Friday 29 March 2013

Know your online target audience

Who are your target audience?

In simple words, they are the crucial actors who help achieve your communications objectives. Basically, while designing a communications strategy you take into consideration their willingness to support your initiative. Thinking in terms of time involvement and willingness of the audiences, they can be classified as partners, early adopters, wait and watch category, and rejecters.  

Most communicators categorise their audiences as ultimate target audience who are the primary audience, actors with the potential to strengthen the key message and influence the ultimate target audience, intermediaries who help to pass the message to the audience that are hard to reach but are easily accessible to them, and actors with the potential to weaken the message.

Analysing the target audience is always a cumbersome job. And, targeting audience according to their online behaviour has been much more difficult since the number of online visitors is humongous and the motives behind the visits are incomprehensible. Due to the influx of millions of blogs, online forums, and websites, the behaviour of online visitors too is changing day by day. 
So, how you analyse your online target audience?

Forrester has devised an innovative approach termed as Social Technographics Ladder to analyse the online target audience. Forrester’s Social Technographics classifies people according to how they use social technologies.

Inactives at the bottom are followed by spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators at the topmost rung of the ladder.

Creators make social content go. They write blogs or upload video, music, or text.

Critics respond to contents from others. They post reviews, comment on blogs, participate in forums, and edit wiki articles.

Collectors use RSS feeds, add tags to web pages or photos, vote for websites online.

Joiners connect in social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Spectators consume social content including blogs, user-generated video, podcasts, forums, or reviews.

Inactives neither create nor consume social content of any kind.

Conversationalists update status on social networking site or post to Twitter at least weekly.

So on which rung of the ladder does your target audience hang on? Try formulating strategies according to the behaviour of your audience and the success is yours!

Tuesday 26 March 2013

Advertise strategically, beat your competitors

Being an advertising enthusiast, I am always in a look-out for creative advertisements. These days my favourite place to search answers to my queries is Quora.  It is a heaven for knowledge hunting, gathering and sharing. Carrying on with my query I stumbled upon the question, "Which are some of the funniest, most clever advertisements?" in my favourite treasure hunting site. If you are into serious mood of beating your competitors with strategic advertising, then follow the below advertisements.
 
Read Quote of Kevin Jung's answer to Which are some of the funniest, most clever advertisements? on Quora Read Quote of Abhishank Sahu's answer to Which are some of the funniest, most clever advertisements? on Quora Read Quote of Siddharth Bhattacharya's answer to Which are some of the funniest, most clever advertisements? on Quora Read Quote of Sean Rose's answer to Which are some of the funniest, most clever advertisements? on Quora

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Social media explained with coffee

Just stumbled upon a pin from marketplacemaven.com - it explains characteristics of different social media in a simple and interesting way. See how your favourite social media positions itself among the crowd of me-too sites.