Defining and pleasing your audience

How can you make your student media good, appealing and interesting, when it seems as though the students at your college are uninterested and overly-critical? It might seem like an impossible task. However, persistence and planning can pay off, and it is possible to turn an unread magazine or unnoticed radio station into essential, compulsive and popular reading/listening/viewing.

Whether you are launching a new venture or taking over an existing form of student media, it is important to spend time analysing the needs and interests of your target audience before you start planning design, content and production.

You may consider it worthwhile to conduct a survey on campus, but you may find it possible to analyse the interests of students on your campus without questioning each and every one.

A good Editor or Station Manager will learn to assess the interests of the student community and to steer the publication or station to reflect and nourish those interests, feeding from the good ideas of others on the student media team without allowing those students’ taste to take over totally.

What Should You Consider

You might consider approaching your College authorities for assistance in assessing some of the following points, and other officers within the student union should be able to help with some of the other points:

• How many students are there?
• How many are mature students?
• How many are under-graduate and post-graduate?
• How many sports clubs are there?
• How many people attend gigs and ents?
• How many people are involved in clubs and societies?
• How many people live on campus, and how many in town?
• How many sites are there?
• How often do people meet on campus?

On top of this you can research the sort of music, mainstream national media, film, sport, TV etc. that your local students like and investigate the sort of issues students are concerned about, such as the environment, HIV and AIDS, anti-racism etc.

Gradually you will start to build up profiles of your readership or audience and from then on you can plan an editorial style and contents list to suit their interests.

You might also discover that students on your campus are very into dance music, and not just traditional student “indie” music, or that they really love fashion, or environmental issues, etc. etc. You can plan the editorial interests and contents around the issues that your students feel interested in. And you can use these key “hooks” as promotional tools, luring in new readers, listeners and viewers with posters, flyers and cover stories about these things, in the way that magazines like Cosmopolitan always puts sex on the front cover, or TV trailers always focus on the sensational.

If your college is very sporty you might want to consider extra sports pages or programmes, if there are many mature students you might want to devote time and space to their interests and market the student media towards them too.

This sort of information and tactic is useful in planning a launch but can be used to market your student media all year round. For example you can put posters up by the Sports Hall and notice boards encouraging the sporty types to read or listen to your match reports and sports programmes and pages. You can put up posters in the bar or main entertainment venue promoting your up and coming listings of bands, discos and entertainments.

Gradually you will build up an interest in your student media and a loyal audience who feel a need to read, watch or listen, and a sense of ownership in what you produce for them.

Continue to monitor your student audience throughout the year, with surveys, questionnaires, and meeting them. Accept their ideas as inspiration and gradually incorporate changes they suggest into the format of your student media.

Follow the needs of your audience at each time of year, for example housing issues are important in the last few weeks of summer term, exams, revision, stress and health are of concern in spring term and the run-up to exams, the sporting seasons follow a pattern too, and Christmas is the time for frivolity and partying.

Distribution is a vital consideration for student press and broadcasting and in order to reach your audience ensure you advertise yourself through posters etc. and that student press is available in well-promoted pick-up spots through your college, distributing to halls, canteens, common rooms and bars as well as the union foyer.

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