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If you’re in the IT business, in particular, that’s an important question.

Most marketers are keen to profile their prospects. For some products and services, these may be ‘people with a large lawn’, ‘married couples over retirement age’ or ‘students living away from home’.

What about your targets? Perhaps ‘businesses running Microsoft Exchange’, ‘people running an e-commerce Web site that require more advanced visitor analysis’ or ‘telcos offering an increasing diversity of services’. In each case, you almost certainly have more than one type of person to talk to within your target groups – the techies and the business people. Those who bite first, and those who control the budget!

Be careful to say the right things to the right people

Whoever you’re talking to, they need to be excited by your copy – as someone in the advertising business once said, said ‘no-one was ever bored into buying anything’. And different people are respond to different things. Broadly, you should talk technology and technology benefits to technical people, and business benefits to the budget holders.

Look at it this way

You need to really put yourself in their shoes and understand what matters to them. As a contact of mine would say – where’s the pain? What are the pressures on the enterprise, department or even the marketplace as a whole?

Can you present a persuasive Return On Investment? Can you show how your product or service removes the pain?

It’s all about identifying with your audience.

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A version of this piece appeared on Ecademy today.

Thanks to Paul Silver for leading me through what feels like a maze of HTML and PHP.

There is a certain amount of satisfaction in hacking around these pages with just a text editor – I feel a purchase of Note Tab Pro coming on – when you’re a writer of words not code.

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I’m a bit fanatical about coffee and tea.

Along with a couple of friends and acquaintances, I’m forever on the trail of the perfect dense, syrupy, short expresso. That’s cool. Coffee is a brilliant part of Lifestyle with a capital ‘L’.

My tea fixation places me somewhere amongst those who choose to fart in enclosed public spaces. You see, I insist on having leaf tea. Now, that just isn’t cool.

Have you tried to buy leaf tea in a supermarket? There’s about a shelf and a half at floor level, if you’re lucky – and you know the significance of the positioning? Yep. If it ain’t at eye level, the product is marginal, at best.

None of the supermarkets are stocking my favourite Ridgways Organic tea any more – except in those dreadful teabag things that make the brew taste like cardboard. The range (I shan’t honour the supermarkets with the word ‘choice’), in most places, is PG Tips, supermarket own brand and Twinings.

And now Twinings are losing the plot. Not only are they getting Stephen Fry to pitch us the benefits of Builders’ Tea Teabags (or whatever it’s called) on TV, but along with the box redesign, the loose tea is now in a plastic inner bag, not the metallised (or was it waxed?) one they had previously. Whatever it was, it jarred.

This may be akin to the wine buff’s revulsion at plastic corks and screw tops, but I’m left feeling that the experience of getting some nice tea has been devalued. And, to give this piece a proper marketing focus, I think Twinings are probably misunderstanding the people who buy their leaf tea.

People who care enough to mess about with with leaf tea almost certainly need to be engaged with, flattered, understood. Or we will go off and find a specialist outlet that sells loose tea.

End of market?