Jerry McCoy, who works as a community relations project manager at the Arizona Department of Transportation in Phoenix, Arizona, brings diverse experience in branding and marketing to the one of the state's largest organizations.
One key element of Mr. McCoy's work over the past two decades is tactical communications, which requires strategically identifying and then targeting specific audiences an organization wants to reach.
Before doing anything else with a prospective audience, public relations and communications professionals must start with audience exploration and research. Some of these exploration and research techniques include:
Researching analytics data -- whether it's looking at who already uses a product or service, or who is visiting an organization's website, this data can show where an organization or brand is surprisingly strong or starting to lose ground.
Using solid empathetic reasoning -- It is important to get "into the head" of a potential target audience member or customer. Even something as simple as trying to search for information on the program or service in question, or looking at how that service is positioned on websites the target audience uses, can help.
Finally, if an organization has tools to effectively segment out the performance of existing campaigns among different audiences, that data can help during audience exploration. Marketing communications professionals should look at whether an existing campaign over performs or under performs with a potential new audience, and assess reasons that might happen.
