Before you jump into that comfortable office chair with an extra-large coffee and begin typing up the perfect sales letter, you need to take a big step backwards. There are two extremely important things that need to be done before you can even begin to write a sales letter.
• First and foremost, you need to understand and profile your market. After all, when it comes to copywriting for cash, what use is the perfect sales letter without the perfect, targeted market?
• Second, you need to create the framework for your sales letter. This includes the basic structuring and formatting that will enhance the visual aspects of your letter.
Targeting your market and structuring your sales letter is just as important as finding the perfect words. It will ensure you are pitching to the right audience and adding professionalism to your copywriting.
So, hop off that comfortable chair, grab a pen, paper and your brainstorming cap, and let the target marketing begin!
Profiling Your Market
You may think that narrowing your target audience means you are narrowing your potential clients. After all, target marketing narrows the mainstream market and focuses on a smaller sector of potential clients.
Why would anyone want to limit their market to include less people? The larger the market is, the more sales you will produce, right?
Not necessarily.
Here’s why:
• Even though you are limiting your focus area in numbers, you are getting the clients who specifically want what you are selling or offering. This is often referred to as niche marketing where you focus on a certain niche and create products and services directed at this targeted audience.
• By narrowing your target market, you are able to save time, money, and efforts on marketing and copywriting. Focus on those clients interested in your product or service and don’t waste your time and money on the rest.
Here’s an example: Say you are targeting a large market of 200,000 people. If only 1 percent of people are actually interested in your product or service, you have only reached 2,000, but wasted a lot of marketing money in the process.
With target marketing, you only focus on a target audience of 20,000 people, all of which are interested. This increases your rate of sales to, let’s say, 30 percent, or 6,000 people. You are left with triple the sales and triple the profit.
Even though target marketing limits the number of people you are focusing your product on, it attracts more of the customers you want.
In your marketing analysis, and, later, in your sales letter, you need to show that you’ve done your homework, you’ve researched the audience, and you know how to connect to this specific market.
You may think target marketing is used only for your niche market, the people who are going to buy your product.
However, when it comes to copywriting your sales letter, you also need to take into consideration the clients who are reading it. This may include a business committee or a parent.
This means that you need to analyze both your potential niche market AND your clients who you are selling your copywriting pitch to.
In some cases, they will be the same. In other cases, they will not.
For example, if you are going to a large company to pitch a certain product to them, you need to analyze both your target audience and the members of the decision-making committee.
Or, if you are pitching a new range of children’s toys, you need to appeal to both the child and the parent who will be reading the sales letter and purchasing the products.
However, if you are pitching your sales letter to the general public, in say, a specific mail-delivered letter, you will need to analyze only your target market.
Before you begin writing your sales letter, try to understand your potential clients you are pitching your sales letter to.
Are they mostly hard-working, business-type males? Are they stay-at-home mothers? Are they women trying to lose weight? Are they low-income backpackers?
When it comes to profiling your market, you need to focus on three specific criteria:
- Demographics: Age, geographic location, gender, income, marital status. All of these are essential to learning the most about your target audience. The more specific, the better. All of these things will be directly related to your target marketing pitch.
- Lifestyle and Personality: You need to look at more than just a person’s statistics to really understand their wants and needs. This is where an analysis of lifestyle comes in. How does your target audience spend their free time? What are their hobbies, their interests? What are their spending habits? Are they crazy? Are they impulsive? Are they reasonable? Do they think with their hearts or their heads? Sometimes this can be hard to determine as you cannot physically get into your target audience’s head and see how they spend. However, focus groups are helpful. Interview potential customers to see how they work. For example, if you are targeting lower-income male sports fanatics, take a trip to the local university or college and talk to some of the varsity teams.
- Desires and Motivations: This is equally, if not more, important than demographics. Finding out what drives your potential customers is the secret to successful selling and copywriting. Play on their motivations and their desires. What gives them hope? What makes them happy? What makes them upset? What makes them want to reach out and take action? What do they need? What do they want? And, why? Ask yourself these questions, or, better yet, offer a focus group to find out firsthand. Before you can write your way to success, you need to understand what drives your clients and what makes them want to buy.
You need to know as much about your target audience as possible to ensure you can reach them in your copywriting.
To learn more on how to identify with your target market and run controlled experiments so that you can learn as much as you can about the members of that market, check out “Internet Marketing Research: How to Discover What Sells and What Doesn’t.”
Another great way to profile your market and find the right words for your sales letter is by asking yourself a few simple questions. So, grab a pen and paper and let the brainstorming begin:
WHO:
Who will see your sales letter? Stay-at-home Moms? A company committee?
Who will need your product?
Who will want your product?
Who will be able to afford your product?
WHAT:
What makes your product better than any others?
What makes your product stand out?
What kind of person would need this product?
What is the most important aspect or benefit of this product?
WHERE:
Where will you pitch your sales letter?
Where would your product come in handy? Around the house? At the gym?
WHY:
Why would anyone want your product?
Why is your product special?
Why is this product in demand? (Or is it?)
Why do you, personally, love this product?
Once you have your answers, you need to directly relate them into your sales pitch.
In fact, these answers will act as the basis of your sales letter.
Now that you have your profile market and the basic focus for your sales letter, you need to ensure your sales letter structure also surpasses the standards.
This is where creating the framework comes in.
