Consumers, not producers, dictate their media diet these days, which means that consumption of your product or message must be the consumer’s choice. The key to ensuring that they choose your product or listen to your message is to build a genuine relationship with them. Here are a few quick tips:
1) Know your audience – research who it is you’re targeting and why
2) Know how your audience consumes information – what is their medium of choice?
3) Identify key influencers in your audience and build genuine personal relationships with them
4) Deliver your message through those influencers
The power of Stone Age tools to reach audiences in the 21st Century
These days, marketing and communications professionals everywhere need to adjust their methods and get back to the basics – developing relationships with influencers that can carry your message for you.
Marketers can no longer afford to believe that repetition and volume are the keys to successful brand recognition and messaging. The information marketplace of the 21st Century is flooded with an endless stream of content – news, movies, TV shows, video games, blogs, websites, advertisements, brands, slogans, logos and messages.
This new reality has created a marketplace where the audience dictates consumption, not the producer. In the last decade, the Internet, the proliferation of mobile technology and social media has turned the information marketplace on its head. This means consumers no longer wait for the morning paper or the 6 o’clock news broadcast to find out what’s going on.
It’s been less than a decade since Facebook and the iPhone first hit the market, and in that short span of time the news media has effectively outsourced its ability to break news to the average citizen. Today’s information marketplace is flooded with storytellers armed with touchscreen production tools anddriven by egocentric social media platforms.
Today’s medium has changed the message
The supply of free content available today far outstrips demand, making it increasingly difficult for marketing and communications professionals to ensure their messages are heard.
In order to grapple with this ongoing flood of content, consumers are customizing their media consumption habits more than ever before. Specialized content hubs that focus on specific subject matter are on the rise while general information sources are in decline or have lost value.
Advertisers are responding in kind, using new applications that aim promotional material toward specific audiences based on subject matter, key words or past purchases. Social media product referral marketing systems are on the rise as printed newspapers and the flyers in them continue to hemorrhage readers.
The same goes for TV commercials: in an age of PVRs, Netflix and on-demand video apps, how do we reach viewers who have the power to avoid advertisements altogether?
Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is the message, and mobile social technologies have sent the message that the consumer is in control of his or her media consumption habits, snatching editorial power from the grasp of traditional content producers and placing it squarely the hands of consumers
Stone Age tools for success
So how does anyone with a story worth telling ensure that his or her voice is heard?
The answer, it turns out, is simple: Stone Age tools. In a marketplace flooded with over-generalized content, personal relationships with targeted audiences are more valuable than ever before.
As a communications professional in northern B.C., I’m constantly challenged to ensure my organization has a strong reputation in dozens of small and medium-sized communities across an area the size of France. But you can’t have a reputation without relationships, so instead of relying solely on newsletters, news releases, social media and email blasts – I focus on building relationships with influencers in each community.
That means getting out of the office, going to the communities we serve, listening to the people who can use our programs and being responsive to their needs.
We’ve found that those same influencers then carry our message for us, connecting our organization with new communities, organizations and clients, expanding our brand presence. Of course, I can’t do it alone, which is why we ensure that all of our employees and board members know what’s going on with the organization, what its mission is and how we plan to accomplish it: empowering each employee to become an ambassador for our organization.
Face-to-face meetings and phone calls with colleagues and clients have generated stronger relationships with our colleagues and clients than emails, text messages or social media connections ever could.
The marriage between Stone Age tools and digital technology
Don’t get me wrong: we’re very active on social media. Yet within our overall communications strategy, our digital outreach is supplemental to our core strategy: building relationships with our communities.
It helps that we know our audience really well. Some of the communities in our region don’t have cell service, so mobile platforms won’t work, but events and announcements at coffee shops, ice rinks and community halls help get the message out. Other communities only have a few dozen people, so there’s no point in blasting out a news release – a BBQ at a central location will work just as well.
We still work with provincial and national media outlets to increase coverage for our region, but we don’t focus on stories about our organization – we want the stories to focus on our communities and the people in them.
The goal is not to flaunt our successes to the rest of the country, but rather to use that national media coverage as third party validation, share it with our communities and empower them to tell their own stories.
In an age when consumers dictate media consumption, we choose to focus on building relationships in person – avoiding a flooded information marketplace in favour of a targeted audience.
The relationships we’ve built have become referral-marketing systems for us, leveraging the power of those relationships to influence an ever-expanding audience base.
It turns out that our people-first strategy has translated into an expanded digital presence as well – the same people we’ve connected with in person, have connected with us online and are sharing our messages there as well.
Whether you’re a lone storyteller, part of a small organization or a major corporation – know who your audience is and build a strong relationship with them and I guarantee your message will be heard.
Creative Commons photo courtesy of bulliver.