What Is an Audience Statement?

Building an audience statement is the first step to a direct mail campaign.

An audience statement is a short paragraph that outlines a target audience’s demographics and vital information that may include such things as marital status, division of time (work, home, leisure), priorities, what is sought after in a product, sports interests and other criteria that help to shape the notion of an ideal customer. Thorough and careful consideration must go into its creation as this will affect both marketing and other groups as well.

Goal

Creating and achieving goals are crucial to any marketing campaign. When developing an audience statement, it is important to not only create a goal but to maintain this focus throughout the particular marketing campaign’s process where the audience statement is at the forefront of this development. Questions such as “What are we looking to accomplish?” or “What would we like our end result to be?” serve as good starting points to achieving this goal.

Collaboration

Though the marketing team will be the group to primarily drive the creation of the audience statement, it is equally important that other groups within the organization also contribute to its formation. Groups that may have critical feedback in this implementation will include sales and key members of the executive team, but other groups such as customer service, engineering and research & development may also provide unique perspectives that might help shape the audience statement as well.

Uses

While postcard and/or direct mail marketing campaigns are the primary campaigns utilizing an audience statement, it can also be applied to many other broad-based marketing campaigns such as newspaper or magazine advertising, large permission marketing (email marketing) campaigns, targeted search engine or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, online banner advertising or any other print/online media venue that enables one to control its targeted audience and demographic.

Considerations

There is sometimes confusion within a company between what they think their customers want and what their customers actually need in a product or service. In an effort to discover the truth, the company may have to deploy a series of surveys and market analysis trials to help formulate an accurate audience statement.

Multi-Purpose

In addition to its primary use in a particular marketing campaign, the audience statement can also serve other purposes throughout an organization’s other groups as well. The executive team can use the audience statement as a way to ensure their long-term, strategic plans are consistent with their current target audience as established in the audience statement while the research & development or engineering groups can use the audience statement as a sounding board to ensure their future efforts are consistent with their company’s business and marketing objectives.

References

• Direct Mail Marketing: What's Your Audience Statement?
• Postcard Marketing and its Audience Statement
• Marketing With an Audience Statement

Resources

• CMC Magazine Audience
• EasyPostcard