the average age of a Facebook user is 40.5 years old, so it isn’t the best avenue for reaching a millennial or Gen Z audience. LinkedIn is a professional networking site, which differentiates its audience and the type of content they look for from sites like Instagram and TikTok.

It’s important to have a grasp of each platform, the buyer personas you want to reach and which type of content is most effective.

For example, Instagram and TikTok drive most engagement through video content in the form of reels and stories. Twitter favors short-form content used to share news, updates and brand interactions. Posts shared on Facebook should be engaging, and can use text, images, video, polls and more. Your LinkedIn content should be relevant to your business and is a valuable B2B marketing tool.

New platforms are always in development, so it’s important to stay on top of new trends in the social media world. Moreover, be sure that whatever content you share aligns with your brand identity and voice.

Before you can start developing marketing copy and tailoring your content to different audiences, it’s important to know who exactly you want to reach in the first place. Download our buyer persona checklist and start getting to know your customers and what makes them tick.