Your Audience is NOT Monogamous

Building audience relationships fills seats

Consumers for the most part date around.  Sure, you probably have a core audience that is in a committed relationship with you.  But this is usually less than 50% of your audience.  The other 50% of your audience is seeing other people.  How much emphasis should you put on these different levels of audience relationships?

Marriage is your priority.  In market segmentation speak a marriage is your relationship with your rabid fan base.  It’s your heavy users, season ticket holders, your evangelists, and your best friends.  Like any other marriage it takes work to keep it together.  Both your audience and you will likely undergo change throughout the relationship.  Just like a real marriage it takes lots of love and lots of work to sustain this commitment.

Most of your audience is dating you.   Medium or light users are how these segments are characterized.    They are trying you on… seeing if you are a fit.  In order to woo this audience you need to also show the love.  But be careful not to do so at the expense of your committed relationships.  For instance, offering discounts only to folks you are dating sends a really bad message to your married partners!

Quite often organizations put too much emphasis on dating or even non dating relationships.  Constant reinforcement for developing new audiences can result in churning and a vicious cycle of new recruitment to replace audience.

Point is; it’s all about relationships. Everybody is important.  Everything is important. Show the love, do the work and build audience relationships.