Are you writing for audiences? Don’t.

As marketers, we have more and more sophisticated ways of zeroing in on our audiences. We can track the activity of not just cohorts, but in many cases individuals.

And while it might seem to empower us, technologically speaking, we’ve outkicked our coverage. Because the fact is, we can’t (yet!) build a fits-like-a-glove piece of content for everyone. So what do we do instead? We take what we’ve learned and gather those individuals into personas: Generic agglomerations of meticulously-scraped data and ethnographic hearsay.

And we do our best to make those personas real. We situate them in a city, park an appropriate car in their virtual garage, schedule their weekends and stock their fridges. We give them modern sounding, unisex names. And paste all these theoretical habits and proclivities onto some beatific royalty-free image taped to a conference room wall.

Detail and specificity inspire

As a marketing discipline, that’s fine. Probably even necessary. But when it comes to creative inspiration, personas are no substitute for the real thing.

Here’s an exercise: Imagine Romeo standing in the garden, looking up at yonder window, glimpsing the breaking light that is his beloved. But instead of his fair maiden, there’s an easel with a photogenic if non-descript brunette affixed to a foamboard: “Juliet” Age: 17 Hometown: Verona Likes: Bad Boys.”

If that’s too much of a stretch, think of your own first love. Or your child or your most cherished friend. Imagine writing them a letter. How would such a letter have differed if you’d instead been writing to a proxy for them? To a persona.

A lot less detail. A lot less heart. A lot less meaning.

And how would a letter penned to a proxy feel to a person?

Less than inspiring.

So what am I arguing for? After all, you can’t write personalized content at scale. Which makes personas the next best thing, right?

To borrow a phrase from the improv world, “Yes, and…”

Introducing…the ideal reader

Here’s where Stephen King comes in. You see King doesn’t write for something as two-dimensional and denatured as an audience. And he doesn’t write to a persona. Instead, he writes to what he calls an “ideal reader”.

According to King, “I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, ‘I wonder what she will think when she reads this part?’”

King’s ideal reader is his wife Tabitha, herself a novelist. So when King is at a narrative fork in the road, he has a tangible, flesh-and-blood target to help guide his choices. When he was envisioning the warden throwing a stone through the Raquel Welch poster in Andy Dufresne’s Shawshank cell, Tabitha’s was the surprised and delighted face in his mind’s eye.

As marketers trying to sharpen our messages, we would benefit from the equivalent of an ideal reader. Call her our ideal listener or viewer or clicker or, yes, reader. An actual customer or client – current or prospective – who will be receiving our messaging. At least one for every persona. So that when we sit down to choose a word or an image, to craft a subject line or build a slide, we’re not writing to a cut-out in the conference room but to an actual “Enthusiast” in Evanston or a “Skeptic” in Scottsdale.

You’ll need to leave the office

By all means do your audience analysis and create your personas. But then go out in the world and find the living, breathing embodiments of them.

Easy enough, right? Except many of us have forgotten how to pull off the “go out into the world” part. And it’s difficult to meet our ideal viewer/listener/clicker/reader from the least cluttered corners of our bedrooms.

But they’re out there.

In some industries, you’ll have sales teams who can facilitate introductions to customers. You should take them up on that. And marketing leaders should support those efforts, impressing upon their sales brethren the importance of firsthand customer knowledge.

But if no such channels exist, do your own leg work. Find them in offices and grocery stores; at the dog park or at pre-school pickup. Hear the words they speak and the ones they avoid. Sense their body language. Learn what’s actually stocked in their pantries and parked in their garages.

Among some more introverted creative types, this can feel dauting. But the payoff of firsthand interaction and observation is worth it.

After all, it’s important to note that Romeo could never have said “O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!” if he hadn’t been there in the garden to “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!”