NextStage Methodology Part 1: The Audience Is...?
NextStage engagements often begin with us saying to clients, "Tell me about your audience." The best responses come from clients who have spent time and money researching their audience. Less helpful responses start with, "Umm...well...ah...let me see..." These responses are expensive because they indicate the client doesn't know their audience well enough to market successfully to them.
It is NextStage's belief that you can't market successfully to anybody until you know who they are, what they think, how they think, what they respond to and what they'll respond with. The smaller your target audience, the more you must design specifically for it. Large audiences are easy to design for; keep it simple! In all cases, the safest design method is one I described at the San Francisco Emetrics Summit as similar to the first contact scenarios in "Star Trek." People with my training and background often learn this as: The first message must be instructions on how to build a receiver.
That statement is the stopping point for many. You need to answer two questions the statement is asking before you can make it work: Who's sending that first message? Who's receiving it?
Most people think, "I want to get a message to my audience, so I'm sending and they're receiving." Good answer and full of problems. It's very challenging to create actionable instructions for an audience if you don't know much about them.
The correct answer is something like this: "I want to get a message to my audience, so they must teach me how to create a message they will act upon."
Whoosh! The first message is not from you to your market, it's from your market to you and is: "This is what will get our attention, so this is what has to be in your marketing message."
The first message is to you from them. It contains instructions on how to craft a message they will willingly receive and favorably act upon, for example, how to build a receiver they will be able to use.
NextStage's most widely used method to help clients build receivers involves placing a small piece of tracking code on the client site. NextStage's tracking is different from web analytics tracking, behavioral tracking, et cetera., because we're not interested in analyzing websites, we're interested in analyzing people. NextStage's tracking determines visitor logical processes, cognitive processes, decision styles, memorization methods and emotional cues. There are more than 80 items at present, and we're adding more as our research progresses. These 80 items cull down to about 45 directly actionable items for our clients: age, gender, buying styles, best branding strategies, impact ratios, touch factors, education level, income level and what NextStage collectively calls the CB/EM -- Cognitive, Behavioral/Effective and Motivational -- matrix.
In the case of Emetrics, NextStage has been tracking site visitors' cognitive, behavioral/effective and motivational activity on the Emetrics Summit site since March 1, 2007, so we have a rich CB/EM matrix of the existing Emetrics audience information to work with.