One Audience Or Many Individuals
Here is a question for DJs and radio presenters: Do you know who your audience is?
Now perhaps this might sound like a simple question but, in fact, it is the wrong starting point. You don’t have a single audience but rather your audience consists of a group of individuals. Each of these individuals is unique and they all have different ways of deciding how to listen to music and, of course, what music they want to hear.
It is important that you start to think of your audience as individuals and try to understand what drives each of them to choose to listen to you.
Here are some questions you should think about:
- How old are they?
- Are they male or female?
- Where do they live?
- What time is it where they are listening?
- What are they doing whilst listening?
- Do they want to interact with you or just sit-back and listen?
- How do they feel while listening?
Gaining this kind of understanding of the members of your audience will help you appreciate better what they are looking for from your show, perhaps what kind of music they like to hear and why they relate enough to you to listen to your show each week.
Personas
Now let’s assume that your audience is big enough that you can’t identify every single individual (hopefully this is the case!). Assuming it is, we can take advantage of an area of marketing that has becoming increasingly important in recent years – personas.
Marketers try to group the individuals in their target market together using personas. A marketing persona combines data, assumptions and educated guesses together to build profiles of the ideal customers that the marketer is trying to attract. The aim of using personas is to help relate better to the target audience as real people rather than just seeing them as statistics.
A persona is built using exactly the same kind of questions we used above to identify the individuals within our audience, bringing together questions on demographics, goals, challenges and values to create fictional characters based as closely as possible on real people. We give our personas names to drive home the need to think of them as people and create as many as needed to identify the main groupings within our ideal audience.
Example Of A Persona
DJ Mike – Mike is 25 years old, lives California and has been DJing for a year. He likes 70s disco music but doesn’t like EDM. Mike listens to the show every week and interacts on Twitter and in the chatroom but watches TV at the same time. He enjoys the community that is built around the show and tells his friends about his experiences listening.
How To Use Personas
Developing personas will help you identify better with your audience and understand what they are looking for from your show. Personas will help you determine where there are opportunities and areas for improvement and if you can now empathise better with your audience members and deliver what they need then everyone wins.
This was a very quick introduction to the subject of audience personas. Personas are now a key part of most marketing decisions and there is a whole science developing around them. If you found this interesting please leave me a comment below and if you would like to know more about let me know and I will be happy to write more on this topic.
