The online marketing world has gone crazy with targeting.
It’s great for all the media buyers and traffic managers, since they can get paid work out of it.
Targeting… like Chicken Man of old-time radio, targeting — It’s everywhere!
But what good does all this targeting do copywriters… and the marketers they work for?
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.
At the core, copywriting is about writing precisely to your qualified prospect’s state of mind.
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.
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:
Traditional and Tuning-Fork Targeting
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)
Traditional 2: Psychographics, which opens the passageway to Tuning-Fork Targeting (identifying what prospects feel and do)...
Tuning Fork 1: Psychographics - Affinity
- easiest
- membership, interests, subscription
- the problem with this is, what they like doesn’t tell you what they buy (except, maybe, other memberships or subscriptions)
Tuning Fork 2: Values
- a little harder to determine
- religion, politics, other cultural and life choices
- Only of limited use unless you are selling religion, politics, or a lifestyle product or service
Tuning Fork 3: Behavior
- This is the holy grail, but it’s hard to get this information from most targeting methods
- However, two dependable sources of behavior are:
1. Previous buyers (buyer lists, endorsed mailings)
2. Retargeting (if they keep clicking on an ad after they know what you’re selling, the clicking behavior is valuable targeting information)
In conclusion...
From a copywriter’s point of view, the best targeting is information that can predict how likely it is for the prospect to buy.

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Targeting and Copywriters

Copywriters Podcast