The Right Voice
What is the Right Voice For You?
By Bob McElwain
Note: Bob McElwain ran his highly successful Sites Tips and Tricks website for many years. When he closed the site to pursue other activities, he granted permission to reprint his articles. Some are very outdated now, but there are so many gems of knowledge that we decided to publish the enitre series on Smart Web Center, just as they were originally published.
There has been a major change in the American social structure. For the first time, many older citizens have significant discretionary income. Among younger people with children, the mode now is both parents working. Many couples have very little discretionary income.
Different Folks Need Different Strokes
You simply can not talk the same way to Xers and Senior Citizens. It won’t work because the value structures differ between these groups. And so do their attitudes. More important, they respond differently to a given stimulus.
For the most part, buy decisions are made emotionally, then justified later with “reason.” On a website the emotional response that triggers the buy decision comes from what is said in the sales presentation.
This means you must know precisely who you are talking to. It means understanding their values, attitudes, and goals. And it means understanding what motivates them to buy.
Voice Matters
Grab a Western novel, a thriller, a mystery, and maybe a tale of romance. Read a bit in each. Writers speak about voice, and struggle to get it right in all of their work.
Voice is a casual term that includes style, imagery, and emotional triggers effective with the reader. It also includes selection of vocabulary, and such simple things as sentence length. In short, anything that helps project a specific tone or feeling is part of the voice that produced it.
As suggested above, the voice appropriate for Xers is inappropriate for Seniors. And conversely.
Off-Target Input Can Mislead
Input from off-target visitors may distract you. It’s possible given sufficient input of this sort, you may be persuaded to introduce a new product to take advantage of apparent interest. In doing so, however, you have broadened your focus, rather than narrowing it. This is always the wrong thing to do.
What’s more, the off-target product will strike targeted visitors as being off key in some way, if not in fact negatively. In the end, you are likely to drive away more targeted traffic, than you are able to generate with the off-target product.
An Aside: If you stumble across something that seems of interest to a significant off-target group, rather than weakening an existing site, consider building another which can be totally targeted to this newly defined group.
A Target Within A Target
Suppose you have decided to target Seniors. And you know enough of their convictions and motivations to be effective in talking with them. That is, you can relate to them in an appropriate voice. An additional step can be helpful.
Define a subset of this group and thus narrow your target even further. Then adjust your manner of speaking accordingly. While you don’t mind if others listen in, you write to and for only those within your target. You use a voice specific to this narrowly targeted subset.
For example, among seniors there are those who graduated from college. Others have educated themselves. Many have been locked into the business world as owners, managers, or employees. And still others, never held a high paying job. Further, to many women, family is all that ever mattered.
If you can define a subset of Seniors, the proper voice may be quite different from what is needed for a different set. Adjust accordingly.
Xers Versus Seniors
The more profitable market may be Seniors. However, if you are an Xer, it may be best to ignore this group and target a subset of Xers. Why? Because you hold their values and attitudes. It will be much easier for you to find the right voice with which to relate to your target. Seniors, on the other hand, are likely to ignore you, unless you can adapt their values and attitudes, and thus a voice appropriate to them.
Direct your newsletter, site content, and sales presentations as specifically as possible to your target. Continually seek to narrow this target even further. That some off-target visitors may buy, is a bonus. But it in no way suggests broadening your target to include them. Or changing the voice.
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