The importance of analysing mobility audiences

The mobility sector is more dynamic and fast-paced than ever before. As the arrival of new technologies and entrants re-shapes the market, the ability to adapt within this new landscape will determine who succeeds – and who is left behind.

In our previous blog we discussed the importance of repositioning your brand to seize emerging market opportunities. Not only is the market changing, the needs of decision makers are also rapidly evolving to account for emerging technologies, changing end-customer preferences and increasingly stringent regulatory demands. When repositioning, it is therefore important to re-evaluate who you are trying to reach and how they fit with the new direction of your business:

• Is your current audience on the same trajectory as you or are they at risk of lagging behind?
• Is there a new audience that is better aligned to your updated brand position?

The answer to these questions will have a significant impact on your comms strategy. Appealing to both new and current audiences is a delicate balancing act, requiring a tailored approach for each audience. Audience analysis can reveal precisely who you need to target, how to reach them and what matters most to them, providing you with a strong foundation for success.

Buyer mapping

When it comes to understanding the buyer journey, many still refer to the sales funnel. As we know, this model fails to reflect the complexity of mobility sales cycles, which often last several years and involve multiple decision-makers and influencers, each with their own criteria and varying degrees of impact. Amid complexity, the ability to prioritise is key.

This is all the more crucial as mega trends like electrification, automation, and digitalisation reshape the entire mobility supply chain. With OEMs now more reliant on software and battery suppliers than on traditional mechanical components, tiered suppliers must now build strategic relationships with a very different profile of organisations to the ones they dealt with historically. A decision-maker mapping exercise can bring clarity to this process, providing a snapshot of the landscape and key people of influence.

Buyer journey mapping allows you to understand the most influential factors along a buyers' decision making journey and identify the touchpoints and interactions that are most critical to success. By understanding the decision making pathway, content, channels, campaigns and messaging can then be aligned to each stage for maximum engagement and effectiveness. This acts as a useful framework, and can be adapted as circumstances change.

Persona creation

Once you’ve identified your key audiences, another useful step would be to create buyer personas to gain a more detailed and nuanced understanding of their unique motivations and pain points.

Being absolutely clear on how your business will use a buyer persona is the starting point of this process as this will determine what information to include, along with the level of detail required. If, for example, the need is to create brand awareness content, your persona would include information on brand needs and perceptions, specific decision making pain points or concerns and content consumption habits

While most people have a notional understanding of what a buyer persona looks like, developing a truly effective persona is more complex than it appears. For optimal results, primary and secondary data collection are essential. Given the complexity and resource demands involved, an external partner can guide you through the process, adhering to a proven research methodology that enhances the credibility of your findings.

When establishing a scope and brief for persona creation, a useful starting point is to identify what personas already exist within the business, the job roles we want to better understand and which internal and external stakeholders we can access to interview. This approach is more detailed but honestly, you will be surprised at just how much you will learn about your audience.

Mapping crucial conversations

When you turn up at a gathering full of complete strangers, it’s rarely advisable to just interrupt the conversation and start talking. There’s a lot to be said for taking a step back to observe and simply listen. When we take the time to observe what’s being said, get to know the people involved and really study how the participants interact with each other, we’re able to contribute in a more meaningful way. The same applies when targeting a new market segment.

Conversation mapping takes the form of a visualization resembling a spider web. 'Nodes' of different sizes symbolize the topics and subtopics of conversation and how they interrelate with each other (such as Connectivity or ADAS technology, in the case of a tiered supplier). Layers can then also exist to then represent how conversations range from macro industry level, to micro and operational level priorities.

For a mobility business repositioning within a new market segment, these insights are incredibly useful when it comes to content strategy, channel and campaign planning and message development. Knowing when and how to contribute with greatest impact is critical in order to demonstrate your value, build credibility and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Resonating with new audiences in the evolving mobility landscape demands a strategic and nuanced approach. A robust understanding of all of your audiences will provide the supporting framework for a tailored and impactful communication strategy, helping your business to achieve a competitive edge in a changing mobility landscape.

At palmerhargreaves_uk , we help mobility brands to adapt their offering to unlock new opportunities within a changing marketplace.

For a chat about your current marketing challenges in the changing mobility industry, get in touch with myself or my colleague Jenny Aveyard on +44 7815 683701.