Even though BITE of Art initiative and its BITE CABM are made to contribute to development of new young audience of contemporary art on European scale and that target audience is already to certain degree selected, there are still many things we should do here in order to create effective communication campaigns. Young audience is still very broad term that we intent to brought down and segment it. Though phrase like “target audience” or “target group” are not catchy and sound too bureaucratic for something that should be creative process, we should consider these phrases as the one helping you to identify a certain number of people similar enough to form a coherent group that you can communicate to and that you as a cultural operator find important. Some adjusted definition we can relate to is:
“Target audience is group of people that somehow benefit from artistic activities and other programs of the cultural operators.”
No one can afford to target everyone in their communication appearances. That’s why we are now bringing you on the process of creating your “Audience persona” – a semi-fictional characterization of your target audience. It is a typical character representing your target audience. This process is going to help us better understand people we would like to attract to our exhibition spaces and artistic programmes.
This process will lead you to setting precise communication approach to target audience, including going to the places they are mostly spending their time, adjust language we should use in communication with them and provoke their motivation for cultural and artistic education and enrichment.
Ahead of you are two tasks in order to develop your audience persona:
1. Brainstorming with your team and a do lot of research activities.
2. Translation of collected/generated data into useful information and segmentation of your target audience.
Here are some questions you can place in front of your team for discussion about your audience persona:
- Who are they? Define their gender, age, level of and direction of education;
- What is their primary sphere of occupation? Define a job they are doing, industry they are in, skills and knowledge they should have, etc;
- How their leisure time looks like? Think of the activities they are doing from the moment they wake up before they go to the work and after finishing with it before returning to sleep. Discuss how their everyday looks like, what are the activities they need to do;
- Think of the artistic and cultural services you are offering. Can they somehow help them overcome some life challenges they are facing? Are they critically addressing issues they are bothered with in daily life? Or think about positive aspect of it. What would they value most and why?
- Define places where they inform themselves. In our CABM you will find some useful tips from the research we have conducted related to this. Discuss their decision-making process related to visiting or consuming artistic and cultural content;
- What are the main reasons why they are not visiting contemporary art programs and your work? Figuring this out will help you to address it in the very core of your communication
- What are your audience‘s motivations for using digital and social media? Can your artistic activities help them to achieve these wants, needs and desires via social content or other marketing activities?
Take care that you do not get into trap of answering to these questions from your personal point of view. Try to get in their shoes. If you have someone who looks like your audience persona, invite him/her and talk about their life. This way you will learn much more.
Of course, you should think about many other questions which you can use to describe your audience persona. Also, you can make as many personas as you find useful. However, at the end of this process, it is important to do a prioritization of all audience personas. Discuss this with a team and make list of audience personas, starting with most important one at the top and going down to the least important at the bottom. There are many criteria for prioritization like impact, size, influence, costs, etc.
Once you do segmentation of the target audience, following as much as possible different characteristics of each sub-target group, try to simply define communication logic and approach to the each sub group. You can use this table matrix to populate and cross data:
TARGETED AUDIENCE
COMMUNICATION LOGIC AND JUSTIFICATION
Sub-target group 1
Draft as much as precise communication approach to this sub-target group as much as it is immanent to their previously defined characteristics/
