Finding Our Audience

How we get clients

Tippingpoint Labs has been around for seven years, and we recently reflected on how we usually get clients. Turns out, people come to us with a very specific need. Usually, it’s a fire that needs to be extinguished. Typically, they say, “I need a …”

• Website
• Video
• Campaign
• Strategy
• Partner to secure new business

The problem is that they usually don’t see the bigger picture like we do. They think they need one thing, but what they really need is something different. We sell strategy, platform development, and content development, and all three usually go hand in hand. Our clients come to us with one of those needs first, which opens the door to a discussion about our other two services. Everything centers on audience.

Our audience

One of the first steps in creating good content is to figure out who your audience is. At Tippingpoint Labs we do that by creating digital profiles that are very specific. When we do this exercise with our clients, they generally come up with 5-10 profiles. We sat down as a team recently to figure out what kind of content our audience is consuming offline and online. The first step is to roleplay and start with assumptions about the types of people reading our stuff, and to be as specific as possible. What are they watching on television? What websites to they visit? What magazines do they subscribe to? All of these answers help paint a clear picture of what kind of content resonates with them. Our job is to then identify the voice and style of their favorite channels.

Here’s one example of what we came up with — it’s a quick digital profile for one segment of the Tippingpoint Labs audience.

Persona Name: Biz Dev / Sales Guy

Psychographic Profile

• Looking for new sources of revenue for his company
• Skeptical of marketing
• Traditional lead gen perspective
• Strong opinions and personality
• Face-to-face trumps everything
• Social media is a gimmick
• See competitors excelling
• Cold calling is dying, forcing them to rethink lead gen tactics
• About getting out of their comfort zone

Online Activities

• Twitter is for douche bags
• Email
• Blackberry
• Boston.com sports
• Amazon shopping
• Lapsed on LinkedIn
• Plaxo

Television/Radio

• Fox News
• Rush Limbaugh
• ESPN
• Law and Order Reruns

Print

• WSJ
• Herald
• NY Post
• Local Print Paper
• Business Books
• Newsweek
• Industry Trade Journals

Demographics

• Age Range: 45 +
• Gender Bias: Skews Male
• Kids: 2 Kids
• Household Income: $175K

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.