When we think about reach vs relevance to our audience as marketers, the solution is often to go more targeted, more specific, with smaller, more homogeneous audiences, rather than the mass marketing days of before.
And I think most marketers recognize now that relevancy, rather than reach, is the new goalpost.
Yet most of us are still marketing for reach like before. And I think it’s because we’re afraid.
Once we submit to the idea that we’ve got to focus on targeted, meaningful messages to specific groups, the quality and execution of our campaigns are much more on the line than ever before. There’s nowhere for bad copy, bad design, or bad strategy to hide. And I suspect a lot of marketing teams just aren’t equipped to live up to these new standards yet.
In a mass marketing environment, we can send out a mediocre campaign and still get mediocre results. But in a hyper-targeted world, anything short of excellent isn’t likely to yield much at all.
I talk a lot about the shortage of technical skillsets in marketers, but true creative talent—the kind that can make an okay campaign a great one—is as rare or rarer to find. For marketers to live up to the promise of personalization and relevancy, we’ve got to start investing more in the talent that makes that happen. Otherwise we’ll build the technology to do it all, but have nothing meaningful to say with it.