Good Internet marketers understand. They need to know what their prospective customers want when they’re involved in the process of market research and product production. They find niches, figure out what the folks who populate those niches are jonesing for, and create resources to fill those needs.

Then, they go out and hire a copywriter to produce a sales page for the product.

Problem: The copywriter fails to understand the niche, its population and how they need to be approached. Instead of writing the right sales copy for the product and it’s intended market, they write the kind of sales copy they always write. There’s no flex, adjustment or product/market-specific creativity involved.

And that costs sales.

Two quick examples:

Example One: I’m an affiliate for a small-niche product. My efforts have consisted of writing a brief landing page and circulating about 10 articles after doing some keyword research. That little project consistently averages about one sale per day, and it’s been doing that for about five months. It’s not the kind of product or niche that’s going to buy me a new house, but it’s a cute little winner.

Notice that I said it’s been rolling along for five months. It’s been “in operation” for six. The first month featured a more “traditional” landing page. Flashier, prettier, heavy pre-sell, etc. It wasn’t converting.

This was a little project that I threw together one day without a great deal of deep thought. After looking at the landing page a month into operation, I realized that my message was wholly inconsistent in structure and content than what the target audience would probably want.

I scrapped the pretty little thing I had and wrote a brief five-paragraph letter–no header graphics, no bells, no whistles–that contained two uses of the affiliate link. Low-key, empathetic and understated. Boom. Sales started rolling in on the very same day.

My mistake? I slapped the whole thing together without really customizing the presentation of my message for the particular target audience. The format I used on the original landing page was good–I basically used a template that has done very well on a series of other projects–but it wasn’t right for that particular situation. It wasn’t until I decided to take this little marketing effort seriously and spent some time really thinking about it instead of just “doing it” that I got it right.

Now, I’m developing my own product for the same niche. I’ll make sure that my sales page reflects what I learned putting together a good pre-sell as an affiliate.

Example Two: Yesterday, I bought a product/service online within the IM niche. I knew what I wanted before I started shopping and I knew I had several options. I ended up buying the product with the ugliest sales page of the bunch. That’s right, the “better” copy didn’t do the trick on me.

What was it about the pitch for the product I purchased that convinced me to buy? It was short on telling me why I wanted the product. It didn’t hammer me with claims about how much money I could make. There was no extended “ironclad guarantee” story. It was all about features and nearly mute on benefits.

I bought because it told me exactly what I was getting and when I’d get it. The end. That’s what I needed.

The others sold me and sold me and sold me when I was already prepared to buy. Meanwhile, it was a pain in the ass to dig out the details from the sales pitch.

In both of those examples, the prettier pitch was bad news and the simple approach worked like crazy. That was because both products have something in common–the people visiting the sales pages are pre-sold on the product, in a general sense. They know that they want something to do a specific job. There’s very little likelihood that they’d bother visiting either site if they weren’t already aware of what they wanted and why.

Let’s say you sold pipe fittings to plumbers. Do you really think you’d improve your sales by trumpeting a headline like “They Laughed When I Said I’d Use The Best Pipe Fittings In The World! Now That I’m Making $250,000 A Year And Buying My Own Plumbing Company They All Want My Secret”?

Hell no. You’d want to focus on sizes, composition, delivery and price. Period. The plumber who stumbles onto your site wants to find freakin’ pipe fittings, he doesn’t need old Mr. Ogilvy to sit in his lap whispering sweet nothings into his ear.

That’s true of other products, too. Sometimes it’s all about hitting the right psychological hot buttons, creating the right atmosphere, and doing all of those other things that only great copy can do. Occasionally, you need to pull out the mallet and beat them over the head, sometimes you need to give them a soft hug and guide them gently toward your product. It can be about status, it can be all about creating cognitive dissonance and then promising calmness with the product. There are a billion different ways to sell.

The trick, however, is knowing which approach to take with the specific audience for the specific product. You can pull an old Gary Halbert letter out of your swipe file and twist it to fit whatever is in front of you. It might read well and it might look super-professional, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work.

There are more Internet copywriters out there today than ever. Too many of them, however, cut their teeth on one particular strong hype methodology and continue to apply that same technique to everything without sufficient consideration of who is going to see it and “where they’re at” with respect to the product.

I know for a fact that I couldn’t get the results I manage with that simple five-paragraph letter in other niches. I also know that the sales page that convinced me to buy that IM product yesterday wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of working with a more general opportunity-seeking audience. Both, however, work very well for their particular products. And that’s what counts.

If copy isn’t reflective of your market research and your understanding of the folks who populate the niche to which it’s targeted, it’s time to start over. Marketers work long and hard to find opportunities and to build the right products to take advantage of them. It’s a shame that so many of those efforts are strangled by one-size-fits-all, formulaic sales copy.