Trying to Reach Young Professionals? Writing Tips You Can't Ignore

Trying to Reach Young Professionals? Writing Tips You Can't Ignore,

“We want to attract a younger audience.”

A few months ago, I heard those words from a potential client.

While confident in my writing skills and ability to adapt to different audiences, I felt I could benefit from researching what young professional audiences read.

Maybe I used the wrong search terms. Maybe people keep their secrets on the topic locked up. Whatever the reason, an hour of Google searches turned up almost nothing.

Here’s the sum of what I found:

An article on how to write Young Adult fiction

An article written TO young professionals

The few other results were in the same vein or even further off-topic.

I gleaned what I could adapt to a business audience from the first article. I ran the second article through my editing software and analyzed it for insights. Over the next few weeks, I broached the subject with three people: my ghostwriting mentor and two young businesspeople.

Then in the spirit of the Little Red Hen, I decided to write the article myself.

How to Write for a Young Professional Audience

Based on the research, and advice I got, here’s what I learned:

Keep it Short.

Attention spans continue to diminish. Long blocks of text make the modern reader’s eyes glaze. To keep people scrolling down your page, your writing should look easy to skim.

How do you manage that?

Blog posts. Keep these between 600-800 words.

Break text up. Your paragraphs should have no more than 3-5 sentences. Paragraphs of 1-3 sentences are even better! And single sentence “paragraphs” pack the punch of a one-liner and make your writing easier to digest.

Subheadings and highlighted quotes. This helps break your writing into chunks. Your audience will feel that they can pick up your main points without reading too much.

Narrow Your Focus

This goes back to the short attention span issue.

Long articles that cover a broad subject are out. Young people prefer short posts that define a narrow topic or explain a specific process.

What do I mean?

Let’s say you’ve accumulated a lot of insight on the importance of mental health in the workplace. You want to share your wisdom. But “mental health in the workplace” is a pretty broad topic. You’d do better to break it down into smaller posts or articles.

For example, you could do posts on

How to listen to and understand your colleagues better

The importance of setting boundaries at work

Dealing with toxic management practices

Then provide links in each post to other of your relevant posts. See how that works?

If you try to cover everything at once, the long scrollbar to the right of your article will discourage potential readers. A series of short posts that link together, though? They’ll spend the same amount of time on your material, but they’ll do it in bite-size chunks.

Be Humble

It doesn’t matter how much experience has taught you.

People won’t listen if you talk down to them. Of course, speak what you know with confidence, but remember what it was like to be in your ideal reader’s shoes? Avoid a “kids these days” attitude. Acknowledge your audience’s intelligence and sophistication.

On that note, it’s good to avoid extremes, too. What do I mean?

Take the news. A young businessperson told me that she avoids major news networks such as Fox and CNN. In her words, those networks “cater to extreme viewpoints” with an eye to strengthening “team loyalties.” She subscribes to more neutral news sources.

To apply this to a professional setting, be careful about speaking absolutes.

This goes back to humility.

Yes, you may have accumulated a lot of great knowledge that really works—for you. But others may have taken a different route to success. So if you act like you have all the answers, you'll lose credibility!

Real-Life Example

Now let's get back to the article addressed to young professionals I analyzed. See how it stacks up! (Note: this was a “how-to” article formatted as a numbered list.)

If you’d like more writing tips, reach out! I’ll be happy to send you my blog cheat sheet.