yinkaolaito.com – the branding gavel, brand communication expert, nigeria brand consultant, social media expert

In our earlier discussion on brand’s content marketing, we did mention that survival of brands during this time is dependent on content marketing which discusses brand’s relevance and education. We did conclude that great content is not only enough but its spread holds the key to its success. For content marketing to be successful or any other online marketing in this instance, there is need to identify each audience, understand the influence individual group wields and properly managed all the stakeholders. 

Like any other platforms, online consumers have influencers, active, inactive stakeholders. Reaching every group begins with different approaches, tactics, strategies. Individual brand must identify appropriate groups to reach, watch how active members of those groups are, research group types and ensure the brand befriend the group’s admins. This will be a discussion for another day, meanwhile let us first identify brand’s online audience; what their influences are and how they can aid the spread of brand’s content and marketing. There are several propositions in this regard, but the best that caught my attention for now and which I strongly buy into is the Charlene Li’s division of US adult online consumers. Charlene Li identifies about six levels or groups of online brand audience, consumers. They are as follow:

1. The creators: This level of online audience is web savvy. I also called them digital natives as they breath, sleep and are consumed by happenings on the internet. This set of audience publishes or maintains blog, upload videos. They are active bloggers, twitters, podcasters , vbloggers . They read others’ blogs, get involved in communities, forums and sometimes they are administrators of some online groups. This group wields a great influence online and some of them command great followings. It is a great advantage for any brand to have the most influential of them in their niche as friends and canvassers. Charlene says this group is about 13% of the online audience. Most of them enjoy strong coverage from the traditional/mainstream media. But if we consider 80/20 percent rule. They are worth given attention

2. Critics: This set of online audience does not maintain blogs in most cases. Few have but they do not maintain them or give the blogs adequate attention. They are not passionate about content spreading. Most of their efforts are concentrated on comments on blogs, posting of ratings and reviews as well as having an account on a medium that catches their attention. They are assumed to be 19% of online audience

3. Collectors: this category of online audience collects materials from the above users; they engage RSS and tag web pages. This category is said to be about15% of the online audience.

The above audience are most active than the other three levels of audience that we are going to discuss below.

4. Joiners: This set of online audience only use social networking sites. A peculiar line of thought associated with them though is that some of them do not come near these accounts for weeks but most ensure they open, check the account once a  month. This group is estimated to be 19% of online audience

5. Spectators: This set of internet audience reads blogs, watch peer generated videos, listen to podcasts and often use their mouths or links to spread whatever they consumed. They are about 33% of the internet audience

6. Inactives: This set care less about what goes on. This set6 of audience is about 55% of the online users. This may be good news to those brands that have neglected the online audience. It must be noted however that this survey is focused on adult online consumers. When we compare teenage or young adult’s data, the result can be shocking. But let assume this is what we have, any brand that is involved in content or online marketing should now have a clear idea of where to concentrate effort, and how best to develop strategy to reach the inactives. For those who do not like long lists, we can group online audiences into three namely: digital natives, spectators and inactives.