Knowing who your audience is, is very important because if you don’t know who you are crafting your message for, then you don’t know who is going to care about what you have to say. If you give the wrong message, then it’s likely that no one will care about what you have to say. To find your audience, the best way is to ask because then you have the opportunity to interact with your potential audience and show them that you care. There are also more great ideas presented in the link above. If you are having trouble finding your audience, it could be because you are looking in the wrong place. I don’t mean that you should be looking in a different city, state or country. I mean you should be trying different mediums. Another solution to not being able to find your audience is having your audience find you. This may seem a bit risky but it could pay off as blogger Jaffer Ali explains here.

Finally, once you have found your audience, you need to keep in mind that they are dynamic and likely to change. They also have many more choices available to them today. You should already be using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to connect with your audience and actively engage them in conversation. Receiving feedback from your audience is the best way to learn and make changes that can only benefit you as a business. After all, the customer knows best. Speaking of customer, just because you have made the sale doesn’t mean you should lose contact with that customer. You should e-mail that customer and make sure they are satisfied with your product and ask if there is anything else you can do to make their experience more enjoyable thus forming a relationship.

I know that was a lot to take in all in one post but it sums up just about everything that was said regarding audience analysis in earlier posts. I invite you to go through and read my other posts regarding audience analysis if you are looking for more information or please contact me if there’s something else you think I should mention.

This is the end of my series of posts on audience analysis. Next I would like to tackle the subject of collaboration and whether new social media make it easier or more difficult to work together. I’ll get started on these posts within the next couple of weeks and go through a similar process as I have done with audience analysis.

Once you know why you want to form a relationship with your consumer, it would be good to know how to build it. In this article from Gail Goodman on Entrepreneur.com, she describes five ways on how to build and keep relationships. Her first point is that building your network is as important as building your sales because as your network grows and as long as you continue to talk to the contacts you make in your network, then those contacts will more then likely become customers. However, getting the sale is not the end of this journey. After the sale you need to continue to engage your customer so they feel appreciated and continue to do business with you. Here is a great video on social media and how it has changed the way we interact and buy. Now more then ever there are so many brands out there and the customer has many choices. You need to make sure you keep your customers loyal so they don’t switch to another brand.

Hopefully this post has been helpful in giving you ways to build a relationship with your audience. My next post is going to be a wrap up of the past nine posts and will hopefully end with you knowing why audience analysis is so important.

These days, anybody who can afford a nice camera can shoot a really nice picture. It just doesn’t take very much to do. Especially with the focus of these new cameras being on userability and ease of use. Somebody with absolutely no background in photography can take shots that look almost as good as if done by a professional. There are however ways to distinguish yourself from the rest.

According to the e-book Understanding new media, social media
and the business of photography, you have to “create a story” for yourself. What the author means by this, is letting people know not only what your style and ability is but how much experience you have. It also depends on what kind of photography you are doing. For instance, being a photojournalist is completely different from being a wedding photographer. Although being skilled in both fields is helpful. The differences are better explained in this blog called the new media photographer.

The best way to get your name out there is of course to advertise yourself. Instead of posting your photos to a photo sharing website, you should create your own website like these people have: Casey Templeton, Katie Stoops and Dr. Frank Doherty. These sites are much more professional than just posting on Flickr but there is nothing wrong with using sites like Flickr.

Doing all of these things will help to establish yourself and hopefully you will gain a following. In my next post I’m going show you how to find a new audience while keeping the existing one interested.

One such tool, is Twitter. Based on my own experience, there seem to be a lot of skeptics out there as to the usefulness of Twitter. However, Twitter is in fact very useful, as discussed in this article from flyte new media. In this article, the author talks about how you can use Twitter to promote your business by first explaining how Twitter works and then how you can make it work for you. The author also includes three guidelines of etiquette, that can be used for all social media, towards the end of his article that are something you should stick to.

Another great tool that has really grown over the past couple of years is Facebook. I’m sure many people think that Facebook is just something a lot of college students use to waste time. It is much more then that though. Facebook can now be used to connect with literally millions of people. If you are a business then you should have a Facebook profile. You can find people who may be interested in your business and easily interact with them. You can post information about your business and let others comment on what you are doing as a business. This is a great opportunity for feedback and for letting your customers know you are listening to them. In this article from Relativity: Business Technology Solutions, the author briefly describes how you can setup your own Facebook account and then utilize it to get more exposure.

Finally, if you are using Twitter or maybe a blog of your own, then you should consider having your own RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. The way RSS works is, you have the link on your blog or Twitter for others to click and by doing so they will receive updates via some sort of online reader such as Google Reader. If the idea of RSS still doesn’t make sense to you then check out this video from CommonCraft for some clarification.

Hopefully now you are already using or considering using some of these tools. In my next post I’m going to be career specific in how you can use audience analysis in the photography profession.

The story starts when Mr. Jarvis bought a Dell notebook along with a four year in-home warranty. The notebook malfunctions and Mr. Jarvis contacts Dell to get someone to come fix his laptop but Dell decides not to honor his in-home warranty and has Mr. Jarvis send his notebook to them instead. He sends it in and they fix it and send it back but the notebook still overheats. Dell once again refuses to send someone to Mr. Jarvis’s house so Mr. Jarvis reacts, much unlike Dell, which you will see later on. Mr. Jarvis takes to the internet on his blog and posts about his bad experience with Dell only to find that many other people are having the same problems. Thanks to Mr. Jarvis, things like “Dell Sucks. Dell Lies.” became a viral message. Dell doesn’t react and instead forms the “look but don’t interact” blog policy, which essentially just means they were ignoring the customer completely. Dell customers start to wonder if Dell really cares about them and Dell’s reputation becomes threatened.

Still Dell ignores complaints from consumers and assume that the whole problem will just blow over. Then in July 2005 Dell closed it’s customer support forum to avoid more negative comments, thus cutting off communication with the customer. After a letter from Mr. Jarvis to Dell, and many months later, Dell realizes that their non-response strategy isn’t working. In July 2006 they came up with Direct2Dell site where they offer support and many other things for their customers, including IdeaStorm, where customers can post ideas for things they’d like to see on their dell. They even have a link on their blog roll to BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis’s blog.

As I’m sure you have learned, listening to your audience is one of the best ways to keep them around. In my next post I’m going to tell you about some tools, that you may not be using, that are very helpful in engaging your audience.

This however would be another great opportunity to try out Vidsense, the ad company I mentioned in my last post that places clips of your choice on one of the many sites in their ad network that lead directly to your website. By doing this all you have to worry about is having the proper content on your website. The audience will do the rest when they find your site through Vidsense.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any research of your audience at all though. It would be helpful to have a general idea of who you are targeting. There is a great podcast I found that is focused on finding your audience when writing a speech but a lot of the concepts can still be applied to many other areas.

Hopefully by now you have an idea of who your audience is or at least how you find out who they are. In my next post I plan to talk about why, once you find your audience, it is important to engage them and keep them interested.

Why bother watching the newest episode of Lost on tv when you can catch it online the next day without the extra 15 minutes of commercial breaks? This is especially important today to those people who feel like they don’t have time for all the things they want to do in a day. People are not only watching network television shows online, they are watching user generated content and other clips of movies that can be found online.

Vidsense provides companies looking to get more traffic to their website with a solution to advertising on multiple sites. What Vidsense does is, it posts clips on the many sites that are in the Vidsense ad network and when users click on the clip they want to see, they are directed to your site where the clip is embedded. This concept is explained more in this demo video from Vidsense.

Now that you hopefully have a better of idea of where your audience may be, you should be able to reach them more effectively. In my next post I’m going to bring up an interesting concept I found on why you shouldn’t be targeting your audience.

First off I have to say that the tour was the most professional that we went on. The guide knew everything she was talking about and answered any questions we had. According to her, the reason their consumers keep buying from them is because they care about their product and take time to make sure each barrel of whisky is exactly the same. They are not about mass production and are instead about making the best whisky they can. I knew it had to go deeper then that though because you can’t reach an audience that way if they’ve never tried your product.

One way that Maker’s Mark is different from other whisky distilleries is that they appeal to those who are into the idea of going green. They recently installed a system that reduces there natural gas usage by 15-30 percent which you can read more about here. They also have their ambassador program which requires you to sign up to view the extra content on their website. You also get your name on a bronze plaque that goes on a barrel of whisky that you can purchase the whisky from after it ages.

Maker’s Mark also holds special events every year for their ambassadors where they invite them to come visit the distillery and they have a big social gathering on what is called Ambassador’s Day. On Ambassador’s Day, if your barrel of whisky has finished aging you are invited to come buy a bottle that you get to dip in the famous red wax yourself. This video will show you more of the events they have on Ambassador’s Day.

It’s things like this that keep their consumers coming back for more. Maker’s Mark seems to understand that just because you make one sale does not mean you make a lifetime customer. You have to do more for your consumer so they know you actually care about them.

There are many ways to determine who your audience is, the easiest being to simply ASK! By asking directly you can find out what peoples likes and dislikes are then go from there. Another good idea is to create a poll. Creating a poll is great because the answers are always accurate as long as you word the questions correctly and don’t make the them too confusing. You can also sign up for a site such as Google Analytics and find out where people are coming from to get to you and what your most popular pages are when determining your audience for your website. You can also click on the links of people that have commented on your website and see what their site is like to get an idea of who they are.

Once you have an idea of who your audience is, you still need to reach out to them. In the book, What Sticks, the authors talk about how to reach your consumer from the standpoint of an advertiser. According to them, the key to reaching your audience is knowing what motivates them to come to you, what the consumer is actually hearing from your message because it might be different then what you want to be saying, knowing which medium to use to connect with the majority of your audience and finally maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing.

If you are still having trouble determining your audience, my next post will be about the different types of audiences out there and which one may be right for you.

Say for example you are writing two letters. One letter is going to your best friend from college and the other is going home to your mom. Those two letters are probably going to have a few similarities in questions like the typical, “How are things going?” and “Is anything new going on?” but the answers you receive will more then likely be different. The interests of the two people you are writing too are, I’m sure, very different since one of them has probably seen you in you’re not so better states and the other caught you the first time you came home in said state. This being said, you will not be writing to your mom asking if she has been to any good parties lately and you will not be asking your friend how his or her dog is doing.

If you don’t take the time to figure out who your audience is then it’s not very likely you are going to get the right message across. This concept is further explained in this this video on the importance of determining your audience when building a web page.

In my next post I will discuss how you can determine and reach your audience for a more effective strategy.