Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market - audience

This is a continuation of the post on 27/12/2009 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.

I have covered the first (1. Make it a strategic business imperative) and today I will cover the second:

1. Know your audience

 The four remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:

1. Share openly
2. Cultivate the media
3. Write and speak about your campaign
4.  Pump up your content online

Action 2: Know your audiences

Knowing your audience intimately should be a prerequisite for any brand campaign, let alone a thought leadership campaign.

To know your audiences means to understand their needs and to understand how you can add value to their lives. The best thought leadership ideas mainly come from the desire to enrich the quality of the target audiences’ lives.

Once a company puts itself in the shoes of its target audiences, it is better able to identify their needs and how it can influence what that audience should think, feel and do with its services or products.

How do you get to know your audience? If your marketing department hasn’t already done so, you research them: where they live, what they consume, what micro and macro issues impact their lives, what their dreams and aspirations are, what their perceptions are of your brand and what values they associate with your brand.

Thought leadership means engaging with your audience

Where possible you also talk directly with them through focus groups or online. You could live with them or go on site visits with a community leader. Combine this with customer visits with the sales team; picking up the phone and speaking to them; hosting coffee chats or customer lunches; and using that wonderful two-way, online communications tool called a blog to facilitate dialogue.

Depending on your business and the nature of the product or service you sell, it is up to you to pick which forms of communication are best suited to your customer group.

The point is you should be listening to what they have to say in order to understand the issues important in their lives as well as the factors impacting their purchasing decisions.  This combined with a number of other factors such as your areas of specialty, pockets of intellectual property you may already have and others, should inform the direction you take with your thought leadership campaign.

The more you understand about your audience the more able you are to form a relationship based on trust and mutual understanding.

Remember their point of view is all about them not you.  You don’t have to agree with why an audience feels or acts they way they do you merely have to understand it and know how to provide information that addresses this.