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Reach: Why Knowing Your Audience Is the Key to Campaign Success
The R in the STRATEGY Framework stands for Reach. Here's why Reach is one of the most important factors (if not the most important) in your entire campaign.
"Listen. Take every opportunity to do so."
That's the advice of Tim Bond, Head of Insight at the Data & Marketing Association. He's talking about one of the most important letters in the STRATEGY acronym: R for Reach. To fully reach your audience, you must learn to listen to them.
Your Reach refers to the people your campaign will, well, reach. The Reach chapter in my new book, Marketing Strategy, is one of the largest. This is a huge topic, and I wanted to give my readers everything there is to know about it.
My Reach chapter covers:
- A brief history of brand and customer relations
- Understanding your audience's needs
- How to gain customer insights through data
- Ethical data use
- How to get audiences to happily take part in your research
- Different types of market research (and how to do them)
- How to segment and target your audience
- How to position your brand for maximum impact
- Lead scoring
- Tailoring your marketing
- Building a competitive advantage
...and more! All laid out in an engaging, easy-to-understand way.
It also includes an interview with Tim Bond, Head of Insight at the DMA, where the quote at the start of this article comes from.
The 4Ps: Positioning Your Campaign for Maximum Reach
For a taster, here's the section on the 4Ps from my Reach chapter. These are the factors that help position your campaign for maximum Reach:
Price
The psychology of pricing can make or break a product. You'll have seen prices like 99p or 99 cents instead of £1, 1 euro, or 1 dollar. The idea behind this pricing method is that the item seems much cheaper, even though it's only 1 penny or cent less.
When making a buying decision, people see the difference between £1.99 and £2 as bigger than it really is (despite what they logically know!). Human psychology is a strange thing.
On the other hand, it may not be wise to position your product too close to the "budget" end of the market. Many consumers link a higher price with higher quality, and a lower price with lower quality. A product could be positioned as an alternative to more expensive competitors. But if you don't want it to be seen as "cheap", the price would need to sit closer to the middle ground.
Place
Where your product or service is available plays an important part. At a basic level, if most of your target audience lives in city centres, selling your product in rural, hard-to-reach areas would not be good positioning for them.
The same principle applies online. Place your product or service as close to your target market as possible.
Promotion
This includes any method of advertising. Positioning matters here because the same advert may not work for your audience when certain factors change. For example, a TV advert may not have the same impact on your target audience at 6am as it would at 7pm.
Product
These are the features and benefits of the product, with specific characteristics identified. This can also focus on how the product is used and its quality.
Gathering Data the Right Way
Of course, all of this needs a lot of research, and will probably involve a lot of data gathering. To learn how to gather and use the best possible data (and, crucially, how to do it ethically), you'll need to read Chapter 4 of Marketing Strategy by Jenna Tiffany. You'll also find the full interview with Tim Bond at the end of the chapter. Trust me, every marketing professional needs to read what he has to say.
With ethical marketing in mind, I'll leave you with another extract from my interview with the wonderful Tim Bond. Here, he explains the DMA's 4 pillars of responsible marketing:
- Respect privacy: Act in line with the expectations of your customers.
- Be honest and fair: Make sure your organisation is always honest, fair, and transparent.
- Be diligent with data: Treat your customers' data with the care and respect it deserves.
- Take responsibility: Always act responsibly and be accountable for your actions.
Order Marketing Strategy today, and learn everything there is to know about strategic marketing!
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