Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Reaching New Audiences

One of the primary objectives of our recently "on-hold" portal project is to reach new audiences, primarily the under 40 age group. This may sound fairly straight forward using technology, but it has raised some interesting questions.

I can think of three target audiences to meet this objective.

  • Individuals who would be interested in the services you provide, but are unaware that you exist - a marketing issue in which the online environment may help you engage some of this audience (the segment which is online and should include the under 40 target).
  • Individuals who know you, but demand new models of engagement; non-traditional communications. Again, you might expect this to include the under 40 age group.
  • Individuals who are looking for new services/products, possibly not your target audience, but also possibly a relevance issue.

In the context of an online audience, specifically under 40 years of age, I will suggest that audiences #1 and #2 can be combined. My reasoning is that techniques and technologies to reach both these audiences will be the same, each are non-traditional audiences.

I'm willing to ignore audience #3 at this time since it suggests that we are in essence "selling Cadillacs" when we should be "selling hybrids". If this is the case, I would hope that audiences #1 and #2 will give us this feedback.

The next question is "how to engage these individuals?"

Over the next couple of months, we are going to attempt to answer this question, hopefully in partnership with the program teams.

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