A simple mindset shift to help you instantly connect with your audience
I spend a lot of time reviewing content in all its guises and find myself offering the same feedback time and time again, ‘write for your audience, not for yourself!’
When we write the focus can either be on ourselves (or the organisation we work for), or your audience — your readers, customers, users or visitors.
If the focus is on ourselves then our writing tends to speak to our problems, our aspirations and our needs.
However, if we turn our focus to our audience then our writing shifts to speak their problems, their aspirations, and their needs. This helps us connect more deeply with our audience by making them feel acknowledged, seen and heard. This is what makes our content relatable.
So what can you do to shift the focus of your writing to your audience? The answer is by making some small but powerful tweaks to how you write. The simplest way to do this is bt replacing ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘our’, or ‘us’ with ‘you’ and ‘your’. This makes your audience feel like your speaking directly to them and helps to create a warmer and more natural tone.
Here's an example where I've tweaked my writing from being focused on my business to being focused on my audience.
Copy Craft is my new step-by-step online training course where I teach people how to write in a way that’s clear, powerful and authentic.
Here the focus is clearly on me and what I do. Below I’ve tweaked the copy to be more audience focused:
Copy Craft is a step-by-step online training course that shows you how to write in a way that’s clear, powerful and authentically YOU!
See how the second version shifts the focus from myself to the reader? It’s a more empathic and human-centred approach to writing.
An easy way to start implementing this is by beginning with your headlines. These can help scaffold your writing by directing your focus back to your audience as you go.
By making this subtle, but powerful shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’ you will find yourself connecting in a much more authentic way with your audience. Being clear on where your focus is will also help you:
write more persuasively
write with more clarity and impact
write faster and with more ease (because you’re clear on your audience and their needs).
If you haven’t tried this approach before then try it with your next piece of writing and see how it feels. My bet is that your writing will flow more easily and feel more natural and conversational for your audience.
