We’ve got a pretty diverse target audience. Our focus is innovation, and it is so broad it can appeal to almost everyone, every socio economic background. Finding your target audience can be a lot of work. We did the work because we could not just assume that our audience would be who we thought it would be.
The majority of interest in innovation is largely inventors, entrepreneurs and SME’s (small to medium sized enterprises). Inventors for the obvious interest in innovation, entrepreneurs searching for innovative ways to succeed, and SME’s looking for ways to move their innovations forward. We have a very extensive audience we would like to capture, but we are not selling a product; we are helping to bring them information on innovation and entrepreneurship in order to help them succeed, which in turn helps the region and the CRI succeed.
And where do we find the majority of our target audience who choose social media? Twitter. Twitter is great for sending out links to articles, or spreading our own curated content; presentations (slideshare) and blogs . For the CRI Twitter is what works. There are still some members of our audience (50+) that choose not to be on-line and we have worked hard at maintaining those relationships. For that audience we still have town hall meetings, traditional print media, and road side signage (Need a patent?) to highlight we are here to help ‘move innovation forward’. But a key factor to our choice in Twitter is many of the influencers that shape our region are there. So we need to be.
It is just good strategy to work towards satisfying your target audience. In the last few years we performed three different surveys to find our target audience and those (3) surveys were answered only regionally. Now, with on line networking and wide spread media we do not have those geographic boundaries any longer. Our audience is becoming more global each day………so that is another factor to consider when trying to target your community. How broad is your bulls eye? Time for a new survey……
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 