Before writing anything, an article, an advert, an email, you need to know who you are writing for and cater to their specific needs.
Pen portraits are one way to get a handle on your target audience by creating a fictitious character to enable you to speak directly to them. The more fleshed out and based on reality this gestalt reader is the more effective the tactic will be.
To create this pen portrait you simply have to imagine who they are, what they are like and what drives them. Keep adding and moulding to the picture until you are happy that you can almost hear them speak to you. Anything you create afterwards can be held up to scrutiny by this imaginary friend.
Some things you might consider are:
- What are they called?
- Who do they think they are?
- Who are they really?
- Who do they want to be?
- Who do they like?
- Who don’t they like?
- Who is their peer group?
- Who do they not identify with?
- What are their beliefs?
- Where do they live?
- Where do they work?
- Where do they learn?
- Where do they want to be?
- What are their needs?
- How old are they?
- How youthful do they act?
- How conservative are they?
- What are their driving ambitions?
- What are their wants and needs?
- What are their pleasures?
- What are their pains?
- What do they love?
- What do they hate?
It’s all about empathy and serving the needs of your readers in the way they will most accept and benefit from. If we only ever do things how we would like and about things that interest us we can never grow into markets outside our own echo chamber.
Especially when writing commercially we do not always have the benefit of writing to people who are just like us. In these cases our creativity and imaginations are really put to the test and we almost must become chameleons. Pen portraits can help keep us on track.
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