Public relations is all about connecting with the right audience at the right time in the right way with the right message. By knowing exactly who the target audience is and what they are looking for, brands can strategically develop communication plans. By knowing and understanding the audience, your brand will be able to craft tailored content aimed at a specific audience and develop long term relationships with different segments. We went to first identify our target audiences. Each company or organization has a different set of audiences. Different audiences often require a different set of messages. Audience segmentation is the process of dividing an audience into smaller groups with similar characteristics, wants and needs. Audience segmentation is based on the assumption that different groups of audience have different characteristics that influence the extent to which they pay attention to understand and act on different messages. Selection of the audience should be based on quantifiable data. Data analytics can be useful for identifying patterns. The key to optimal audience segmentation is making sure that each segment is relevant, unique, significant and locatable. Relevancy is the key to audience segmentation because each segment should have a purpose. Segments should also be unique and distinguishable from each other. While some customers may overlap into several segments, each segment should have distinctive characteristics from the others. Each segment should be significant enough in size to really matter. You want to make sure the segment is worth your effort. You also want to be able to locate each segment through at least one media channel. Here are some common ways to segment audiences. There are generally four basic types of market segmentation, behavioral demographic, psychographic and geographic. Behavioral market segmentation is focused on how consumers interact with a brand or how much they know about a brand. Demographic segmentation is grouping audiences based on similar age, gender, family, size, religion, nationality, income and education level. With psychographic segmentation, companies examine consumers lifestyles, personality, interests, opinions, social class, habits and activities to better understand their needs. Geographic information about consumers can be very helpful. Geographic segmentation takes into account what country, region, city or area consumers resided. Segmenting audiences can be very useful for PR practitioners when thinking about strategy. Early on in this specialization, we talked about the four steps in public relations. Research is always the first step. No matter if we are talking about race, ropes or our pie, we have to conduct research on the situation and the company or organization. That's just basic research becoming acquainted with our client and or the communication problem. Beyond that, PR practitioners conduct research on audiences trying to understand them and how to communicate with them in a way that accomplishes the objectives. Defining an audience, determining the appropriate messaging and identifying the right communication channels is critical in crafting any public relations strategy. In order to deploy a successful PR strategy, an intimate understanding of the niche audiences you're trying to reach, an advanced audience insights is a requirement in today's fragmented media environment. But we also have to dig beneath the numbers and learn about the audience in terms of their motivations, needs, behaviors, challenges, pain points and goals. Remember that idea of tuning in from the elaboration likelihood model? Well, that's the strategy here in public relations. If we know our audience well enough, we should know what kind of content they will tune into. Getting the key messages out to the right audience is key in effective public relations. It's important to know the different channels and platforms and the best way to use each of them. Choosing the right channel will help you build stronger relationships with your audience.
