Audience
With some media, you can be sure who your audience is: think of a publicist with a clear idea of what sort of person or company requests his brochures. But with the internet, your audience is vast and varied.
Even on the web, you don’t need to talk to everyone. Your audience is the group of people which you seek to address and influence.
Considering their:
- Typical Age
- Gender Mix and
- Social Profile: their backgrounds, wealth, education and so on
...is a start.
As you begin to hone your message for the people you seek to address, consider also:
- What they’re looking for
- What will appeal to them about your proposition or argument
- What they know, or think they know
- What they don’t know, or fear
Your Proposition
Make sure your proposition is clear: state it at the earliest opportunity and don’t hold back from repeating it.
Consider your proposition from your reader’s point of view: how will it appeal to, help or satisfy your target audience or audiences? Make it easy for the reader to serve himself. It should be clear from the front page of any web site where to click in order to buy, browse, find information or contact the site’s authors.
Who’s looking in ?
Who is it that’ll be landing on your page, and what do they expect?
If you’re selling car parts or ink cartridges, most of what matters to the person viewing your site is Availability and Price. Ease of use will be all-important, and your words won’t be picked over for detail.
But if you’re offering services at the higher end of a market — bespoke kitchens, for example — then you’ll be talking to wealthy and probably well-educated people who will balk at badly thought-out text. It’s about attention to detail and simply being right. The idea will go: “If they can’t be bothered enough with detail to check spelling, why would I trust them with my granite worktops ?” Illogical, perhaps, but human nature.
Anything you’re selling to the upper end of the market needs to be supported by collateral that makes potential customers see that good quality and attention to detail pervade all that you do. This makes heeding the advice on these pages even more important in industries like:
- Finance
- Personal Services
- Creative ... and so on
Would you invest your fortune through a company that boldly shouted:
- We’re morgage experts
- We understand trust and what its worth.
- A home for you’re rainy day money. (presumably wet notes)
... or anything else so palpably sloppy ?
No. Neither would we.
And we didn’t make these up. They didn’t come from any of our customers, either: we never quote from, or identify, our customers.
Knowing and Not Knowing
Make sure you are careful with any jargon that you use. That doesn’t mean there is no place for specialist language. If you are addressing people who well understand your subject, you can safely use technical terms and other words that only specialists will understand. But be careful of alienating people on the margins of your audience.
Often, the most common-place things that people deal with assume a complex language of their own, simply because the common usage of a word isn’t precise enough for the specialist.
Take the words ‘soil’ and ‘computer’. A horticulturalist will seldom use the former; someone who works with them will seldom use the term ‘computers’. That’s because to a nurseryman, ‘soil’ is just one sort of ‘growing medium’ and that’s the term he’ll be happiest with. Only that term encompasses loam, vermiculite, grit and so on.
Someone working in information technology may regard the word ‘computer’ as similarly imprecise: he may prefer to talk about a mainframe, a lap-top, ‘the processor’ or just ‘the box’. All these terms have technical, nuanced meanings.
It’s important to consider how your audience will respond to the way you use specialist terms. The words may have acquired local or hybrid meanings, and that could lead to confusion.
As a general rule, the simplest language is the clearest, and if you can strip out jargon and words with ambiguous or local meanings, then do so. Only use jargon if you are exclusively addressing experts and you can be sure that they will know exactly what you mean.