Marketers spend a lot of time choosing who their target audience is and finding ways to attract their attention. They ask themselves, "Who is our ideal customer? Which are their pain points? What do they think about? What do they need?" As new technologies and channels bring a wider array of content to choose from from the user perspective, audiences are experiencing a process of fragmentation. They have much more autonomy in order to when and where they consume media. But more importantly, they can easily find content about topics which really interest them. It's what we call niche audiences. Branded content specialists like those who we'll interview during this course, agree about the need to adjust content to smaller and smaller communities. Groups organically created by their passion for a certain activity or belief by common interests of any kind. A niche is simply a group of people who have the same interests in a particular subject. There are millions of them, soccer lovers, ice cream lovers, dog lovers, people who suffer a strange illness, fishermen, et cetera. This category is if you think about it are really too general, and niches divide themselves really into sub niches, if you want to call them that way. So, if you want to address people who like fishing for example, the audience would be quite big, many millions worldwide. But if you really want to make a connection with the consumer with a fisherman, if you want to make them select your content over thousands of other possibilities. If you want them to choose your book above any other book on your bedside table which is what writers used to say before the Internet, you you need to tailor your content offerings a bit further. Does your target audience loves sea fishing or fly fishing or pike fishing or kayak fishing? Internet has allowed for the creation of ever more specific niches and the goal of content creators should be to focus as much as they can on these small groups with very specific interests or problems or concerns or passions. In the advertising industry, this is called the narrow casting. It's the dissemination of information to a narrow audience not to the broader public. Fortunately, it's not that difficult to find out what people care about, and when I say people, I should say your target communities. There are many extremely sophisticated tools out there to analyze what groups are talking about or searching about. Interest targeting can be based on real time conversations today which allow for immediate reaction from companies that have enough editorial resources. They can change their story immediately with the flow of the conversation and tailor them to individuals, even allowing those people, those users, to modify their own stories, as we will see in our last module. Listening to your audience is easier than never before. It's only the first step in a consistent branded content strategy, but an essential one. Because if you want to engage people in any conversation, shouldn't you first listen to what they have to say? Put yourself in the consumer shoes. What is on their mind? What do they need? What is your intended audience going to do with your content? What functional role has the highest propensity to engage with your content. Companies need branded content, but the audience generally doesn't like it unless it's written or produce properly, and unless it's truly meets your interests. In our digital world today, trying to embrace too much audience, often leads to no repercussion at all.
