Lee Ash is a highly experienced conceptual thinker, designer and art director with 20 years in the marketing and brand-building business, working on major consumer and business campaigns. Lee is our go-to creative strategist and he recently took time out to pen a few words on why you need to think about the AUDIENCE before the CHANNEL you use to target them. Read Lee’s guest post below:
Putting the Cart Before the Horse
“I was recently approached by a company who wished to promote their brand. I’d been recommended to them as the person to contact.
After the introductions and pleasantries, they kicked off the conversation by saying “we need an email campaign”
When I asked them why, they said “Well, that’s what you have to do nowadays to market your brand isn’t it?”
At this point, instead of worrying about the channel I feel It’s important to ask a couple of different questions:
- What’s the business problem you need to solve?
- Who is your audience?
These questions give all the answers needed to start promoting the brand in a considered and specific manner. Every business has a problem to solve; Do you need to put more bums on seats? Do you need shift more products? Do you need to launch your brand?
Time to Find Your Audience
Once the business problem is uncovered then the audience can be discovered.
Very few brands are catch-all, and aim at everyone. We need to drill down and discover how the audience will respond and react to specific messages.
It’s one thing to know your audience but can you hand on heart say that you understand them? When you truly understand your audience you can then ‘speak’ to them. That’s when a brand affinity occurs – that’s when your audience know that you understand their needs and goals.
There are many ways to discover and understand your audience and with social media playing such a big part in our lives there has never been a better time.
- Listen to what your customers and potential customers are saying. What are the hot topics in the industry they operate in right now. What do they think? How do they talk? Which of these social channels seem to be favourable to them at the moment?
- You could create a survey to send to your customers – there are many great online forms now which are easy and won’t take a lot of time to fill in such as survey monkey or type form.
- Find someone in the industry who you feel is making a lot of noise at the moment – a potential ‘mover an shaker’, who can tell you what will be the next challenge for your customers. Listen to the way they speak – the words they use, it is important to tap into this language when marketing to your audience.
So which channel should we use right now?
Take a couple of clients that we’ve worked with:
First a football club. The audience here it could be argued come from all walks of life, backgrounds and cultures – but on match days they are united (pardon the pun!) They are passionate, excited, together and happy to show and shout about their allegiance. For this audience twitter, Instagram and Facebook work very well and generate great engagement.
Another client of ours in the medical industries would get very little traction with this form of engagement. Confidentiality is key so we looked at a much more tailored and personal approach when speaking to their prospective customers, and of course using a very different tone with the communications.
Because a particular channel may be the ‘latest thing’ it doesn’t make it the right one to use.
Concern yourself with what you need to achieve with the communications that you’re putting out and the voice you are speaking in and the correct channel will follow.
Horses for courses you could say!”
