What We Know to Be True

When it comes to communicating with a broad audience, knowing them is the first step in reaching them. The smaller the audience the easier it is to know what will resonate with them. But when you're dealing with thousands of people, you can waste a lot of money on ineffectual communications and marketing if you haven't done your research on what makes the majority of them 'tick'.

There really is no such thing as a homogenous group - we are all individuals, and we all think and react with our own individual bias or emotion. While some research can be too broad sweeping - so much so that it really gives you no direction at all, pursuing a communications or marketing initiative without some basic knowledge is a big no-no. Individuality aside, good research will find the trends and commonalities that help you to better know your audience as a whole.

You can usually tell that you need research done when you're having a meeting with a group of people who keep saying things like "They probably think..." "They probably want..." "I think they're ..." "I think they might...". Not the most solid analysis to base a $5000 campaign on let alone a $100,000 campaign.

Some research is already done for us and if you have a good sense of the demographic of your audience, you can rely to some extent on sources like Statistics Canada to make some assumptions. In fundraising, for example, existing research generally shows that older people give to health care and younger people give to animal welfare. You can draw a conclusion that older people feel their mortality a bit stronger while younger people are still pretty emotional about their pets.

However, what if you want to reach an audience that is a mish mash of old and young? Working and retired and still in school? Multi-cultural? Multi-lingual? If you have a good list of questions and a good sampling of your entire prospective audience, then you're going to end up with some good answers to what will reach them best.

I'm no expert in developing those questions - that's why I hire outstanding research firms (like Viewpoints Ltd in Winnipeg for example). That's their job. My job is to take those results, the firm's analysis of them, and create the marketing and communications miracles that will resonate with my target audiences. And incidentally, the projects I've worked on over the past two decades that were based on solid research ALWAYS resonated with the audience.