The huge power of knowing why your audience is where they are

When a Polish engineer-turned-philosopher coined the phrase “the map is not the territory” almost a century ago, he definitely was not referring to an audience’s online habits.

And yet, it’s a truth worth keeping in mind when dealing with the demographic data that is so often the starting point for a campaign or program.

Demographic data is of course useful, even essential, but it is also flattening – and potentially misleading – reducing an audience into an average consumer who doesn’t exist, and stripping context from their content habits.

Asking questions

Take, for example, some of the lessons we learned recently when working with a major association for allied health professionals.

The organisation enlisted Mahlab to help boost engagement with its future membership – people studying physiotherapy at university.

The traditional student-to-member pipeline had been severely disrupted by the pandemic and it was clear the organisation’s previous reliance on face-to-face events was not enough in an age of hybrid-remote study.

It would be easy to take a look at the demographics of this audience – predominantly Gen Z – and make some quick assumptions about what a campaign to reach them might look:

• TikTok should be part of mix (Gen Z is Officially Using TikTok More Than Any Other Social Media Platform)
• Facebook shouldn’t be a high priority (Facebook fights for relevance as Gen Z turns away)
• Email is out (Emails are over. Just ask Gen Z.)
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But knowing that demographic data is no replacement for audience understanding, we dug a little deeper. We reached out to almost a dozen current undergraduate students and recent grads, conducting in-depth interviews to understand their content consumption habits – what they consume, where, when, how and why.

Admittedly, it was a small sample, so we took what we learned from those interviews and made a whole swag of hypotheses we could test with a much bigger sample, running an online survey with a couple hundred more current students, seeing what stood up to scrutiny.

What we found

As soon as we started our interviews, it was clear that broad demographic data didn’t do this audience justice.

One of our first interviewees, when asked how often he would use TikTok to learn about physiotherapy, audibly scoffed, explaining that among his peers the platform was seen as the realm of over-the-top chiropractors, not physiotherapists.

As for Facebook, many of them admitted it wasn’t their first-choice social platform for communicating with friends, but when it came to anything to do with their studies or future profession, it was number one. Why? Almost every university had a student-run private Facebook forum for physiotherapy students that was often the primary channel for learning about events, resources and the profession in general.

Another near-universal finding was that even among those who didn’t love email, it was actually the channel which offered a 100% guaranteed way to reach them. This was because of the simple fact that every student knew the horrors that could befall them if they ever missed an email from their uni course coordinators. Suddenly, uni course coordinators – or more specifically their email outbox – made sense as a powerful distribution channel.

In all of the above, it wasn’t that the demographic data was incorrect – it’s just that the real-world context transformed it.

This is particularly true in B2B communications. We all have work selves that are (hopefully) at least partially delineated from the other versions of our selves that exist in the rest of our lives.

This can manifest in many ways. For example, someone might spend hours a day on YouTube but resolutely refuse to click on related to their day job, for fear of polluting their algorithmic feed with what they try to leave at work.

Unflattening the audience

Of course, people’s reports of their own content habits have their weaknesses too. For instance, tn the pre-digital era, newspaper reader surveys consistently reported a higher level of self-professed interest in worthy topics such as foreign affairs that have been seldom replicated now that newspapers can get real-time data on how many readers are actually clicking on international coverage versus, say, reality TV recaps.

It just reinforces the fact that no strategy can ever be set and forget. The better you understand an audience, the better you can plan, but no matter how much research you do before you launch a program, there will always be big lessons in performance data that add more context to your research.

You need a map, of course, but you also need to look up from the map every now and then to see if it still matches the territory.