Finding Our Audience
Jim Cosco
How we get clients
Tippingpoint Labs has been around for seven years, and we recently reflected on how we usually get clients. Turns out, people come to us with a very specific need. Usually, it’s a fire that needs to be extinguished. Typically, they say, “I need a …”
- Website
- Video
- Campaign
- Strategy
- Partner to secure new business
The problem is that they usually don’t see the bigger picture like we do. They think they need one thing, but what they really need is something different. We sell strategy, platform development, and content development, and all three usually go hand in hand. Our clients come to us with one of those needs first, which opens the door to a discussion about our other two services. Everything centers on audience.
Our audience
One of the first steps in creating good content is to figure out who your audience is. At Tippingpoint Labs we do that by creating digital profiles that are very specific. When we do this exercise with our clients, they generally come up with 5-10 profiles. We sat down as a team recently to figure out what kind of content our audience is consuming offline and online. The first step is to roleplay and start with assumptions about the types of people reading our stuff, and to be as specific as possible. What are they watching on television? What websites to they visit? What magazines do they subscribe to? All of these answers help paint a clear picture of what kind of content resonates with them. Our job is to then identify the voice and style of their favorite channels.
Here’s one example of what we came up with — it’s a quick digital profile for one segment of the Tippingpoint Labs audience.
Persona Name: Biz Dev / Sales Guy
Psychographic Profile
- Looking for new sources of revenue for his company
- Skeptical of marketing
- Traditional lead gen perspective
- Strong opinions and personality
- Face-to-face trumps everything
- Social media is a gimmick
- See competitors excelling
- Cold calling is dying, forcing them to rethink lead gen tactics
- About getting out of their comfort zone
Online Activities
- Twitter is for douche bags
- Blackberry
- Boston.com sports
- Amazon shopping
- Lapsed on LinkedIn
- Plaxo
Television/Radio
- Fox News
- Rush Limbaugh
- ESPN
- Law and Order Reruns
- WSJ
- Herald
- NY Post
- Local Print Paper
- Business Books
- Newsweek
- Industry Trade Journals
Demographics
- Age Range: 45 +
- Gender Bias: Skews Male
- Kids: 2 Kids
- Household Income: $175K
Category: Valuable Content
Tagged: Digital Profiles
4 Comments »
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knowing your audience is the key to success in so many areas of marketing.
Intriguing Digital Persona, TPL. I am interested to see the others you came up with, and the methodology used to create them (or is that the Secret Sauce?). Being a “Sales Guy” myself, I’ve learned over the past few years that understanding your audience is important not just so that you know where to FIND THEM, but – more importantly – so that you can position yourself effectively in enough locations (with the right messaging, of course) so that they will FIND YOU. Thinking about this from a long tail perspective is crucial because there are no longer just a handful of places that a Marketer or Sales Guy can be, in order for a large number of potential clients to find you. You need to be ubiquitous to the point of satisfying many of your leads’ frequent hotspots, but not delusional enough to think that a simple approach of “MORE IS BETTER” will work. This is a good post and I look forward to seeing the other personae. Thanks!
This is really interesting, as I was trying to figure out how you get new business. I like the spec from above, but what would the next steps be once a profile is established? Begin content creation? Editorial organization/calendaring? Orchestrated stage deployment?
Thanks for the comments. Dan, once we’ve identified our target persona’s, the next step is to develop a content calendar that will feature themes which will resonate with them. Then we fill it with content and publish it regularly (well, we try to). So the idea is to have features that will suck in Brand Managers (one of the profiles that could end up bringing us into their organization) or any of our other target audiences. Hopefully over time, they will develop a relationship with the content and us. Refining the content, to make it attract that specific audience, is an ongoing process though.