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A company’s communication strategy is crucial to its marketing efforts. As a decision-maker for your brand, either as an executive or a marketer, it is your job to develop a strong communication plan to convince customers to buy what you are selling.
Part of the communication strategy involves increasing your reach. Greater brand awareness in the public sphere gives you a larger audience to market to. Achieving the level of brand awareness depends on using the right marketing channels that will speak directly to the target audience.
Increasing the reach of your marketing channels is going to help you grow. Here are a couple of strategies to do so.
Conduct Deeper Audience Research
The first step in improving your reach is knowing what channels to adopt. The only way to know which channels will be effective is to learn more about the audience. Defining the audience can also guide content. Where do they spend their free time? What social media do they use most often? What are their fears? What are their careers and salaries like? The more you know about the target customer, the easier it will be to communicate with them. Better research can be conducted by using consumer insight tools like Google Trends, Semrush, or SurveyMonkey. Using these strategies can glean valuable information from your customers that will inform which marketing channels could be the most effective to improve your reach.
Find Niche Channels
There are tons of possibilities for marketing channels that your brand can use. Some of them may be more suited to your specific audience than others. Sometimes, the best marketing channel where you can connect with customers is a little more niche. For example, Usenet is a discussion forum platform where many users go to talk about specific topics like computing, politics, news, and more. If a large newsgroup aligns with your company’s goals, then this could be a great way to connect with more customers. Try out this platform using top Usenet providers to learn more about this customer group and interact with them to demonstrate expertise.
Focus on Deeper Benefits
One of the main tenets of marketing is focusing on the benefits of a product or service. Features are the physical characteristics and functions of a product, while benefits are the positive outcomes that occur as a result. However, deeper benefits are more connected to emotions. How does a frozen pizza result in more family time to grow closer with your children? That is a deeper benefit. Often, these ideas can draw a bigger emotional response from the audience. Stronger emotional responses to your advertising are more likely to increase your reach and convince more people to buy from your company.
Trial and Error
Advertising is often considered a guessing game. While you can do a ton of research and internal editing to perfect a particular message, there is no guarantee that it is going to work with audiences. Embracing the concept of trial and error is a necessary characteristic for marketers. You cannot simply plug information into a marketing formula to churn out effective campaigns. Though there are certainly guiding principles that can set your pieces up for success, you must become comfortable with experimenting and adapting. The best marketers in the world have plenty of blemishes on their record of campaigns that fell flat. Trial and error can help you learn lessons from what does not work to increase your reach.
Competitor Research
Another marketing strategy that can improve your reach is looking for new opportunities. Sometimes, those opportunities come because of shortcomings from your competitors. Researching the competition in your industry should always be part of your strategy. It could reveal audience segments that their marketing efforts are not reaching. You might also discover gaps in their customer service or product offerings that you are capable of covering. These weaknesses in your competitors can become new opportunities to increase your reach. But you will only find these gaps if you take the time to discover them. This means ongoing competitor research. It might mean that you form a team that is dedicated to that end.
Marketing Needs a Focus to Succeed
All the points listed above can be summarized into this one concept. If your marketing efforts lack focus, then you will not be able to improve your reach. Focus comes from having thorough audience research to draw from. It is the result of finding the right channels, whether they are very niche or broad. Deeper benefits can target the emotions of your audience and trial and error will teach you what works and what doesn’t.
These steps can help you bring focus to your advertising campaigns so that you have greater reach and better responses to your messaging.