Write to a Person, Not a Persona

Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks: I am a C-level executive. They wake up tired. They worry about their kids. They hope the weird noise their car is making is not expensive to fix. They are people. And then they go to work. And when a sales email arrives, they do exactly what you do when a sales email arrives — they delete it. The fact that they have a title does not change this. The title is a job description. The person underneath it is still just a person.

How audience research makes copy worse

Audience research is useful. You should do it. But most people do it and then make a mistake: they write to the research instead of to the person. They read that their audience is C-level executives with time constraints and a focus on ROI, and they write stiff, formal copy about strategic value creation and optimized outcomes. That is what they think C-level executives want to read. What C-level executives actually want to read is the same thing everyone wants to read — something that is clear, direct, interesting, and written as if a human being wrote it for another human being. Read the research, understand the context, then forget the category and write to the person.

The demographic trap

When you write to a demographic, you write to an abstraction. When you write to a person, you write to someone. Those are different experiences for the reader. Copy written to an abstraction sounds like it was written to everyone, which means it feels like it was written to no one. Copy written to a person sounds like someone is actually talking to you. Nobody identifies with their demographic label. The CFO does not read your email and think: yes, this speaks to my needs as a chief financial officer. They think: this sounds like it was written by someone who has never met me. Or they think: wait, this person gets it. One of those gets deleted. The other gets read.

What people actually respond to

The best B2B copy I have ever seen says things like: “I know you are busy” rather than “C-level executives have time constraints.” It says: “This will help you sleep better” rather than “professionals value work-life balance.” It talks to the tired human being, not the demographic category. This is not pandering. It is precision. The tired human being is the actual audience. The category is just how you found them. Their life was full before you arrived. Once you have their attention, you are talking to a person. Write accordingly.

The test for whether you got it right

Read your copy out loud as if you are reading it to one specific person — someone you know, someone whose job resembles your buyer's, someone you could actually picture. Does it sound like something you would actually say to that person? Does it sound like something they would actually read? Or does it sound like a document that was approved by four people who were all trying not to offend anyone? If it sounds like the latter, you wrote to the demographic. Find the person in the message. If they are not there, put them there. Everything else follows from that.

The billion-dollar companies get this wrong too

This is not a startup problem. Some of the most stilted, formal, nobody-home B2B copy in the world comes from the largest companies on earth. They have brand guidelines and legal review and committees that approve messaging, and by the time the copy comes out the other side, it sounds like it was written by a policy document rather than a person. The executives at those companies delete generic sales emails just like everyone else. The person who sends them a message that sounds like a real person is the one who gets the reply. Company size and category prestige do not protect you from the basic rule: write to a person, not a persona.