Michael Brito is a digital strategist, published author, TEDx speaker, adjunct professor, and avid 49ers and Lakers fan with over 20+ years of experience helping brands break through the clutter and reach their audience with game-changing marketing and communications programs.
He is Head of Digital Analytics at Zeno Group, Silicon Valley's first agency on a mission of record one click+like+tweet+share & conversion at a time.
Ok, so you have a product that you want to sell to IT professionals. Maybe it’s a data or cloud platform, enterprise security software, ERP, Unified Communications … whatever.
And let’s assume you are planning for a full-scale integrated marketing campaign... media relations, social media, influencers, demand gen, search and display. You even have an employee activation plan. You’ve gone through rounds and rounds of edits to your messaging, creative. You have all your KPIs documented. The CMO is bought in. Your agencies are ready to go. Everyone is excited. And then you launch.
And then you scratch your head wondering why the campaign isn’t performing the way you expected. Maybe it’s the agency. Let’s blame them. The targeting is off. The ads are wrong. The website broke. But the question I have for you is … do you really know who your audience is? And if so, did you spend time segmenting that audience in order to be as laser-focused as possible?
The reality is that all IT professionals have one thing in common. They work in IT. But outside of that, there are hundreds of variables and characteristics that make them unique. Now Google is your friend but it's only going to give you limited information. Now I am pretty good at using Google (yes, I use boolean) and I found some good nuggets. This one from IDG.
And there’s some really good data here, which I will highlight here:
Ok, now moving down to the Slideshare presentation. Here is an interesting nugget based on what we just saw about content. We can see that download consumption varies by the topic or technology.
And this data is from Adobe.
I’m familiar with this study because I have referenced it before. The study examined IT decision-makers’ top concerns for 2020.
I also found this to be interesting - what factors influence purchase decisions:
I want to introduce a new concept called multi-segment audience intelligence. And the process involves dissecting and clustering sub audiences – analyzing each of their sharing habits, conversational patterns, demographics, and psychographics in order to get actionable and defendable insights that you can use to make data-informed decisions.
For the purposes of this blog post, I did a quick analysis of IT decision-makers.
And our cluster analysis shows each of these sub-audiences and how they are connected. Because I work with a lot of B2B and technology companies, I can tell you that each of these IT audiences is very different - not just in terms of job titles or functions, but also in their interests. Even within the C-suite and developers which would be a separate analysis, you’d find very different interests and characteristics.
Moving on to what I call an audience matrix for audience intelligence. The top row represents each of the audiences we just looked at.
In the columns, I added a few variables that I like to use:
Now I don't have time to do a full analysis and fill this matrix in, but if I were planning a campaign, I would go through this exercise and share it with my internal stakeholders. You’d be surprised at how different each one of these audiences is from one another.