Marketing to cyclists

Sometimes you want to reach cyclists as an audience…preaching to the converted!

I’m thinking about this a lot at the moment because of a couple of projects I am involved with at Surrey Police.

The first insight, which I have to thank my colleague Nick for crystalising for me, is that there is more than one type of cyclist…and their beliefs and needs are very different.

You should not try to appeal to “cyclists” as a single audience any more than you should try to appeal to “drivers”. That is to say you will have far more success if you have a more specific profile in mind.

The major split is between sport cyclists and leisure cyclists. As an example (and stereotyping enormously) leisure cyclists are scared of cars, whereas sport cyclists scare cars. A campaign aimed at keeping leisure cyclists safe on the road has to push very different buttons to one aimed at sport cyclists.

Insight number two is that it is far easier to target bikes than cyclists. Look for bike racks and you can quickly reach hundreds of cyclists quickly and easily. Unfortunately this predominantly reaches leisure and utility cyclists , not the sportier ones (their machines area too expensive to risk leaving in the bike rack, in the rain).

On the bike rack flyers, I was dead impressed worth these seat covers I saw in Cambridge recently:

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Bills is a restaurant, and the seat cover includes a map, a QR code link and the opening times. Obviously the bike’s owner will notice the seat cover, but I can tell you that passers-by were also noticing them (and not just transport/comms bloggers like me!). I also have a suspicion that the cyclists kept the seat covers on their bikes – so the adverts continue to work for the restaurant.

A quick google found this site that sells them – minimum order of 1000.

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