The holy grail of marketing for many organisations revolves around either increasing the frequency of the people who already attend – or attracting people like them - or encouraging different people who are currently not attending to engage with your organisation.
This guide centres around the hypotheses that neither of the above will happen unless you know more about the people who are attending or you think would like to attend – who they are, what kind of lives they live, and most crucially what they think of your organisation i.e. why they attend or why they don’t. Once you have some information that you know you can rely on, it is more straight forward to identify target groups or segments for audience development and marketing.
Most organisations have information about their attenders, whether it is in box office systems, visitor books, from research or in the vast resource which is your staff. However, it may not be perfect, complete, consistent or statistically sound. Fear not, with a small amount of work or additional information it can become a gold-mine if approached with an enquiring mind.
Overall this guide offers a range of techniques for using information to better understand hot spots for greater penetration of audience groups and to work out how the issues associated with ice-blocks, or groups of potential, affect why they don’t attend at all or as often as you would like.
It is then up to individual organisations to assess what return on investment would be acceptable in working with these target groups – based on the organisational and audience development objectives, existing knowledge and experience and the available resources of time and money.
This resource is put together from the perspective of someone working within an organisation in marketing or audience development, who is neither an expert researcher or statistician. Where more complex explanations are useful, there are links to further ADUK resources.
The raw materials
The type of information an organisation holds on its visitors or audiences may differ depending on the organisation or sector, but the essentials are the same. Where one organisation has baseline information of one type, it will have to make up the ground with another type of information.
The most effective use of your research is to use it in combination to get as full a picture as possible so that you can fully understand where there is potential or opportunities for penetration - whether it is an audience monitoring survey, desk research, data analysis (also see Roisin Jones' Panning for Gold and Heather Maitland's Buried Treasure), or a visitor survey. You might also have access to TGI Area Profile Reports, to geodemographic profiling tools such as Acorn or Mosaic, or have done your own catchment area analysis or mapping.
By using information in combination you can increase your understanding, identify issues and, with an eye to the information’s reliability, develop your own intelligent targeting and be confident in your decision making.
Hot spots or ice blocks can be ultimately identified and described as audience segments depending on what you are offering and how the benefits might be perceived by the customer. This segmentation approach results in a practical marketing tool for developing audiences from your hot spots or ice blocks.
In using this guide, you can either dip into the sections as a refresher or work through the steps as you go in search of hot spots or ice blocks for your organisation.
