Target text: How to manage the reader’s response

What is good text? To answer this question more accurately, let’s answer another one, namely the question of what a bad text is. Clearly a bad text is a text that leaves the person reading it indifferent, not prompting him to anything – either to action or to reflection. If we are talking about a good text, then we can conclude that a good text is a text that induces the reader to do something or to think about something.

If we are talking about texts for online resources related to a particular area of business, the primary task of the text – to create an attractive image for the resource where the text is placed and for the goods or services that this resource offers.

Texts placed on the Internet most often encourage targeted actions, which can be divided into five varieties.

Do something

This objective is the main one for online resources that promote some kind of business. The text in the test encourages the reader to do something may or may not contain a direct appeal (to buy, order), and may not contain a call as such, but the meaning of the text has a definite incentive to the reader. For example, the text may describe a product in a way that encourages the reader to buy it. The text may also contain a hint at the continuation of the topic, so that users will continue to visit the site to read new articles.

Invoke an emotion

Provoking the audience certain emotions – the task of any sales text and most informational texts. After all, at the heart of the vast majority of our actions are emotions. And often under the influence of emotions people decide to buy some kind of product or order some kind of service.

Therefore the task of the text – to cause the target audience is the emotions that will encourage people to use the product proposed by the online resource. However, it can not be overlooked that the strongest human emotions – negative. But in this case, the authors of the texts need to be very careful, because the negative emotions can direct people to a completely different path.

Learning new things

Texts that present useful information in an accessible form and that the reader didn’t know before are valued by all audiences. People eagerly retell what they learned, share interesting and informative texts in social networks, and therefore the advertising and sales segment in such texts is very effective. True, the author should not abuse this component, and it is best to be limited to non-obvious advertising without direct appeals.

Entertain the audience

Easy and creative entertainment texts enjoy steady success with any audience. Especially if the texts are written in a lively and humorous manner. In combination with such texts also works very well for the sales component. But, as in cognitive texts, it should not be intrusive.

It is also very important to understand what kind of entertaining texts is appropriate for the audience of a particular online resource. For example, somewhere humor “on the brink of a foul” may be received with approval, and somewhere – to be condemned.

Convince the reader of competence

This is especially important in sales texts when it is necessary to arouse the reader’s confidence. Then you can put the characteristics of a product or service in the mouth of an authoritative expert. Alternatively, the expert can tell you why you should buy a product or use a service.