Maximize your success by knowing your target market and media
Getting your target media right is crucial for the success of your PR campaign. Pitching a cute parenting story to the Australian Financial Review is unlikely to get picked up, as the AFR is quite obviously not the right target. Sometimes though, it’s not that obvious, and trying to work out the right target media for your PR can be hard. The media is made up of so many thousands of individual journalists, bloggers and organisations, not to mention the many wide range of media types, from newspapers and other forms of print, to TV, online media and radio. How can you know which ones you should go to the effort of contacting and pitching your story?
The place to start when defining your target media is your target market. In general terms, we all know who the target market is for our business. You might answer ‘cyclists’, ‘homeowners’, ‘CEOs’, ‘young men’ – but where it really starts to get interesting is when you start to narrow it down and consider your secondary markets. For instance, at HYOPR we think of small business owners as our target market. But business owners is still a very broad market, and that really limits us to broad appeal messaging in our PR and means we would miss opportunities to communicate more effectively with our secondary markets.
So instead of lumping all business owners together, we segment our primary target market into smaller, niche markets. This includes business mums, entrepreneurs, retailers, franchisees, product wholesalers, inventors and everything in between! We can even get more specific and segment further by location, type of business/entrepreneur/retailer, age of business etc. That way, we can tailor our message to each specific market – after all, you don’t use the same language or examples for florists as you would use for software start-ups, or financial advisors, or musicians, do you?
So who are your secondary target markets? Perhaps you are a women’s fashion retailer, in which case you may think you are just targeting women, but actually, you could break it down into retirees, young singles, mums and businesswomen, as well as by style, interest and personality. If you are an accountant, you may break down your target market into people running family businesses, franchisees, young entrepreneurs and start-ups or retirees. Perhaps you run an online store and you sell hampers – your secondary target markets might be young women, young men, new mums, grandparents…and so on. Read more…