What in the world is a widget?

Yesterday, as I was watching television (which is a very rare occurrence), a public service announcement for National Parks Canada was aired. The 30-second "commercial" centered on how to protect oneself from dangerous animals often found in Canada's wilderness -- namely bears and wolves. The commercial particularly targeted youngsters, such as summer-camp kids.

What was interesting in this public service announcement was not so much what the narrator said, as how he said it. Specifically, he used a copywriting technique I refer to as "upwords." "Upwords" is an acronym I devised that stands for "Universal picture words or relatable, descriptive sentences."

Essentially, upwords are words, phrases, and expressions that help messages to be easily interpreted by their target audiences. Upwords include the use of examples, symbols, analogies, metaphors, picture words, and so on. Even jargon and colloquialisms are appropriate upwords if they are acceptable to, and used frequently by, a specific target audience.

With regard to the commercial mentioned above, the sentence that caught my attention was, "Be safe by staying away from animals and standing back at least three bus lengths." Note that the narrator didn't say "105 feet" (assuming that a bus is about 35 feet long). Instead, he used a visual equivalent -- an object easily recognized by children watching the announcement: a school bus.

A challenge for many webmasters, designers, and marketers is to ensure a site communicates effectively to its audience. Studies have proven that most websites are misunderstood, or partially understood, by their audiences.

When the Web was first created, the need to communicate in a language that the vast majority of people could understand was not important. In those days, using technical terminology, or "technolese," was commonplace since the Internet was mostly populated by programmers. Today, however, things have changed. (For more, read the article at http://successdoctor.com/articles/article59.htm.)

A while ago, I was at a local IBM Home Computing store buying a computer. Beside me happened to be someone shopping for her first system. I overheard the customer's questions and the sales clerk's explanations, and what struck me was that the shopper knew little, if anything, about computers. Apparently, she never touched a keyboard in her life. What's more, she really only wanted her new system for one thing: email.

For better or worse, this is the reality of today's Internet population. With computers becoming more affordable and the Internet more accessible, the growing online population now consists of market segments that would have never used computers otherwise. Many users are novices, and some are even computer- or Internet-illiterate.

Of course, even users who are technologically savvy can get confused by a poorly thought-out website. And few people will buy from a website that confuses them in the slightest. If you don't want to lose sales, you must think like your audience.

To be successful online, you must mold your message in a way that makes it easy for your audience to understand. Speak their language, in other words. For example, if you are trying to sell software to clients who have recently connected to the Internet, and your copy is laced with complex, technical jargon that only veteran surfers can understand, you will obviously do very poorly.

In order to use upwords effectively on your site, you must first develop a "perfect customer profile." As much as possible, discover and list the demographics, psychographics, geographics, and technographics of your market.

• Demographics are the basic characteristics of your market (or the largest segment of your market). Information such as age, gender, culture, industry, income level, marital status, and so on are all part of the mix.
  
  
• Psychographics include your market's behavioral qualities, such as purchase histories, buying patterns, trends, psychology, thought processes, interests and hobbies, associations to which your customers belong, etc.
  
  
• Geographics should include not only the locations in which your customers reside, but also the areas where they work, shop, etc.
  
  
• The term "technographics" is fairly new. Originally coined by Forrester Research, the term consists of your market's attitudes toward technology. In other words, technographics measure the inclination to adopt (or avoid) new technology such as computers and the Internet.
  

Researching these four categories will give you an excellent idea of who your target audience is. Once you've developed your perfect customer profile, it will then be easy for you to craft compelling copy by molding your message into one that your audience will quickly and fully understand.

Look at it this way. Words mean different things to different people. Consequently, your challenge is to choose those words that will help get your message across as effectively and succinctly as possible.

Remember: words are not the message -- they only communicate it. So, the manner in which you encode (i.e., or word) your message is absolutely critical. To explain, here's an illustration:

Sender >>> Encoding >>> Message >>> Decoding >>> Receiver

Your objective, therefore, is to encode the message in a way that will enable it to be decoded without losing meaning.

To that end, you must first know your "receiver" -- and if you've done your research, you do. Then, you must use the words that will help paint vivid pictures in his or her mind.

Why? Because people think in pictures -- not in words and certainly not in numbers. The mind hates confusion. It will naturally translate words into their visual equivalent.

For instance, if I told you to think of a garbage can, you're not going to think "G," "A," "R," "B," etc. Instead, your mind will automatically visualize some sort of garbage can. Similarly, a youngster understands the length of a school bus far more than he or she understands "105 feet."

So, regardless of what type of widget you sell, it must be explained in a way that is understood by the people you hope will buy it. If your market consists of artists, use art examples. If your market consists of managers, use business analogies. If your market consists of florists, use metaphors that florists can understand.

Let's expand on the latter with an example. Say, your site sells an email management software specifically geared toward florists. The copy might read as follows: "Email messages from your clients are like fresh-cut roses. They need to be handled promptly and efficiently. If not, clients can prick you and hurt your business -- or they can wither away, never to return."

Using metaphors is just one of many ways to apply upwords to your website copy. There are many more.

Granted, using upwords can be a challenge for the less confident writer. But by clearly defining your audience, you simplify the task of encoding your message by knowing, beforehand, how your audience will decode it.

Knowing how to reach your target audience begins with knowing who they are. The more you know, the more writing compelling copy that sells will be like "A walk in the park." "A piece of cake." Or "easy as pie ..."

... Get the picture?