5. Keep It Relevant

Making your copy interesting is all well and good, but you also have to remember that different things appeal to different people. So the first question you have to ask yourself with any copywriting project is: who am I writing for?

In virtually all assignments, you will find there are usually two or more distinct audiences. First there is the ultimate audience, the one your client is trying to reach. This may be consumers, business people or some sector of society; youth, for example, or professional women, or members of the press. If the ultimate audience is not clear from your client’s brief, then make sure you establish what it is before you get to work. And if you are not personally acquainted with the ultimate audience, find out as much as possible about them, both from your client and from other sources. You need to find out what drives these people and what messages they will respond to, so that your copy will grab their attention.

As well as being relevant to your ultimate audience in content, your copy needs to be relevant in tone. Youth audiences are unlikely to respond to corporate speak, for example. But beware of overdoing it if you are not familiar with the language of a particular group or you could end up alienating the audience you are trying to get through to. If in doubt, stick to simple, straightforward words and phrases as these make sense in any dialect.

Besides your ultimate audience (and there may be more than one of these), you also have to satisfy an immediate audience: your client. This means that your copy has to be consonant with your client’s organisation and take account of its style and approach to communications. Again, if these are not outlined in your brief, it is worth querying your client on what they would and would not like to see in your text. Remember, also, that the ultimate audience is likely to have certain expectations about how they will be spoken to by your client’s business.

It is probably obvious at this point that your immediate and ultimate audiences may have widely different expectations and requirements. In general, your job as a copywriter is to try as far as possible to steer your client towards using the language of the ultimate audience, as this is the approach that should achieve the best results.

However, you also need to be sensitive to your client’s idiosyncrasies, particularly if these are imposed by some higher authority. It is usually possible to come to some form of compromise, but if you cannot reconcile the two types of content and tone then you really have only two options: resign the work or accept the client’s point of view (with reservations, if necessary) and do it their way.

Which you choose is up to you but personally I favour the latter. You still get paid and many clients appreciate the effort that you put in on their behalf plus the fact that you understand the constraints they operate under.

A final point on how to keep your copy relevant to your readers: talk about them. When writing marketing copy, it is easy to say ‘we do this’, ‘we do that’. Your client’s readers, however, are in the main not interested in hearing about your client. So write text that says: ‘we’ll help you do this’, ‘you’ll do that’. As a basic rule of thumb, if your copy says ‘you’ more often than it says ‘we’, then you are talking in language that is likely to appeal to readers. Get into the habit of checking that this is always the case.