Why Your Marketing Agency Should Stop Trying to Reach Everyone
One of the easiest ways to waste a marketing budget is to advertise to people who were never realistic customers in the first place. Businesses naturally want the largest possible audience. More impressions feel better than fewer impressions. More website traffic looks impressive in a report. More views, clicks and followers create the appearance that something is happening. But marketing is not a popularity contest. The objective is to find customers. A marketing agency should therefore begin with a very different question: Who is actually eligible and likely to buy what this company sells?
That question immediately changes the strategy. Instead of trying to reach as many people as possible, the goal becomes identifying the smallest meaningful audience containing the greatest concentration of potential customers. A company may technically be capable of selling its product or service to millions of people. That does not mean millions of people are realistic prospects. There are always conditions that determine eligibility. Geography may matter. Income may matter. Age may matter. Industry, company size, timing, lifestyle, ownership, existing relationships or a specific problem may matter. A marketing agency should identify those conditions before recommending where advertising dollars should be spent.
A Marketing Agency Should Start With the Problem
One of the most effective ways to identify an audience is to begin with the problem the company solves. Who has the problem? Who knows they have it? Who is motivated enough to solve it? Who has the financial ability to solve it? Who is responsible for making the decision? Answering these questions allows a marketing agency to move beyond basic demographics and begin thinking about actual purchasing behavior.
Imagine a company selling a highly specialized service to business owners with more than $10 million in annual revenue. Reaching 500,000 random people is almost meaningless if only a tiny percentage of them own businesses and an even smaller percentage operate companies of the appropriate size. An audience of 5,000 carefully selected people could be considerably more valuable. The number became smaller, but the opportunity became larger.
Two people can have the same age, income and ZIP code and still have completely different needs. One may be actively searching for a solution while the other has absolutely no reason to care. The difference is not necessarily demographic. It is relevance. This is why building a large audience based entirely on broad characteristics can create enormous amounts of activity without creating meaningful business.
More Reach Can Mean More Waste
The advertising industry has spent decades celebrating reach. Digital marketing made the numbers even larger and more visible. Millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of clicks can look impressive in a presentation. Those numbers can certainly be useful, but only when they are connected to the right people.
A marketing agency that reaches 100,000 people who have little reason to buy has not necessarily accomplished more than a marketing agency that reaches 2,000 highly qualified prospects. In fact, the smaller campaign may be substantially more valuable. Every advertising dollar spent reaching someone who cannot or will not become a customer is a dollar that cannot be spent reaching someone who might.
That does not mean targeting should become so narrow that a campaign has no room to work. It means audience size should be determined by business opportunity rather than vanity. The objective is not to make the numbers look impressive. The objective is to create an audience containing enough qualified people to produce a meaningful business result.
The Customer Should Determine the Media
Audience identification should also influence where marketing appears. Businesses frequently choose platforms first. They decide they need social media, Google advertising, LinkedIn, YouTube or some other channel before determining exactly who they are trying to reach. Those platforms may ultimately be appropriate, but choosing the tool before understanding the customer reverses the process.
A marketing agency should determine who needs to be reached and then identify where those people can most effectively be found. A company selling to corporate executives may require a completely different media strategy from a restaurant, luxury homebuilder or consumer retailer. The platforms are not interchangeable because the audiences are not interchangeable. The customer should determine the media. The media should not determine the customer.
This is also why there is no universal collection of marketing channels that every business needs. A platform can be enormously effective for one company and virtually useless for another. The value of the platform depends on whether it provides meaningful access to the people the business actually needs to reach.
Better Targeting Creates Better Creative
Narrowing the audience does something else that is equally important. It makes the creative stronger. The more specifically a marketing agency understands who it is talking to, the more specifically it can speak to that person.
A broad audience usually produces broad language. The advertisement has to remain generic because it is attempting to accommodate everyone. A clearly defined audience allows the message to address specific problems, motivations, desires and concerns. The marketing begins to feel as though it was created for the person receiving it.
That relevance creates attention. It does not require the advertisement to become louder, more aggressive or more sensational. The person pays attention because they recognize something meaningful to them. The message has entered a conversation that was already taking place in their mind.
Good Marketing Strategy Is Often About Elimination
A good marketing agency should be willing to eliminate people from the audience. Strategy is often as much about deciding what not to do as deciding what to do. Removing people who cannot buy, have no reason to buy or are unlikely to become customers allows the business to concentrate its resources on the people who matter.
The resulting audience may be considerably smaller, but it can also be considerably more valuable. Marketing becomes more efficient when businesses stop paying to introduce themselves to everyone and begin concentrating their money, creativity and attention on the people most likely to produce a return.
A successful marketing campaign does not need everyone to see it. It needs the right people to see it. That is why a marketing agency should not begin by asking how many people a campaign can reach. It should begin by identifying exactly who represents a realistic customer and understanding what would cause that person to respond.
Once that is clear, the targeting becomes sharper, the message becomes stronger, the media choices make more sense and the budget becomes easier to defend. The audience may become smaller, but the opportunity becomes much larger.
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