Hey Mate. Stop right there.

See that person on the right? She’s your jack-of-all-trades – someone who asks what an audience consumes and knows how to deliver it.

What our audience wants
Targeted content. A balance between teaching and entertainment, like that crazy chemistry professor who taught equations with fireworks one day and ice cream the next. But don’t be distracted by the glitter and sweets.

It’s not about short attention spans. It’s about streamlining for our time-poor professionals.

It’s competing – really competing – with all the other things vying for the attention of our audience: yes, our competitors, but also the chores and the reality TV and the game apps.

You need someone on your team who can get your strategic content out the door and into the hands of the person who will be richer for it.

Who is our audience?
People are now consuming media in smaller portions, in part thanks to the increase in mobile platforms and mobile content.

Of the 5 billion mobile phones owned worldwide, 1.08 billion are smart phones. Of them, half use their mobile device as their primary or exclusive means of going online. As a result, social media is fast becoming a news source in its own right, blurring the lines of advertising, marketing, word of mouth and hard journalism.

But that doesn’t mean dumb it down.

It means we have to be smarter about how and what we deliver.

How to reach our audience

• Eye tracking studies of newspapers and websites show people read headlines and photo captions to decide whether to read the actual article.

• Meanwhile, multimedia research shows audio is even more important to the viral video than short and sweet. Ever done the dishes with the game on in the background? Your brain seamlessly integrates the commentators and the sounds of the crowd so you get the story – and smart editing cues you to dash back to the visuals for the replay.

• Australia and New Zealand’s big six social media sites continue to be: Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr and Twitter, with around 50 per cent of the population of each country visiting Facebook and YouTube. Seniors have become the fastest growing social media demographic, while women continue to be more involved than men, except when it comes to Google+.

So now you know where to find them. Here’s where to find me.