Targeting and Copywriters

<img src="https://copywriterspodcast.com/images/banner/copywriterspodcast153.jpg" /> <br />The online marketing world has gone crazy with targeting.<br /> It’s great for all the media buyers and traffic managers, since they can get paid work out of it.<br /> Targeting… like Chicken Man of old-time radio, targeting — It’s everywhere!<br /> But what good does all this targeting do copywriters… and the marketers they work for?<br /> Today I’d like to look at targeting from a copywriter’s point of view. Not how to do targeting, but how to make the most out of what the media buyers and traffic managers deliver to you.<br /> At the core, copywriting is about writing precisely to your qualified prospect’s state of mind.<br /> Targeting is the way, unless you know each prospect personally, to find out as precisely as possible what your qualified prospect’s state of mind is.<br /> Let’s look at two types of targeting and figure out how each one is useful — or not useful — for different kinds of offers, and how you can use it:<br /> Traditional and Tuning-Fork Targeting<br /> Traditional 1: Demographics and Geographic (measuring prospects: age, number of kids, ZIP code, region of the country, net worth, number of guitars in the household)<br /> Traditional 2: Psychographics, which opens the passageway to Tuning-Fork Targeting (identifying what prospects feel and do)...<br /> Tuning Fork 1: Psychographics - Affinity<br /> - easiest<br /> - membership, interests, subscription<br /> - the problem with this is, what they like doesn’t tell you what they buy (except, maybe, other memberships or subscriptions)<br /> Tuning Fork 2: Values<br /> - a little harder to determine<br /> - religion, politics, other cultural and life choices<br /> - Only of limited use unless you are selling religion, politics, or a lifestyle product or service<br /> Tuning Fork 3: Behavior<br /> - This is the holy grail, but it’s hard to get this information from most targeting methods<br /> - However, two dependable sources of behavior are:<br /> 1. Pr