I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with brands, products and services whose managers are transposing their offerings to the digital arena. Many times, they rely heavily on traditional conceptual media and insights models to sculpt a view of their consumers. The problem is these models don’t take into account the digital roles audiences play or actions they take in digital places.
You’re probably all to familiar with the persona I’m referring to (e.g., Alexandra, age 33, married with two children, average household income of $75,000. Shops at Super Target, etc.).
The audiences that experience planners and strategists plan for aren’t any different today. But the methods to account for them has changed significantly. And the information needed is much more faceted. Traditional account planning practices typically don’t have the framework or tool sets to understand these nuances. For instance, demographics tell us about their propensity to gravitate toward certain products or services. Psychographics can tell us what they may think about the product or service (or what they think they think), but they don’t tell us much about how these audiences actually navigate the world.
I know I’m rehashing an old conversation here. But it’s frustrating because many have yet to adopt a framework to understand their audiences beyond this model. Or, maybe the tool sets to figure it out aren’t in place. Or maybe account planners are simply ignoring it.
Maybe we (user experience strategists and planners in the marketing world) have done a poor job of evangelizing the concept of user-based analysis in digital planning. Some of the more astute distinctions between market segmentation versus user segmentation have been celebrated in UX circles for a while, but the practice has a long way to go before being mainstreamed into a broader UX/marketing mindset…at least for those who are “UXperts” teaching their clients the difference.
So it’s good to see there is an evolution in account planning. Finally, we are witnessing some thought leadership in terms of how to think about and plan for digital audiences from a marketing perspective. When experienced, notable (former) account planners consider user experience to be the new account planning discipline, a lot of UXperts in the marketing world should get excited. But we have a long way to go.
Lenses for looking at audiences as users – in their digital and real worlds
So, where do we begin? This is the question that inspired me to write this post. There is no simple answer. This is an ongoing work in progress, as I don’t profess to have all the answers a typical digital account planner might need. The methods listed below should help drive the analysis, however:
- Focus on small sample sizes and examine their digital online footprints – Identify your core set of audiences, take a look at a few key users and follow their digital footprints. Spend some time in their specialized communities. See what artifacts sit on their digital curbs and inside/outside their virtual doorways (and garbage cans, for that matter).
- Hit the real streets to witness what your audience is doing, where they’re living and who they hang out with. Watch them as they navigate their real (and digital) worlds in their native habitats. And take copious notes. This is labor and time intensive, but the gold nuggets are always somewhere at the bottom of the river.
- Bring key audience members into your brainstorming. This should come as no surprise: your core users might have good ideas that lead to better ways to serve them. It’s amazing how often they’re excluded in the conceptual design process.
- Spend some time to understand key movers and shakers. These might be the influencers. They might be the connectors. They might create a lot of chatter. They might carry a lot of online currency or “clout.” Take the time to discover them and watch what they do, because their followers will mimic them.
- Know your data and look for patterns. Get access to any information dashboards available. Keep looking for similar behaviors, activity, conversation and movement.
- Understand what has gone before. Dig for relevant secondary research that seems to match up with the cohorts you’re studying.
This is just a start to a growing framework on discovering the nuances of key audiences in a digital world. Specifically, these steps take our thinking and ideation well beyond the traditional model for how to better service our audiences as users, not just marketing targets.