Now in its eleventh year, the Ideal Home Show will be celebrating ‘The Best of British’ in 2019, taking place this week at Olympia London. The event will showcase 600 exhibitors, and their experts will offer insider knowledge on everything from interior design inspiration and landscape gardening, to tech trends and advice on wellbeing.
But with so many innovations in a market already so saturated, it’s getting more and more difficult for brands to prove they’re worth a second look. Whether you’re an established business or a smaller start up, the following consumer PR tips and advice provide an overview of how you can communicate to new audiences, whilst ensuring you don’t alienate your existing customer base.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
Defining your target audience: Creating a core customer profile is invaluable in order to establish what grabs your audience’s attention. It is important to fully understand your target demographic so the more detailed this profile the better. Try to identify age, gender, habits, hobbies, influencers and motivations.
Market Research: The next step is to investigate the consumer habits of your target audience by asking a few key questions:
- Where do they shop?
- What do they look for in their chosen brands?
- What influences their decision to buy?
- What celebrities or trends do they follow?
An effective way of gaining this invaluable market research is through focus groups. Not only can you garner insight into your chosen audience, but you can also gain advice and feedback on your brand.
Once you have collated this research, make sure to keep this as your bible and refer to it throughout the branding, marketing and communication of your product.
Effective Research in action: OPRO
An example of a campaign where The PHA Group engaged a new audience successfully, by utilising research into their target audience, was with OPRO. OPRO recruited PHA Social to overhaul their social media strategy; make in-roads in the North American market by targeting US-based audiences and improving online sales of products.
Our findings from our in-house social listening platform, suggested mouthguards are used beyond combat sports such as rugby and MMA and more for everyday activities such as cycling and sleep-grinding. So, we used this research to launch a wider social media strategy that attempted to engage with both a traditional audience of athletes, sporting clubs and organisations, schools and students, as well as a new audience of cycling enthusiasts, sleep grinders and those interested in preserving oral health.
We launched with Mouthguard Day, a national day owned by OPRO that delivered significant spikes in user engagements, user-generated content and ambassador interactions. We oversaw huge spikes in performance across the individual channels, including a 6,000% increase in audience reach on Facebook which amassed over 100 individual mentions on the day from ambassadors and partners on Twitter. In total, we reached a combined total of 4.4m accounts across the social media channels, generating 5.2m impressions in total.
INTERACT WITH INFLUENCERS
Identify your influencers: Journalists and bloggers are hugely influential in the consumer market and placing your product or service on their pages or site can be a great way of targeting a new audience. Research the relevant publications and sites that your target audience interact with to identify who you should be communicating with.
Get some face time: It is important you target the main influencers of your audience and there is no better way to do that than through hosting face-to-face activities such as:
- Press days
- Events
- Desk-side appointments
Activities of this kind will allow you to communicate your brand message succinctly, whilst helping you to build a valuable relationship.
Interacting with Influencers in action: Ninja Coffee Bar
Leading household appliance brand SharkNinja wanted to work with relevant digital influencers to support our UK launch PR campaign for the new Ninja Coffee Bar. Importantly, their core customer is women aged 30-50 and therefore our campaign would need to be relevant for this audience to ensure that it reached the right people.
To amplify the launch of the Ninja Coffee Bar in the UK and reach the target customer demographic for the product, The PHA Group decided to recruit high profile parenting vloggers to record themselves making their ‘dream cup of coffee’ using the Ninja Coffee Bar. The video content would be captured and then posted to coincide with International Coffee Day on 1st October.
We secured partnerships with influential ‘mummy’ vloggers – Mrs Meldrum and Lived with Love – who both produced video content using the Ninja Coffee Bar to create their ‘dream cup of coffee’. These videos saw over 10,000 YouTube views after being posted on International Coffee Day. The content was then also cross promoted via each influencers blog and social media channels as well as all of Ninja’s relevant online channels. Each video provided in-depth information about the new product showcasing its innovative technology and range of features. We also worked with a variety of other influencers including Launeden, Rosie Fortescue, Certified Nosh, Liberty London Girl and Sweet Monday to deliver over 35 further pieces of influencer content for the campaign, reaching an audience of over 1.2 million.
The tips and advice given above provide an outline of some of the key elements a successful PR strategy will incorporate to engage a new audience… but stay tuned for more in the next few days. If you would like to speak to experts regarding a campaign you are looking to launch or ways in which you can engage with a new audience, please get in touch with our Consumer PR team.