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Posts Tagged ‘audience’

Time To Evolve How We Target Social Media?

10.09.07

How many times have you read something like this in a digital communications plan?

“One in three of our target audience is using Facebook. So, we recommend creating a Facebook page for this program.”

As social networks become more and more prevalent, we’re at the point now that almost every client brief appears to point, on its surface, to one of a few key networks. As a result, we’re seeing more and more programs based on “insights” like:

Only eight per cent of Canadians in the target demographic are inactive in social media (according to Forrester)
There are more Facebook accounts for Canadians aged 25-34 (according to Facebook’s ad creation tool) than there are Canadians in that age group
We need to reach our target market in the place they inhabit.
Therefore, we should create a Facebook page.

Right there, without any knowledge of the company, the product or the objectives and only minimal knowledge of the target audience, you’ve made a pretty standard case for a Facebook page. Trouble is, these insights are no longer particularly insightful. At this stage of the game, they’re akin to “2.6 million Canadians read the Globe and Mail. Therefore, we should do a traditional media campaign.”

This only leads to a plethora of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and the like – some of which are well targeted, but many of which are not. Let’s face it, most B2C clients are going to target people somewhere in the 18-55 age group. Using just a demographic rationale, you could propose similar social media campaigns for all of them.

I think it’s time to move beyond sheer demographics when we’re planning social media campaigns, and towards more sophisticated analysis. What about:

What are the company’s business and communications objectives?
What behaviour are you trying to motivate?
What are the norms within the different social networks? Do they fit with what you’re trying to achieve?
Would you be better served via mass reach, existing niche communities or your own hosted site?
Do the company’s culture and existing policies lend themselves to social media engagement?
What existing properties do we have that we could leverage?

Let’s move away from generic demographic analysis and towards more sophisticated, critical analysis. For sure, some people are already doing this, but I think we can work to raise the bar.

What do you think?

Posted in: social media, strategy

Tags: audience, social media, strategy

36Comments

Is The Customer The Target?

09.04.24

Every so often I read commentary in traditional and social media circles critiquing particular companies’ public relations efforts. The targeting of the effort is a common target for those pieces, with a common refrain being, “do they know where their customers are?”

Here’s something useful to remember: The customer isn’t always the immediate target.

Companies don’t necessarily look to communicate direct-to-consumer with every initiative. There are many viable approaches to outreach which, while they look at the end consumer down the road (or businesses in a b2b model), focus elsewhere with their tactics.

Here are a few of the potential top-level groups that companies may be focused-on outside of the end user.

Employees: Domino’s found out, to their cost, what happens when employees go rogue. They’re not alone. Last year, Burger King was forced to take action after an employee was videoed taking a bath in a restaurant sink.

These are extreme examples of idiots being idiots, but the fact is that your employees can be your best ambassadors or your worst enemy. Smart organizations communicate with them.

Stakeholder groups: My background over the last few years is in government communications. I know only too well the effect that stakeholder groups can have on an organization’s agenda. A supportive word from a third party is worth way more than ten of your own news releases. Meanwhile, a negative comment can completely derail your initiative.

Stakeholder groups are a critical piece of the corporate communications puzzle.

Thought leaders/influencers: If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Paul Gillin’s The New Influencers, Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion or any other book on this subject, you’ll be familiar with the concepts of connectors, influencers and so on.

They’re the people that everyone knows, who lead the way for others, and who people look to for advice on topics.

They’re NOT always the same thing as your customers.

There are plenty of fields where the influencers don’t share demographic characteristics with the target audience. Think: if you’re looking at outreach that seems to be targeted awkwardly, are they really targeting the people that the end audience looks to?

Government: Organizations will often engage in public-facing communications activities, where the target audience is really the government. Why? Because they want to stir-up public opinion, which has a habit of changing government positions in a way that organizational lobbying can struggle to do.

Don’t get me wrong – the end audience of communications activities is critical. In an economy like this, companies need to be ever-more focused on achieving business goals with their communications activities (and not just inflating their CEO’s ego). However, remember that the end-customer may not be the first target.

Next time you see a communications campaign or message that doesn’t seem right at first glance, ask yourself:

Who is this really targeting?

Posted in: communications, pr, public relations

Tags: audience, communications, government, influencer, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Gillin, Robert Cialdini, stakeholder, target

2Comments

Focus Or Fail

08.12.16

The ever-thought provoking David Armano wrote earlier this month about the “paradox of please,” where he clearly and simply made the case that businesses need to focus to be successful.

While Armano’s post primarily focused on focusing product and service design, the same principle applies to communications.

Few parts of a communications plan are more important than your initial analysis of the stakeholders involved and, later, the audiences you choose to target.

When I worked for the Ontario government, we had to constantly remember that although the government serves all of Ontario’s residents, every initiative had its own, more specific target. We couldn’t communicate to everyone all the time. Sometimes it was easy to define that audience, other times it was more difficult. Regardless, communications plans that set “the public” as their audience would get heavily edited and sent back.

Working agency-side, I’ve found this is one of the most important questions to ask your new clients early on. I’ve been blessed with some clients who know exactly who they’re after and even have detailed personas fleshed-out for those targets. I’ve also worked on others where that wasn’t as clear. I’ll give you one guess as to which ones were easier to work on.

If you cast your net too wide, you end up pleasing no-one – your messages will be too diluted by your desire to cover everyone. You’ll end up with bloated, ineffective babble that fails to hit any of the triggers for the people who make up your real audience.

Focus too narrowly and you miss the opportunity to communicate with important audiences – your messages will be highly effective for the narrow segment you’ve targeted, but ineffective for any others.

It’s easy to forget to focus. How do you keep yourself on track?

Posted in: public relations

Tags: audience, David Armano, focus, target

4Comments

How To Write A Good Communications Plan – Part 7 – Audiences

08.06.05

This is the seventh post in a series exploring how to write a good communications plan.

At this stage we’ve finished our analysis of the situation, set our objectives and decided on a strategy. Now it’s time to decide our audience – in other words, who we’re speaking to.

Audiences

Think back

Audience at a theatre It’s time to decide who you want to reach with your communications.

Analyze the key groups or people you want to reach and what their needs are. Which stakeholders are key to this initiative? Who else do you need to consider?

Remember to refer back to your objectives and your strategy. Are you looking to reach a few narrow groups or a broader selection?

Be thorough

Make sure there aren’t any gaps in your chosen audiences. What angles haven’t you thought of?

Think about why you’re considering each potential audience. Where do they stand on this issue? Are they so opposed that they’ll never be happy regardless of what you do (if so, maybe you should re-focus on the people who may be receptive to your actions)? How much do they know about this (that may affect your tactics later)?

You can draw your audience from a wide range of groups. Your stakeholder analysis is an easy place to start. Look back at what you came up with. Who are your targets within this?

Some other potential sources of audiences:

Opinion leaders
Professional/business groups
Governments (other jurisdictions if you’re working in the public sector)
Industry analysts
Your employees
Online audiences (bloggers, for example)
Media

Be precise

If you’re looking to speak to consumers (or, if you’re in the public sector, “the public”), do your utmost to break that down and identify specific niches. Whether that’s by demographics, by interest, by previous purchase habits or whatever means appropriate, never leave yourself with “the public” or “consumers” as an audience. It may not be easy but, hey, if it were easy they wouldn’t need us communicators, right?

Just as with “the public” or “consumers,” never use a general definition of “the media.” Break it down. Look back at your environmental scan (funny how this all fits together, eh? Almost as if people have thought it through) and see who has written about this in the past. Who is interested in this subject area? Not just publications, but individual journalists where possible (some publications, like the Economist, don’t identify their authors).

If you’re targeting bloggers, think carefully. Of course, you’ve already identified and engaged with the key bloggers in your industry, right? That means you also know who is interested in this particular topic and who is likely to be receptive to your approach. Don’t just blast your material out to every blogger you identify – just as you would with media, think about what they want, what their perspective is and whether you should even approach each of them. While positive reviews in the blogosphere can be a great thing, bloggers are far more likely to turn around and complain publicly if they don’t like your pitch than journalists are.

Think ahead

Throughout, consider whether you may be able to leverage the support of any of your audiences ahead of any potential announcement, in preparation for planning your tactics later.

Conclusion

Your audience selection is critical to the success of your communications plan. Gap-filled or imprecise audience selection leads to an unfocused, ineffective roll-out of your communications. Conversely, well-defined audiences let you craft your messages and tactics appropriately to achieve your objectives.

What have I missed here? How do you approach defining your audiences?

The “Communications Plan” Series

This is post number seven in a series of 13 posts exploring how to create a good communications plan. To read more of the series, check out a summary of the posts so far or pick from the list below: