Promoting your work as a performing artist might at first glance seem like it doesn’t have much in common with, for example, companies promoting their products or services, but in reality they’re actually very much alike. There’s something you want the audience to know about – you and your work, and most likely you want to sell something to them – tickets to your shows. To succeed in this, you need to know what your brand is, who your audience is and how you can “sell” your brand to them. Insights are a useful tool to help you in this process.
But what are insights and how are they relevant to your digital presence? An insight is a profound understanding of people’s behaviours, attitudes or beliefs that offers exciting growth opportunities for our (personal) brand. An insight is the seed, the starting point that enables our activity to fit meaningfully into our audience’s lives.
Why are insights important?
Insights link what we know about audience and brand building activity. Insights focus our efforts, allowing us to develop initiatives and content that resonate with our targeted audience. Insights also spark ideas and can drive our communications. Insights are not just about answering questions – they are about ‘what can I do with this information?’
How to recognize an insight?
The SEED test:
S – Sparks recognition: “If we say this, it might resonate with the audience”
E – Easy to understand: Uses audience language as if they have said it
E – Echoes and extrapolates: Reflects what we know has been done, said, felt or seen
D – Directional: Provides stimulus for activities that will alter audience behaviours and drive results
To generate insights, you’ll first need to define your brand challenge in audience terms. Defining the challenge means that you should think about what your biggest issue or opportunity is, i.e. where gaining insights would really help you. Then you can translate this challenge into an audience task before you can start digging for insights.
In the next chapter we’ll look into these audience tasks and give you some tools for working on them.
Further reading
Generating insights
https://www.locusresearch.com/generating-insights/
The Secret Sauce to Generating Insights
https://www.thedrg.com/the-secret-sauce-to-generating-insights/
Power of Insights in Brand Building
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-insights-brand-building-deepesh-kv/
