Creating Effective Audience Messages

Using personas and segmentation analysis techniques to help PR practitioners better understand audiences and develop appropriate messaging strategies 

Written by Neil Cary

What is segmentation analysis?

 

Market segmentation is a technique used by marketers and researchers to divide markets into distinct groups. Each group should be distinguished by unique or different characteristics. They should also be readily identifiable, so that each group can be effectively communicated with.

Why is this important for PR practitioners?

 

The benefits of segmentation are obvious. It is better to split your target market into logical groups rather than addressing the whole market in the same way. The idea is that distinct groups can be marketed to specifically address their needs. Rather than advertise products broadly to a generic market, segmentation allows us to target the most attractive groups with appropriate messages (based on their needs, demands and who they are) that are likely to illicit the most favourable response.

 

The Need to Develop Targeted Messaging:

 

• Understand consumer behavior, motivations and personalities
• Design relevant messages and target appropriate media
• Demonstrate market knowledge and deliver effective messaging

Increasingly, the most effective PR activities are rooted in understanding more and more about the target market. Consumer insight will tell much about behaviour, motivations and even personality. Knowing this will enable messaging to be relevant and highly targeted, including which media channels to cover.

 

Credible segmentation analysis is a powerful way of understanding markets and bringing credibility to the clients PR agencies serve.

 

What is a persona?

Personas are a simple and often, very effective way of describing an audience and their motivations.

 

There are two ways of segmenting audiences and creating personas, typically used in PR:

 

• Pen Portraits/Personas
• Segmentation Studies
  

 

The simple way of creating personas is to describe the audience profile you want to reach. Having a strong sense of the “right audience” is no bad thing. You can go a long way in constructing profiles based on hypothetical characteristics. But they remain hypothetical, unless the personas are based on real data. Segmentation studies (sometimes known as needs based segmentation) are used to understand audiences, and develop distinct audience groups. They are based on consumer needs, preferences for brands, their attitudes and motivations. In other words, real consumer insight, collected typically in large quantitative surveys (e.g. 1,000 online interviews).

 

It all comes back to messaging – the ability to know your audience, their behaviour, motivations and what media they consume. From this knowledge, creating appropriate, relevant and resonant messaging strategies is so much easier than basing such a strategy purely on intuition.

 

 

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Research Articles from Redshift Research - Personas and Segmentation for PR agencies