Social Media
Website Development
The great thing about colleagues from each of these disciplines is that they should already have a keen sense of the value of an audience—albeit within the channels they currently serve. Your challenge is to open their eyes to the value of all of your company’s proprietary audiences. I recommend selecting only four or five other people for your PAD Team to keep your efforts both manageable and focused. As a first order of business, introduce your team members to The Audience Imperative by sharing this book with them or visiting www.AudiencePro.com.
A Team of Many from One
If you are a one-person or small marketing team, you may wonder how you can possibly hope to build a PAD Team to assist your efforts. The answer lies in:
Tapping an existing agency partner. Agencies and creative partners know your business and bring a wealth of different perspectives to the table. Challenge them to think beyond a short-term, campaign mindset.
Networking in your industry. Your PAD Team doesn’t have to reside within your company’s four walls. Noncompetitive industry peers can be of great help to one another and serve as a great sounding board for new ideas to grow your proprietary audiences.
Networking in your community. Local marketing organizations are chock full of people just as overwhelmed about where to begin with Proprietary Audience Development as you. Seek them out at local AMA (@AMA_Marketing), BMA (@BMANational), DMA (@DMA_USA), Social Media Club (@socialmediaclub), and other professional events. Building a local, noncompetitive, mutually beneficial PAD Team may not only yield ideas, but also meaningful professional relationships.
While it may take a bit more initiative and creativity for smaller companies to assemble a PAD Team, the long-term benefits are well worth the effort.
Audience Exercise #7: Get Out of the Office
To build a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose within your PAD Team, get everyone out of the office and into an environment where real consumers interact—a mall, a restaurant, or even a ball game.
Encourage the team to engage with the environment through their mobile devices. Ask them to document any proprietary audiences or attempts at Proprietary Audience Development that they see. Finally, wrap up the trip with lunch or dinner to share observations and ideas that would help build your proprietary audiences. Sharing, after all, isn’t just for AMPLIFIERS.
You’ve probably noticed I’m not suggesting the creation of a team that lives on an org chart in your company—at least not initially. Instead, the best PAD Team will be a loose affiliation of individuals who may report to different leaders within your organization. Their passion to collaborate is driven by their passion to achieve not only the company’s goals but also their individual goals—many of which are tied to the performance of proprietary audiences. Thus, if the PAD Team succeeds, they succeed.
Take a Page from Traditional Publishers and Broadcasters
Whether your company is big or small, your PAD Team will likely begin as an informal, collaborative unit. I believe we’ll see more formal roles, responsibilities, and titles emerge as marketers begin to embrace the value of Proprietary Audience Development—not unlike what happened with Content Marketing. Both Content Marketing and Proprietary Audience Development are modeled after the two sides of the traditional publishing/broadcasting business—editorial and circulation. Just as Content Marketing emulates the editorial side with writers, illustrators, researchers, talent, and videographers, so too will Proprietary Audience Development emulate the circulation side with future job titles incorporating concepts like:
Audience Acquisition
Audience Development
Audience Management
Your informal PAD Team will not have anyone with any of these titles initially. Over time, however, companies will have to create roles with similar responsibilities in order to create accountability for all PAD efforts.
If you aspire to be a long-term PAD Team member in your company, you would be wise to learn as much as you can from the people who hold circulation and audience development roles in traditional publishing and broadcasting companies. Those folks have been through the Internet’s wringer—and have emerged leaner, meaner, and more appreciative of the temporal nature of audiences. Their experiences can help your team better understand that:
Building an audience is hard. We heard it from Bruce in Chapter 1—but if you really want to feel what this means, talk to your local newspaper’s circulation manager. They’ll regale you with tales of how brand loyalty, consumer habits, and new technologies will erode proprietary audiences if you don’t pay attention to their changing needs.