Know your audience

If you’re reading this magazine, you’re probably well educated, in your thirties or forties, and relatively affluent. Good for you!

That’s according to the demographics figures in another cycling magazine’s media kit, which is a document that publications use to describe their readers to potential advertisers. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that ROAD and this other magazine, which will remain nameless, reach a pretty similar audience.

I believe that those terms are a good description of the primary audience to which a domestic team like Kodakgallery.com/Sierra Nevada gives our sponsors access. That ‘primary audience’ consists of the serious cyclists – the kind of people who follow racing, read the cycling magazines and websites, and might travel to watch a race like the Ford Tour de Georgia. Put simply, they’re bike people, i.e. you.

Looking at you from the perspective of an advertising buyer, I’d say that you’re a targeted national audience in an upscale demographic, the kind of people I’d spend my clients’ money to advertise to. Once again, good for you – but it’s also good for the athletes that you’re fans of.

However, the primary audience that pro teams reach is very different from that which even our biggest events reach. I have less data about this, but my observations and limited data suggest that races like the Tour de Georgia reach audiences that are much less targeted demographically and much more targeted geographically than are the teams’ audiences. If you have seen the crowds in cities like Augusta and Macon, I imagine that you would make similar observations.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. ‘Local’ is not a synonym for ‘small’, and more and more companies are incorporating local sponsorships and events into their marketing strategies as consumers become harder to reach through traditional media.

The Amgen Tour of California was an exception, because its sponsorship packages included airtime on the national ESPN2 broadcasts. Looking again from an ad buyer’s perspective, those 30-second spots change the race from a local to a national sponsorship. Without those, the race is a series of valuable, but still local, marketing opportunities for all but the title sponsor, whose name gets repeated sometimes in non-advertising editorial coverage of the race. In other words, how many people who didn’t attend the event in person would have associated Herbalife with the race unless they watched the ESPN2 shows?

Getting back to the difference between the teams’ targeted national audience and the events’ broad local audience, compare the auto sponsorships of the Ford Tour de Georgia and the Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team. The race is sponsored by the Georgia Ford Dealers (not by Detroit), and a local dealership has displayed a range of different models at each stage. In contrast, the team is sponsored by Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. and its marketing is focused on one model: the RAV4.

In both cases, I’d say that the sponsors have done their homework and know their audiences. They’ll get a better return on their investment, so good for them. And that means that they’re more likely to stay involved in cycling, so – once again – good for you.