by Alicia Solanki
Framing consumers within culture and behavioural shifts allows brands to develop campaigns based on real-time data, avoiding outdated demographic insights and enabling more powerful storytelling.
You’ll learn:
• How to better define target audiences using real-time data
• Why testing on tribes matters
• How to create more effective campaigns and reduce wasteful marketing
Audiences, audiences, audiences.
It’s definitely on the PR bingo sheet. A word that’s banded around like it’s going out of fashion. But what still surprises me, even after a decade in this business, is how few people really understand the intricacies of what we mean by ‘audiences.’
We’ve all been there…the long-awaited client brief that pings into our inbox. We open it with much trepidation, excitement, fear even, that god forbid, the deadline for response will be in 48 hours. The brief seems straightforward until we get to the section marked ‘target audience.’ That’s where I usually weep.
More often than not, it’s likely to say the words ‘Gen Z’ or ‘female millennial’ or…yes…even the word ‘everyone’.
Now, unless a client’s budget is infinite, going after ‘everyone’ is not only unrealistic, but it misses the point.
It’s like someone taking aim at a target board and when asking where the bullseye is, being told, ‘oh, it’s anywhere really.’ The clue is in the word ‘target’. We have to be much more laser focused, less lazy and understand that this is only going to become more important as people seek to define themselves beyond their age, ethnicity, occupation or postcode.
I am me
Being under lockdown has been a transformative period for so many people. But not just at an individual level. We’ve seen seismic shifts in public opinion connected to issues we may have preferred to sweep under the proverbial carpet.
The world has rallied. People have united across traditional audience lines and formed new groups based on shared views, shared cultures (and I don’t mean religious necessarily) and shared experiences.
We’ve seen people take a stand. We’ve seen people take the knee. Assert ‘I am me’ and break the shackles of the traditional audience banding which society, or just being of a certain age or gender, has imposed upon them.
There are so many lessons to be learnt here for PR professionals as we charge into the future:
I. Get down with cultural drivers and don’t be too quick to put your target audiences in boxes. Yes, it may feel neater to approach it in this way, but humans are individual, colourful beings and frankly, there is a huge difference between a millennial born in 1981 and one born in 1995!
II. Go after the ‘first time mum’ rather than ‘parents.’ You’ll not only get a more acute focus on your bullseye, but it will cut out wastage from a media point of view and tighten the screws around your talent recommendations.
III. Don’t just rely on what the data tells you. Speak to people. Assemble a network of tribes around your business or agency who can add a human lens to the cultural insights you may have gleaned about specific audiences. Computers are smart, but people are smarter.
Digital crumbs
Identifying groups of people horizontally across passion points and less so vertically based on strict demographics is only possible if we get down and dirty with data.
Consumers leave digital crumbs wherever they go online as part of their sharing and web browsing patterns – their favourite place to eat, best online retailers, the e-book genres they frequently go after. These digital crumbs offer huge clues as to how we might hone our language and vernacular to best appeal to a specific audience segment.
In many ways, I see this as the unearthing of the consumer truth in a very raw, uninterrupted way. Once we’re in command of this information, it’s a gold mine of clues as to how we might phrase and structure our branded content and the types of lexicon we might choose to use in our earned copy.
Audiences will only respond to something which feels familiar and natural so it can be a great lens through which to pass client messaging to ensure it’s jargon free and doesn’t set off the BS alarm.
I’ve often had many a client say to me ‘we want our industry’s version of the plastic straw moment.’ Whilst we won’t pretend to have a crystal ball which can predict some of this, we do have data. By being forensic about search patterns and social conversation, we can quickly start to gather crumbs about our audiences’ passions and convictions and start to map the velocity of themes we know will gather momentum over time.
Curb the waste
It was encouraging to hear that last year Procter and Gamble announced a move to ‘smart audience work.’ A pivot designed to help the company move away from generic demographics to ‘smart audiences’ to help boost the effectiveness of its marketing and innovation pipeline.
This move was designed to not only curb ‘wasteful’ mass marketing in favour of mass one-on-one brand building, but serve people with stories and messages that resonate where they are and with more human truth built in.
There’s a reason companies like HMV suffered when consumers made the switch from physical to digital music formats – their audience antennas were probably malfunctioning.
I urge brands to keep on top of audience segmentation to stave off HMV or Blockbuster syndrome and ensure that if a specific audience behaviour shifts, we’re right there to capitalise on the swing.
We’re so lucky to have immeasurable amounts of data at our fingertips. We just need to get smart by framing audiences within these cultural shifts and being savvier with the way we cluster them.
Traditional audience segmentation work tends to take place annually or every two years and its maddening to think marketing communications investment decisions are often based on these outdated insights. We need to box way smarter with our audience intelligence or become quickly out of touch with the very people we’re trying to influence.
Culture is malleable, fluid and shape shifts more than a mythological werewolf, but let’s get comfortable with the mess. People can be more than one thing. An art lover and a first-time mum. A tech enthusiast and a chessboard champion. Let’s redraw the audience battle lines.
Art and science
The way in which the PR industry is evolving is exciting. We’ve always been an art form. Masters of language. Kings and Queens of influence. Champions when it comes to a memorable campaign tagline. But what we’ve learnt to apply in the process is a layer of science. Some healthy challenge to our ‘gut’ and a way to test out our hunches and hypotheses in a way which makes it irresistible to clients or stakeholders. In many ways, it’s how our friends over in the precision marketing or advertising industries have been doing it for decades. But when you think about the stranglehold PR has on the power of earned storytelling, it’s undeniable how powerful our campaigns could be if we got real specific with audiences.
I once read this quote: “identifying clearly defined target markets and target audiences works like a magnifying glass that focuses the sun’s rays.” You will eventually get fire…and who doesn’t want a hot PR campaign?
Alicia Solanki is the Deputy Managing Director of Ketchum London’s Brand division, a community of over 40 consultants. She heads up the agency’s largest technology client and is instrumental in helping drive forward the agency’s innovation pipeline from a products and services perspective. Although now in consumer brand, Alicia spent 13 years of her career in corporate communications, which has given her a uniquely ‘corpsumer’ mindset. Clients Alicia has led at Ketchum include Samsung, Nissan Europe, FedEx Express, Hertz and P&G Professional. Away from work, Alicia is married and adores being a mum to Ella (6) and Ethan (3). With an Indian and East African heritage, she can often be found cooking up a storm in the kitchen. Alicia also loves travelling, supporting industry D&I initiatives (she’s a mentor on the 2020 BME PR Pros scheme), spending time with her extended family and sampling fermented grapes!
Twitter: @17_alicia
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alicia-solanki-n%C3%A9e-mistry-a5150834/