It’s wild how you can hear the name “Karen,” and suddenly you are thinking of a middle aged woman who is bitter towards everyone, always frowning, and complaining at things that have absolutely no impact on anyone. This is largely due to the Karen phenomenon.
Now, imagine writing an ad specifically for Karen.
5-1-1: A minimal complaints hotline that informs authorities about matters you care about most. The next time you need immediate action because the kids working the lemonade stand at the neighborhood block party don’t have a permit, give us a call! Never be classified as “over-dramatic” when you call 911 with a “non-emergency situation.” Your lemonade stand crisis matters to us!
A common issue us copywriters have is casting too broad of a net with our target audience. Instead, you want to personalize your audience.
Why Personalization is Best:
You have greater chances of hitting your REAL target audience.
Think of it like casting a net into a sea full of a variety of fish versus baiting a fishing pole for the specific fish you want. Most business owners are extremely familiar with their target audience and have spent countless dollars investing in the specific ways their product or service appeals to their audience. Your words should do the same.
You can easily imagine the pain points of your target audience.
While you might be able to showcase features and benefits of the product or service you are writing for to generic audiences, writing without a personal buyer in mind will limit your knowledge of how to solve their problems. Thus, you will never appeal to the motivators that encourage purchasing.
Even if you are leaving out a different personality type within the same demographic, you are more likely to appeal to emotions by having a specific point of view.
Writing to a “middle aged mom” is different than writing to Karen, specifically. Even if the target middle aged mom is the most kind, smiley, grateful woman, you might still be missing her emotionally with generic terms. A personal point of view often evokes emotion, and even if that emotion is disgust towards the “Karen” archetype, you have still caught the attention of your audience and showcased the features of your product in a unique way.
4. Save time.
Because you are thinking of a person you know who is in the target audience, you will save yourself research time. You can easily consider the pain points of this person, as you’ve likely had conversations with them where they express their needs and interests. And if not, you can have one! So you can put more time into making the creativity of your writing come to life and generate more revenue, thus making you a valuable asset.
Strategies to Personalize:
Think of someone you know who fits the target audience. Then ask yourself, what are their pain points?
When I first hear of a product or service, I ask myself: Who do I know that would really benefit from this? So let’s use my friend for an example. He’s an introvert who loves the movies but hates going to the movie theater. When I wrote for an at home movie streaming service, I was easily able to think of the problems that the service solved because I can hear my friend complaining about the “overpriced movie snacks” and “ridiculously expensive tickets” in my head. And while neither of those were a part of the listed features, they most certainly benefit my friend, thus they benefit my copy, which, in turn, benefited the client who owned the streaming service.
Create a buyer persona. Free buyer persona website.
There are plenty of free buyer persona tools out there. My personal favorite is Hubspot’s as it walks you through each piece of information you may want to consider when creating a target buyer, but it also asks you to personalize your buyer with a name and picture.
Remember, to personalize your audience in your copy. And if you can’t remember that… just remember: write to Karen!