Target Audience

Add All The Public Relations Curb Appeal You Want

Garth Beyer

You’re a realtor. If the house is a log cabin and you’re trying to appeal to a more modernistic Le Corbusier-type of consumer, sprucing up the curb, the walkway, the mailbox won’t do it.

Companies who are labeled with a target consumer, don’t often grab hold of someone new outside of the described (and perceived) demographic. (And that’s okay!)

Apple might pick up some 60+ year olds, but do they really contribute to the success of Apple?

Hot Topic might get a preppy teenager to come in the store by advertising polos, but is it a smart use of space for the possibility of reaching a different demographic member?

Lands’ End might try appealing to a younger generation of women, but will the advertising strategy work?

Many businesses throw themselves under the bus by trying to be something they are not, by trying to wiggle their way into the minds of a different demographic. What happens? They end up ignoring the strength of the tribe they already have. Curb appeal may grab the attention of difference consumers, but at the same time it confuses your current ones.

At some point you have to realize you need to create a new product to reach the new target audience (if that’s really what you want). At some point, no amount of curb appeal will attract the number of new customers you hope for.

My advice when you know you’re at the end of the rope, tie a knot.

Praise your current market. Instead of paving a new pathway to the house, add more to it. Give back to existing customers. If your business is a traditional one, drop the idea of a mobile app and revert back to rewarding those who share through word of mouth and refer you to friends.

Apple is successful because they admire the early adopters. Hot Topic is still open because everything is still black and they have CDs. Lands’ End will grow more if they create a referral program for consecutive consumers rather than telling 20-year-olds what they should be wearing (without changing the style of the product, merely its curb appeal).

I’m a PR strategist who prides himself in being honest. Can you get new customers? Certainly. Can you get the number of new customers you want (or will need once you start confusing your existing/returning ones)? No.

Sometimes it’s easier, better, cheaper to build a new house than to add to the curb appeal of the one you own. (Especially when the one you own is beautiful as it is!) Plus, it’s more fun to create a new product that fits the target audience you want than to stretch the fabrics of the current product. Sooner or later, it won’t fit your consumer base, and that’s when you crumble.

 

Stay Positive & Tie A Knot And Show It Off

Who Are Your Sponsors/Investors/Donators

Garth Beyer

My SO and I listen to the same radio station. She mentioned to me the radio station is asking for $2,000 donations. The two grand donation can be given at once or over a period of a year. She thought it was a lot to ask of people to donate. Why not ask for smaller donations so more people will be willing to pitch in, she suggested.

She’s right. They would get more donations if they requested a smaller donation and reached out to more people. But why? Why spend more money on advertising to the mass who may or may not donate a little bit to the radio station when the radio station can meet their yearly goal with a handful of large donations. It’s truly niche marketing.

If Ferrari really wanted to (heck do I wish they would), they could cut the price of their cars to a quarter of what they are now, sell a ton and still make loads of profit. Why, though, when they can produce a few hundred cars and sell them at high costs.*

Even certain news organizations could put ads on their sites, put up paywalls and charge submission fees for freelance content, but why when their journalism is so thorough and desired that they can meet their expenses just by asking for donations.

I think there are grand benefits in figuring out how much it is you want to make from an idea, invention or business and how exactly you want to make that much. You can follow the steps of selling a product or service and charge what everyone else is charging in hopes of gaining the attention of the mass public. Or (or!) you can find the condensed group of people who will pay top dollar for what you offer.

Might be worth mentioning there is a profit differentiation between the two methods. I think you can figure that out for yourself, though.

 

Stay Positive & Remember, The Less There Are, The More You Can Focus On Each Individual

*Quality of course matters. Yamaha wouldn’t be able to sell their mopeds for half a million dollars. The quality just isn’t worth that. But, there are products and services I see regularly  I would pay more to have than what they are charging. Macs, Mizuno shoes, Biofreeze… Despite this post encouraging increased pricing, I can’t contest there’s beauty (and profit) with the effect of selling something for less than it’s really worth. (Something I’m sure we’re all thankful for.) Discretionary note: never price lower to the point people assume cheapness.

Lost Glove. One Cold Hand.

Garth Beyer

Glove

At least 18 people felt bad today. I counted.

I waited for the bus to pick me up and transport me back to work. I noticed a single glove in the middle of the sidewalk where people get on and off the transit. It appeared not stepped on, stirring me to assume it was recently dropped. Perhaps from someone who loaded on the bus moments before I arrived at the station. Not sure what to do with it, I watched it and noticed something peculiar.

Every person who walked past the glove looked at it, stared at it just long enough to think something like “well, that sucks for someone. I wonder if they figured out they lost it yet.”

Similarly, no one knew what to do with it. They just left it there.

It surprised me to find that Jennifer Gooch tried finding a solution to this problem with onecoldhand.com. The hyperlink goes to a shout out at Carnegie Mellon University (where she attended) and not the actual website because the website no longer exists. (You can see what the website looked like by using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)

To keep this post short, I’ll keep my argument short.

Jennifer Gooch had the business plan backward.

Today, one person lost one glove. I then watched 18 people empathize until the 19th person actually stepped on the glove, picked it up and handed it to the bus driver. The bus driver shrugged his shoulders and tossed it on the council, certainly to stay there until he decides whether it’s better off being tossed or brought to the transit’s lost and found office. (More likely the former.)

In Pittsburgh, Gooch focused on finding the owner of the one glove, only sometimes relieving it’s owner of the minimal stress of having lost it. Both her and my own’s take is to satisfy one person is, well, satisfying. However, not remarkable.

To satisfy 18+ people in one swoop is remarkable. Instead of creating OneColdHand to meet a demand that isn’t much of a demand (most don’t think, how can I find my glove. They think, when can I go buy a new pair), Gooch could have created OneColdHandTwoWarmOnes – pairing one lost left-handed glove with one lost right-handed glove, then giving them to someone without any.

A reason so many businesses flop when trying to find a niche market is that they go after the wrong long tail. Yes, there are people who use spinoff OneColdHand websites, but there is no profitability in something that is (rarely) at most, satisfying.

Consider when you’re trying to define who you want your audience to be, that although there are people wanting to reunite with their lost glove, there are far more people who have none. The question every entrepreneur or freelancer needs to ask is “who cares more?”

Ask that question enough and you’ll have your target audience. (A profitable one.)

 

Stay Positive & If Mixmatching Socks Is A Thing, Why Not Gloves?

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit

You’re Confused About Shotgun Marketing

Garth Beyer

I too thought shotgun marketing was a waste of time and an annoyance. The idea of reaching as many people as possible is ridiculous. The entire force of our economy right now is aimed at rifle marketing, targeted, niche, focused, small…

Everything is getting specialized, individualized and compartmentalized for like groups of people, tribes.

The rifle approach is extremely rewarding. Why bother trying to sell horror stories to those who hate them or would rather read a romantic novel. If you’re going to sell a horror story, you have the resources to find the perfect people to target – horror story readers.

We’ve shot ourselves in the foot if we really buy into all of this, though.

I have nothing to critique when it comes to rifle marketing – that’s spot on. However, the flood of criticism that shotgun marketing receives is uncalled for. Shotgun marketing isn’t used as a spray and pray approach. There’s mythological thinking behind the aim and the scope.

The other day I and a couple of others pitched to a small board an idea of creating an online resource the covers activities for kids in Madison. Our target audience? Parents with kids and nannies. Quite simple and forward, but the board responded with a reminder not to limit ourselves. There are many mentorship programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters that parents could enroll their kid(s) in and that nannies can volunteer with. Originally, this market was not in our strategy memo.

What are the two words that explain this decision? Shotgun marketing.

And if you didn’t know, shotguns have different chokes and barrel sizes. You still have to aim them. And as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen or read about anyone killing five birds with one shot. Shotgun marketing is a challenging strategy because of the stigma, but equally as rewarding as a rifle.

 

Stay Positive & Pew Pew Pew

Garth E. Beyer

 

Dancing To Your Own Tune

Garth Beyer

Public Relations is a lot about reaching out to a specific group, your target audience. When you reach out to your audience, you want to develop positive awareness that turns into an action that everyone takes.

A big problem before going out with a press release or other form of an announcement is that there is more than one thing you want your target audience to do.

Don’t just buy the new iPhone 5, tweet about it, tell us what you think about it, write a blog post about it, get someone else to buy one, show it off to your coworkers, try our app on it … the list goes on.

At times, yes, PR is about target, precision, and getting your audience to take one action at a time, but this current digital revolution has created the 100-focus-mind. Everyone can and does focus on a hundred things through the day and never is there a time that only one item is focused on. It’s a two-or-more interactive world.

Every digital native audience is capable of handling it, so why do PR specialists still focus on one-group-one-action strategies? It seems to me that you can reach out to each individual member of your audience and give them the option of what to do. As a result, you will have created sub-audiences – people who are taking the same action (listening to the same tune) bundle together and then you can focus on their progress.

Basically it’s about letting every member of your audience dance to their own tune. Whether it is communicating to the entire audience or subgroups, they are all still dancing.

PR: Knowing Your Audience

PR: Knowing Your Audience

Garth Beyer

Many PR firms either get lucky or just get by when their strategy for knowing the audience is to judge and make assumptions.

According to a survey conducted by Jericho Communications, the typical American Fortune 1000 CEO is more likely to have watched The Simpsons than to have watched all three presidential debates.

Now, PR may be in control of social media, but PR still involves meeting the target audience, becoming one of them in the real world (not just online). You must know where they (your audience) goes, where they eat, what they read, watch and listen to. A great PR Specialist assimilates herself into the audience at the same time as keeping an eye out on social media trends before initiating a PR strategy.

Familiarizing yourself with the lifestyle of your target audience allows you to pitch stories directly to them, create the publications that they will read, and direct the appearance of your product so it faces them in an unobtrusive way. It does well to note that there still must be your own passion that is put into the publication. Since you are placing your pitch in between a stream of feed that the target audience is more familiar with than the last presidential debate, how passionately you present your pitch matters considerably.

Unable to create that publication? Send a press release to the newspapers, the magazines, radio stations or TV stations that you know your audience views. Does breaking news involve your product? Your topic? Get those press releases out. As you know, PR isn’t about putting your product or a story in front of everyone’s faces, over and over and over. That’s called advertising. PR is special, it’s separate from advertising although it uses it. It’s about strategizing the perfect moment to turn a presentation public.

Syncing your pitch to your audience is just as important as getting in sync with the perfect moment. What puts the “specialist” after PR is the ability to combine the two.

Assimilate, Syndicate, and Presentate

What Makes It Different

Garth Beyer
Justins Peanut Butter Cups

I have never seen or heard of these until I went to Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event and had one.

Then I had another, this time the milk chocolate kind, as opposed to the dark chocolate.

Then I had another, the same day within a span of four hours.

Then I grabbed two more and put them in my journey bag, I gave a third one to someone else and grabbed a fourth to eat while I grabbed a fifth one to eat on my way out of the event after I finished the one I was holding.

I then presumed to eat the two that I stored in my journey bag throughout the evening. Note: By “one” I mean the two chocolate peanut butter cups in the “one” package.

Total: 16

Depressing? I could fight and say they were organic although it doesn’t help my case too well. (More on organic in a moment)

To say they are delicious is an understatment which is something people often say about Reece’s peanut butter cups.

However, to say that Reece’s peanut butter cups are the most delicious ones in the world would be half-true. (As is the case for Justins) They are the best if you ask the niche audience that they are marketed to and consumed by.

Whereas, if you ask the niche group Justins markets to, they would say Justins chocolate peanut butter cups are the best.

What I’ve learned about products, not just chocolate peanut butter cups is that:

1. You can always improve but what you can improve on may not be exactly the product itself, the chocolate. It may be the shipment, how the ingredients are grown, the graphics of the wrapper, the mission statement on the box or in this case, the audience you are targeting.

2. All in all, precision meets profit. You can always find a niche market to make a profit, especially in organics. In other words, there is always a way to make it different for that special tribe who likes it that way.

Justin’s chocolate does just that. They reach out to the audience who doesn’t buy just cheap chocolate.

Afterall, for some people, going big means buying not just buying any kind of chocolate. If they are going to go big buying chocolate, they are going to spend an extra 40 cents or a dollar for the good chocolate, the rich chocolate, the organic chocolate, the chocolate that makes them feel they are benefiting the world by eating.

This is a small niche audience and Justins makes their chocolate different so it’s target is precise.

Stay Positive & Thought It Was Worth Sharing

Garth E. Beyer

Is there something you have had too much of?