Your audience is everything in the world of sports media. In order to sell what you’re creating, you have to know who you’re selling it to, and you have to know them well.
In the process of creating your brand and laying the foundation, identifying your audience is one of the most important steps. And when conducting brand analysis later on, having an up-to-date understanding of your audience in an ever-evolving market is just as essential.
There’s always a lot of talk about finding your target audience, but it’s also important to remember that you can have more than one target audience. You can have more than one group of people, or audience demographic, that you intend on reaching with your content.
With this in mind, how do you go about the process of segmenting your audience, understanding where to target with which pieces of content, and ensuring that all of your efforts are channeled effectively and efficiently? Here’s a helpful rundown.
6 Steps to Performing Audience Segmentation
1. Determine Your Brand Mission
This is an aforementioned foundational step; this part should be finished by the time you start the process of audience segmentation. But that doesn’t make it any less relevant to the process.
To know your audience, you first need to set up your brand mission. As a composite, what does your brand provide in terms of value? Will you be a team-specific brand? A sport-specific brand? Will you engage in a specific medium? All of these brand characteristics trickle down and help shape the audience base you intend to pursue.
For this reason, having a clear understanding of your brand mission is imperative before taking the next steps. If you misunderstand your brand’s mission or placement, it could impact your ability to properly target audiences down the road.
2. Segment Audiences Based on Their Needs
When you establish your brand, you have a composite audience in mind that you intend to reach. For example, if you have a football-focused company with a broad brand umbrella, your overarching mission might be to inform and engage football fans. Your composite market might simply be passionate football fans as a whole.
But within this vast umbrella, there are subcategories that can’t be ignored. Continuing with the football audience, many football fans have a more direct focus on their specific teams of interest. Many football fans are avid players of fantasy football. Some football fans engage in betting. Some crave NFL Draft content. All of these groups are different segments that you can separate beneath that broad umbrella.
This is the first step of the audience segmentation process. Break up these micro-audiences based on their specific needs: What do they desire from your content?
3. Ensure Minimal Overlap and Maximum Audience Exclusivity
Through the initial process of audience segmentation, you should make sure that your micro-categories have little to no overlap with each other. You want your audience segmentation results to form a composite image of your audience as a whole. Thus, if you have overlap and aren’t mutually exclusive with each subgroup, you might fail to cover every segment.
Another football example is fantasy football users versus BestBall users. BestBall is a type of fantasy football, so you wouldn’t identify it as a completely different segment. Doing so could run the risk of spending more energy and resources than required on a segment that, while important, is only one small part of the complete picture.
4. Assess Your Brand Alignment With Each Audience’s Needs
Once you’ve segmented your composite audience based on each subgroup’s specific needs, then you can use that knowledge to synthesize your segmentation results. This is where you assess your brand alignment with each audience’s needs. How well do you fulfill the desires of each smaller audience?
During this step, having a detailed knowledge of your composite audience and all of its subgroups is especially vital. Because it’s not just your audience’s content needs that are being assessed. It’s the medium needs, too. Some audiences will favor written content. Others will favor audio or video. It’s up to you to have this knowledge on-hand within each category, so you can determine which subgroups your brand aligns with best.
5. Rank Primary and Secondary Audiences Based on Alignment
You’ve segmented your subgroups from your composite brand audience, and you’ve assessed your brand’s alignment with each subgroup’s needs. Now, you can start the final process of ranking primary and secondary audiences based on your alignment results.
This is where you identify your prime target audience, and separate them from other secondary audiences that, while notable, may command less attention or less inputs from your content department. With these primary and secondary rankings, you can channel your resources where it’ll yield the most production.
6. Monitor Audience Data Across Content Mediums
As is the case with many processes and cycles, this too is an open-ended sequence. Even after you’ve ranked your audience segments based on alignments, and received a clear picture of where you should target your energy, the work of brand and audience analysis doesn’t end.
Continue to monitor your usage data across different mediums, and stay up-to-date with audience developments across different categories. The modern sports media industry is constantly changing, so staying vigilant with audience analysis can keep you one step ahead.
Playbook
- Determine your brand mission
- Segment audiences based on their needs
- Ensure no segments have substantial overlap
- Assess brand alignment with each segment
- Rank primary and secondary audiences
- Monitor and review across mediums
