Master the Art of Knowing Your Audience

In my previous post, I talked about how as a freelance writer, you need to master the art of disappearing. You relinquish your distinctive voice in order to take on the voice of your client. After all, you don’t get paid to write in your style, you get paid to write for your client.

Still, even after you know your client’s goals, their history, their industry and have their voice, that isn’t enough. Sure, taking on their persona means that you can be a believable mouthpiece, but it doesn’t make what you have to say interesting or meaningful to the most important people of any freelance project: your audience (i.e. the customers).

If you want to earn your pay and bring business to your client, you have to be an effective communicator. And effective communication involves more than giving information (i.e. writing content) to the audience. You have to translate what you know about your client (their goals, styles, etc…) in a way that connects with the customers. And you can’t do that, unless you master this next tip.

Know your audience

Regardless of what project you’ve been commissioned to do (e.g. web content, a brochure, a ghost written article, etc….), you have to know your audience in order to translate the client’s message in a meaningful way to the audience. Communication happens when the speaker (i.e. you) conveys the message (i.e. what you’re working on for your client) in a way that is understandable, relatable, and relevant to your audience.Remember, it’s not the audience’s responsibility to figure out what we’re trying to say. The onus falls on us, the freelance writer, to clearly communicate the message.

We’ve all been victims of poor communication. High schools and colleges are filled with instructors who drone on and on about a subject and are never able to engage their students. They fail because they never make the ideas they are trying to teach relevant to the student’s lives. Companies are also filled with ineffective communicators. Think back to the jobs you held in your pre-freelancing days. At some point, did you ever sit in on a staff meeting where a lot was said yet nothing was communicated? In both situations, someone was talking and you may have been listening, but in reality, no communication was taking place. Rather than talking to you, they were talking at you.

The same thing happens when freelancers don’t take the time to get to know their audience. Here are a few factors to consider that will help you get to know your audience:

• Know your audience’s demographics. What part of the country do they live in? What’s their age group? What’s their socio-economic status? Different demographics have different values and attitudes. Baby Boomers won’t respond to a message the same way that Millennials will. If you write your content for everyone, you’ll reach no one. Targeted writing is effective writing.

• Know your audience’s language. What words, similes and metaphors do they use in their everyday lives? What imagery are they familiar with? How I write a marketing piece that’s directed to hip urbanites from Chicago is vastly different from a piece I would write for earthy Midwestern farmers. Whoever your audience is, you have to speak at their level and with their language when you’re writing content.

• Know what’s important to your audience. What does your audience care about? What are their needs? What are their goals? What are their desires? What do they want? When you know what makes your audience tick and your message addresses something that is important to them, you give them a reason to care about what you have to say.

In the end, your client’s customers shouldn’t see you when they read your content; they should see your client. And when they see your client’s message (i.e. the project you crafted for them), they see something that speaks directly to them and their needs. Your skill and professionalism as a writer shine through when you masterfully combine the art of disappearing and the art of knowing.

John Pajarillaga

John Pajarillaga runs a business as a freelance writer and editor. After years of reading bad content in everything from websites to brochures, he decided to make the world a better place by writing content that businesses could be proud of. Drop him an email or contact him on Twitter @jpaja.

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