Using Audience Spectrum Subsegments | Get personal with your profiling

As with any segmentation model, it is essential to make sure that Audience Spectrum is relating directly and efficiently to your own audiences and program, and can be implemented effectively by internal teams across your organisation.

Getting even more personal is a great internal exercise to help kick-start or refresh your implementation. As organisations, we often talk about 'our audience' as a whole entity but, in reality, we have multiple audiences with different expectations, often unique to our geographic location and program, who attend for various reasons and behave in slightly different ways... even if they fall into the same Audience Spectrum segments. We need to understand them as personally as possible, and the Audience Spectrum subsegments have been designed to help with that kind of precision profiling.

To get to grips with how the Subsegments can help you build this more nuanced and actionable audience picture, try this exercise at your next team meeting, looking at the top 3-5 Audience Spectrum Subsegments on your books:

• Step 1: Sketch their outline. For each sub-segment, draw, write, and collage a description of your archetypal audience member using the descriptions and pen portraits as a guide. 
• Step 2: Get to know them. We want to get in their mindset, so give them a name, decide where they live in your local area, their type of home, what do they do in their spare time, etc.
• Step 3: Consider their motivations. With the basics in place, ask why they attend your organisation, what their main drivers are for coming and what might increase their engagement.
• Step 4: Put yourself in their shoes. What external or personal factors might impact them in the next 12 months in their daily lives, and how could this affect their engagement? 
• Step 5: Look at your relationship. Ask yourselves how you can start to increase your engagement with them: what small elements can you implement to help increase their overall engagement? How could you personalise your communications with them in order to achieve that?
• Step 6: Keep checking in. Write these up into simple notes and keep them on hand as you monitor how your audiences change and develop. Then set a date to regroup and review after 6 months, to see if your personas are still accurate.