How well do you really know your audience? I don’t just mean do you know who they are, though that’s a strong starting point.
When we talk about knowing your audience, the modern marketer has to go far deeper than just identifying a single target audience. You need to know about the different sub-groups that make up that audience and how they differ, whether that’s in the types of content they like, or the channels they consume their content on.
We can’t assume that a shared passion, interest or job role makes an entire audience look the same.
So how do we get this deeper understanding? On one level it’s about using data to drive the decision making process, to guide the business strategy and tactical outputs. However in order to truly succeed, organisations need to look beyond the confines of data.
Yes, data should be at the core of how audience insights are formed, running through every part of the business, but it should only ever be a supporting act: an organisation must inherently know and understand the world in which they operate.
Nowhere is this truer than in marketing departments. It’s not enough to just understand audience behaviour, which is what the data shows us. Marketers need to pay just as close as attention to why communities act in the way they do. The only way of achieving this is by engaging directly with them, asking what they like and dislike and sharing their passions.
It’s paramount to have a deep understanding of your audience, and to be deeply rooted in it. But it’s also important to place huge importance on spending time engaging directly with your entire audience. Without this understanding, a marketing department can quickly become a content factory that churns out content because the data tells us that it will get views, preventing any hope of creating content that resonates, moves and even empowers a community.
We believe data and creativity should be married closely together and constantly assessed and reassessed, to ensure that published content engages fans in the now. All communities evolve and progress, so by closely tying data insights and creative understanding we have a constant barometer, measuring how our content is performing and how our audience feels about it.
Over time this means that we have developed the ability to know very quickly whether a piece of content resonates or not with our community. By watching this, learning and adapting day in, day out our community has become one of the most engaged football fan audiences across the globe.
The best, and only way to do this is by investing in your community and ensuring your team are given a licence to engage with this community. More often than not, that means talking about something other than your own product. It means being part of that community, commenting on wider discussions and asking for their opinion on what really matters.
By simply forming an audience, you’ll be forever extracting data and insights to plot the future, because you’re so far removed from understanding what matters to them. But, a community will naturally give you the answers to any question you’ll ever have.
By Tom Thirlwall, CEO of Copa90
Sport's ability to bring communities together is showcased in the short documentary below, which enabled Hyundai to engage with over 1 million football fans through Copa90's network.
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