“How to know if I’m reaching my target audience?” is without a doubt the most frequently asked measurement question I get these days. In today’s chaotic and disaggregated media landscape it’s a tough question to answer. Monitoring platforms will happily tell you where your brand or topic is appearing, and how many “alleged” eyeballs you may be reaching, but that’s very different from knowing if you are in fact getting into the eyes, minds and hearts of the people you are targeting.
Fewer and fewer people are getting their news from traditional sources these days. According to the latest Pew data more than half of Americans get at least some news from social media, over 50 million Americans regularly receive news from online influencers and a quarter of U.S. adults reported getting news from “traditional” media. So, it is clearly time to toss that old “top tier” media list and figure out where your audience actually goes for information.
The first place they go, of course, is very likely a Google Search. Google’s data will tell you that the vast majority of purchasing decisions start with a search. So, some would have you just turn your budget over the SEO folks. Another likely source of information is of course “influencers.” You could certainly search out and work with (or more likely pay) the online “experts” or “enthusiasts” that might be talking about whatever you are promoting.
But since that’s probably not in your budget, and we all want to keep the PR and Comms industry alive, lets look at some better alternatives.
An Audience Survey
The best approach would be to conduct a brief survey of your audience to find out what news they consume and what sources they trust. If you have an internal customer email list, you can use Google Forms or start a free trial with SurveySparrow and conduct a short survey for free. Or if you already do surveys, make sure you add a few questions:
- Where do you most often go to get information about xyz?
- Where do you prefer to get information?
- What sources of information do you trust the most?
If you conduct events, whether live or online, use them to conduct audience research. Before the next online event, add a few warm-up questions about where they get information. Of if it’s a live event give away free swag if they answer a few questions about their reading habits.
Absent the budget, time or inclination to conduct real research, one good alternative is SparkToro, a platform that scrapes and analyzes Google Search data to tell you where the people looking for your product are hanging out. For example, I entered the term “Public Relations Measurement” and discovered that 574 people are looking for information on that topic, and the top 10 news sources for people are searching for “Public Relations Measurement” are:
- forbes.com
- nytimes.com
- cnn.com
- theguardian.com
- bbc.com
- businessinsider.com
- msn.com
- reuters.com
- usatoday.com
- substack.com
No huge surprises but note the presence of Substack on the list. My guess is that most PR people are news junkies and that’s why they hangout on those sites. But since getting a story on PR measurement into any of those outlets is a bit farfetched, let’s see what other websites they go to. Not surprisingly the top sites are:
- prsa.org
- prowly.com
- meltwater.com
- 5wpr.com
- brand24.com
- agilitypr.com
- odwyerpr.com
- walkersands.com
- designrush.com
- prezly.com
- prdaily.com
- prweek.com
- instituteforpr.org
- everything-pr.com
- prnewsonline.com
Conveniently, Spark Toro also provides lists of podcasts and YouTube channels that those “PR Measurement” seekers are paying attention to. So, an action item might be to see if I can get on these YouTube channels:
- PRLab: The Public Relations Channel
- Institute for PR
- DesignRush
- Clutch.co
- PRWeekUS
- The Jeff Crilley Show
- Pew Research Center
- BambooHR
- PitchBook
- New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA)
SparkToro provides you with about a dozen other data points, not all of which may be relevant, but at least it’s a place to start.
Where is the competition?
If you are using a monitoring service, I hope you are already monitoring coverage of the competition (or opposition). If not do a Google News search and see if they are showing up any place you aren’t.
