Who are you writing for?

This one’s for all you copywriters in the audience. Come over to the corner with me for a second. don’t worry, no one else can hear.

Alright kids, I know. I know your plight. I know you wake up nights sweating, wondering how you can best serve your clients when your clients aren’t much interested in best serving themselves.

I know you worry about the age old question “Who are you writing for?”

Because here’s the problem. If you’ve spent any time as a wordslinger, you know that while you SHOULD only be thinking about what your target market is going to like and respond to, you ACTUALLY spend all your time thinking about what your CLIENT is going to like and respond to.

Because most clients–especially clients who don’t have any marketing experience–make the absolutely deadly mistake of thinking that what they like and what their target likes are the same thing.

Which is sort of like thinking everyone else likes pistachio and swedish fish ice cream just because you do.

It’s driven many a writer to commit ritual sepuku, slaving away on hard-working copy that pushes all the right buttons and uses all the best selling tricks only to have a client come back and say “Well, can we use optimize a few more times here? And I really don’t like the way you use “You” all over the place.”

So what do you do? How do you make sure you give your clients copy that’s actually going to work while still letting them feel like they’ve got a real hand in the copywriting process?

You get sneaky. You write the “First Draft of Over the Top Awesomeness.”

Now, this is a trick that should only be used in extreme circumstances. But if you’ve got a client you suspect is going to red-line your copy to death, and who thinks he’s the target market even when he obviously isn’t, you’ve got to write a first draft so far out there that he’s guaranteed to hate it. And I mean hate. You’ve got to get witty. You’ve got to get clever. You’ve got to steal whole passages from Finnegan’s Wake.

And then you send it off to the client.

And you wait.

And after all the comments come back, you go and write the copy you wanted to write in the first place. And this time? This time I’ll bet the client will be just thrilled, the target market will be all sorts of amped up and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you did your marketing best.

Happy Friday. Currently I’m slaving away on HWW #21, putting together a few proposals and setting up a brand new blog I’ll be sure to key you in on later.

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