I recently attended Canada's Mobile and Social Media Conference (MoSo) in Saskatoon and I was fortunate to have been on the organizing committee since it gave me personal access to many of the speakers. After learning from them, watching their presentations, and reflecting on what makes a good presentation it drove home the point that knowing your audience is critical for successfully engaging them.
As a marketer I'm supposed to know the importance of market research, segmenting your market, and then targeting messages/products/services appropriately, but most businesses don't have the time or resources to carry out theses exercises. In most cases, businesses go with their gut or assumptions and use the "spray and pray" approach by sending out mass messages in the forms of email notifications, direct mail, print ads, or online banners. Then if it doesn't work the copy writers are blamed or the advertising channel is considered poor quality. The truth is, the failure is likely a result of the message not being appropriate for the audience.
Have you ever sent an email blast or postcard to your customer but then ignore those things yourself when you receive them? You're customers are likely doing the same thing. The secret to success is knowing what your customers are most likely to respond to and knowing how they like to interact. It's a matter of delivering the right message at the right time in the right place using the right methods. I know you're thinking that's a lot of "right" things that you need to get "right", but I've got a couple cool tools that will make this achievable online:
Forrester Technographics
Different demographics use the web differently. Some people like to primarily consume content, others prefer to create, while others may like to join or comment. To help you decipher which behaviors your audience prefers check out this neat little tool from Forrester Research - Simply choose age, country, and gender; It will give you an approximation of which behavioral categories your audience falls under. There is also a profile tool for business behaviors that operates similarly.
Online Consumer Technographics: http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html
Online Business Technographics: http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_b2b.html
Depending on the typical behaviors of your online audience you should adjust your approach accordingly. For instance, if your target audience are mainly "spectators" and "joiners" then you would want to make sure you were providing a lot of varied content in the form of blogs, video, pictures, and podcasts along with integrating social networking tools so that people could connect with their facebook or twitter. On the other hand, if you're audience are "creators" then providing them opportunities to upload videos, create content, and contribute to an online community would be best. In a nutshell, if you know your audience you know what they'll likely respond best to.
F-Score Personality Test
Before you can understand somebody else you may want to ask how well you know yourself? What aspects of your personality can you leverage to fascinate others? Everybody has something special about themselves and knowing how to leverage it can help with developing relationships and positioning yourself for success. Enter the F-Score Personality Test by Sally Hogshead. Yes, that's right, her last name is "Hogshead", and she developed a really cool tool to evaluate your fascination score. The tool evaluates your personality across seven attributes and provides a summary analysis. Think of it as a cross between Meyers-Briggs and Horoscopes.
{F} Score Personality Test: http://sallyhogshead.com/f-score-personality-test/
It would be really interesting to hear what you discover regarding both your customer profiles and personal F Score. Feel free to share your findings by writing a comment. Thanks for reading.
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