Audience building takes coordination. There’s a reason radio stations don’t play Adele’s “Someone Like You” straight into Slayer’s “Raining Blood”—those songs appeal to two very different audiences. Audience professionals know this and help develop audiences appropriate for different types of content.
Competition is everywhere. TV shows are incorporating more hashtags, promos, and information on screen than ever because they don’t want to lose your attention. Once the social center of the home, the television is now just another device competing for time and eyeballs. As a result, “build it and they will come” is not a Content Marketing strategy; it’s a recipe for disaster—a very lonely, unwatched disaster.
Measurement matters. It took years, but mass media finally got the ratings bureaus—the Alliance for Audited Media (print), Arbitron (radio), and Nielsen (television)—to account for online readers, streaming listeners, and on-demand viewers in their ratings.1 If you can’t communicate how you have performed, you’re dead in the water.
The only real question is how fully you embrace the opportunity this presents. You need a PAD Team not only to navigate the challenges that all media face today, but also to cure the ailments inflicted on your company by a generation of siloed audience management efforts within Marketing. Ailments like:
1. Inflammed Data. Symptoms: Hoarding data in siloed repositories such that consumers in one channel are treated differently (and probably worse) than those in channels where that data is used to personalize messaging.
2. Rash of Selfishness. Symptoms: Seeking to boost the performance of channels you manage without any regard for their impact on the rest of marketing’s objectives.
3. Cross-Channel Blindness. Symptoms: Failing to use cross-channel promotions to build bigger, better audiences, and engagement.
4. Device Paralysis. Symptoms: Failing to take mobility into consideration and treating consumers like stationary desktop users instead of the on-the-go, smartphone addicts they are.
5. Irritable Revenue Syndrome. Symptoms: Boosting short-term results only to drive proprietary audiences—and LCV—down over the long term.
Thanks to the Internet, every company today is a media company.
With your PAD Team assembled, you can cure what ails you. But you may have to get over your own allergic reaction to a certain word: audit.
Red Bull Media House: Building Extreme Proprietary Audiences
If you want to see how Content Marketing and Proprietary Audience Development can work together to transform brands into media companies, look no further than Red Bull Media House (@RedBull). Launched in 2007, the content arm of the Red Bull beverage company began producing sports events, documentaries, and even a magazine (The Red Bulletin) as a way to increase brand awareness.
Today, however, the unit does that and far, far more. Once a cost center, RBMH now turns a profit all its own thanks to documentary sales on iTunes, licensing deals with NBC, and advertising sales within The Red Bulletin. Red Bull hasn’t just built a media juggernaut; it’s built a kingdom of proprietary SEEKERS, AMPLIFIERS, and JOINERS who are all thirsty for the next great bit of content—as well as the beverage that “gives you wings.”
2. Audit Your Existing Efforts
It is said that those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. You can avoid this fate by rallying your PAD Team to document how your company is building, engaging, and managing proprietary audiences today. No one can map those things for you—not even Google. Instead, your PAD Team will need to venture into the heart of your organization to conduct a PAD Audit.
I know the word audit strikes terror in the hearts of many. However, you can’t hope to optimize your future PAD efforts unless you know where they stand right now. A PAD Audit requires you to document your existing:
Paid Media
Owned Media
Proprietary Audiences
Employee- and Partner-Owned Media and Proprietary Audiences
Over the next few pages, we’ll explore each of these items; and if you visit www.AudiencePro.com, you’ll find a variety of free resources to assist with your PAD Audit. One word of caution as you proceed: Don’t let PAD Team members audit the channels that they currently manage. Fresh eyes yield far better observations than those who have a vested interest in the status quo.
Paid Media Discovery
The first step in your PAD Audit is to get your arms around all of your company’s Paid Media. This requires that you interview colleagues and analyze your advertising creative and placements to document:
Channels and ad units used (e.g., print, radio, TV, OOH, online, etc.)
CTAs, both primary and secondary