How To Target Your Digital Audience Effectively

Hello and welcome to Media On Q Episode 3 - Hyper Syndication Part 1.
My name is Carlos Quintero.
Today we are going to explore techniques that are useful for those of us who are content producers.  So if you create content for your blog, website, social media posts or even web video for YouTube or Vimeo…this will be right up your alley.
This will be a two-segment podcast given the amount of content that we’ll be covering. In part one, I will share information with you about where exactly you can find your target audience as well as an overview of how RSS feeds can help you.
In part two, we’ll talk about how to target content to Computers, Tablets and Smart Phones and even Television sets. I’ll also share with you and possibly remind you about the important point in successful marketing and we’ll make sure to cover some tools that can help you keep everything running. 
What’s the idea or functionality behind Hyper Syndication?
Well, hyper syndication helps you create content once and distribute it across many digital platforms or in simple terms do more with less.
We can all benefit a little from working less right?  That however does not mean we’d drop the ball…hyper syndication simply allow us to work more efficiently.
Ok so Hyper Syndication is a simple and straightforward process BUT, yep, there is a but…to execute on this effectively we’ll have to involve and use several different technologies. Oh and don’t worry – most of these are FREE.
What we’ll go over is how to piece these tools together in order to get the only thing that ever matters in marketing and that is RESULTS.
We can all agree on that fact. Results allow us to feel the rewards of our effort and also then help us determine where it is that we should spend out time.
Now the results I am sharing with you today are based on my own personal experience. 
I run a digital media company in the Midwest called – yes; you guessed it Media On Q.
I have a wide range of clients all over the United States…everything from small businesses, corporate clients, automotive dealership groups and large radio station groups.  I’ve helped them extend their reach well beyond traditional media and out too much broader audiences.
I’ve found that using these free tools is a great way to extend any project’s reach and all you have to do is put a little bit of effort toward building a network. You can then leverage that network and experience tremendous results. 
You need to know and understand that it will take a little bit of work…but the payoff is huge. 
Using technology like hyper syndication you can often eliminate things like replication, meaning printing costs, shipping and direct mail campaigns and instead leverage the power of the web to reach much broader audiences. 
My name is Carlos Quintero, Media On Q CEO and founder. We are going to dive right in to a bunch of hyper syndication techniques today. Once again thank you for joining me.
Remember you can always share your comments or provide feedback directly at mediaonq.com.
The exact methods and services that you will want to use for your hyper syndication project are going to vary based on who your target audience is or who you want to reach.
In order to understand your target, I think it would be useful to review and understand recent trends in Internet behavior.
It is no shock to us, I’m sure that over the past 10 years there has been a gigantic increase in internet content consumption. 
BTW – my stats come from Nielsen Research Studies. If you’re not familiar with Nielsen, they are a media research group and you can learn more about them at Nielsen.com.
Now back to Internet consumption stats. 
People say that the Internet is the most essential medium to their lives.
In this survey – 45% of adults said that the Internet is the last method that they would choose to give up to get their news and information.
Now if we break this down by age…it is even more impactful.
Of those people surveyed – those under 35, 66% or two thirds of them said they would not give up the internet period. They would rather drop movies, drop television, drop magazines, and drop the newspaper…basically they would drop everything except for the Internet.
The marketing take away here is …You Have To Target The Internet to experience Results. 
I get to see a lot of folks put a great deal of Money, Time and Effort into print (newspaper and local magazines), Billboards and direct mail campaigns.
While those have their place and do reach people…the Internet is really where they should be spending their time and efforts. 
So do yourself and your business a favor and really think about that. 
If you’re targeting or trying to reach people under the age of 45, you must use some sort of online delivery method. 
Think about this, just last week, 98 Million people in the United States watched a video online.
If we break that down into a percentage it means that 40% of us are watching online video. Oh and BTW – the United States is not the leader in these stats. Europe and Japan’s numbers are significantly higher.
It is important to understand just how much people want and expect online content.
All that said, when it comes to reaching people online people still get freaked out. 
What happens if my customer is not online? 
What happens if my fan for my show doesn’t have a good Internet connection?
Will they be able to see it?
Neilsen has an answer to that. When asked in the U.S.A., 9 out of 10 adults said they had the ability to get online whenever they want.
Now, it is important to realize that this might be at school or at their job but also know and understand that people have access to the Internet and can get on the Internet. 
In North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Japan there is easy and reliable access to the Internet.
So, no matter what you publish, you’re going to want to leverage the web. It does not matter if it’s news, entertainment or corporate communications You need to leverage the web.
One last point – and that is the extreme growth in social media. This will continue to grow. The key number to look at is the 18-24 year olds. 80% penetration into social media and as this group ages, you’re going to see them continue to use social media; meaning this number will spread to all age groups over time. 
So now that you understand where to find your target audiences, it’s time to think about whom you want to reach.
In the next segment, I’ll go over the specific techniques to target these audiences. 
Using RSS Feeds 
RSS is a great way to target a broad audience.
What’s RSS – RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication.
What exactly does RSS do, you might ask?
Well the goal with Real Simple Syndication is to get subscribers.
Once you’ve captured a subscriber, you can continue to market, entertain or keep them informed Without having to spend additional dollars in an effort draw them back to you.
A subscriber will continue to get your information until they physically unsubscribe.
As a content producer, this simply means that your subscribers will receive ALL of the content you produce and distribute through RSS – And That Is Really Useful.
RSS has the ability to feed your social media making it a necessary tool in your hyper syndication strategy.
With that said, let’s take a look at two helper type of applications that will make it possible for you to take any RSS feed and push it out to your social media outlets.
We’ll start with Twitterfeed. And guess what? Twitterfeed is FREE, well at least it is as of the time of this recording.
The benefit with Twitterfeed is that you can take your RSS feed and push it out to your social media.  
So, if you have a YouTube channel or a Vimeo account you’ll have the ability to publish your content from one feed on to the multiple accounts.
Some of you are probably thinking, why not simply sync the accounts. While it is possible to sync your YouTube, Facebook and Twitter account – using Twitterfeed allows you to sync multiple accounts as in more than one Facebook page.
This is worth noting given that lots of businesses dove in to social media because of individuals, without having a roadmap or strategy in place leaving them with individual pages vs. business pages or multiple individual pages or business pages and accounts.
The Twitterfeed process is as simple as copying your RSS feed and pasting it into the Twitterfeed account.
Once you do that, you will have the ability to push the content to Facebook, Twitter and Linked in as well as a few other services.
Once again, the key with this tool is the ability to push the content to multiple Facebook and multiple Twitter accounts.
Another useful syndication service is HootSuite. Unlike Twitterfeed, HootSuite is a paid service…well it is a paid service if you want to take advantage of all of their features. They do offer a free version and this free version is not a bad place to test drive the service.
The reason why I like HootSuite is because it takes Hyper Syndication and makes it easy.
HootSuite also allows you to connect multiple social media accounts but adds one important feature and that is the ability to schedule your posts. 
This is a huge benefit, because you can target your messages to different groups of people. For example, you’ll reach a different group of individuals at 8am Central Time in the East Coast, Midwest and West Coast. So you might want to give it some thought as to when you Tweet or post a status update so that important messages don’t get overlooked or flat out get missed by your target audience.
While we are on the subject of posts and status updates. I would strongly recommend that when you post links back to your own landing pages or websites that you use a link shorting service like tinyurl.com or ow.ly
Back to HootSuite, some features include the ability to add multiple users to share accounts and collaborate and one of my favorite features are their reports.
HootSuite will generate a weekly report for you with a great deal of detail about your social media networks and your assets or content.
In this report you’ll be informed about how often your content was consumed or republished to other websites.
So for me the five dollars and some change it cost a month is more than worth it and a great tool for the modern media producer.
RECAP 
Hyper Syndication is a straightforward concept and process.
After listening to this podcast you’ve realized that using technology like RSS Feeds allow us to tie blogs, video-sharing sites, social media all together.
Remember, that what it really comes down to is having a consistent network. Once you take the time to set this network up, it’s not that hard.
Things can essentially run on autopilot.
This means you post once and it goes out to 10, 20, or even 50 different websites.
This is great because it serves the cardinal need, which is make sure that your message is delivered where your audience is.
Whether you’re an individual publisher, a small business or a large corporation, the use of hyper syndication techniques can go a really long way to extend your marketing brand message and promise.
Taking the time to set up the network is going to free up your publishing efforts, leaving you much more time to both create new content and respond or reply to all of the great new leads you’re attracting.
This concludes Hyper Syndication Part 1.
In Part 2, we’ll cover how to target content to computers, mobile media devices like the iPad and iPhone as well as how to get your video on real living room television sets.
My name is Carlos Quintero.
Feel free to check out more on Hyper Syndication and a wide variety of digital media branding content at MediaOnQ.com.