If you had to guess what percentage of digital news readers in Australia live in state capital cities, what would you estimate?
You’d be forgiven for aiming high, taking into account the population differences and the increased emphasis on technological trends in major cities.
… But the data might surprise you.
According to an audience report for the first quarter of 2015 by “The Newspaper Works,” a whopping 42% of digital news readers live in regional and rural areas.
So in spite of state capital cities hosting larger populations and technology-focused cultures, the distribution in the digital space is almost half and half.
This just goes to show: ANY assumption is a potential mistake.
Most online marketers wouldn’t bother to check this data, and would cater their messages for a “city” audience. The latte consuming, train riding, 9-to-5ers that filter through Flinders St. in Melbourne and avoid Kings Cross like the plague in Sydney.
And in doing so, they’d immediately miss the chance to connect with 42% of their audience.
Sound scary? It should, those are make-or-break numbers as far as small-to-medium businesses are concerned.
So how can you avoid potential marketing catastrophe?
You need to challenge assumptions, gather the data, and know your audience back-to-front before you send out so much as a paragraph or a single line of HTML code.
And the only way to avoid unpleasant surprises and ensure you’ve covered all your bases is experience.
Experience is what happens when you’ve seen businesses lose revenue and even have to shut down because they made the wrong assumptions and ran with them.
And assumptions are sneaky, because it’s hard to know what’s worth checking and what’s a waste of time when you can’t even trust common knowledge.
If you don’t have experience, luckily you can hire experience.
