Are all your marketing channels broken?

I hear that nothing in marketing works anymore! Social media is cluttered, email is saturated, print is challenging due to everyone working remotely and digital ads are just annoying. All your channel choices for generating awareness and creating leads are broken. That’s the prevailing business wisdom.

Are they really broken - or do you just need to rethink how you use them?

Forget about the medium or the delivery method. Start with what matters most: your messaging. Relevance is key. What breaks through the noise to influence your target audience is content that’s laser-focused on their interests.

The reason so many of these channel choices are “broken” is that they’re glutted with useless content. Many business people think the more content they publish, the more exposure they will get. Not true. You risk alienating your audience. It’s true! Your competitors and other options are just a click away. If you’re wasting their time, they stop considering what you are providing!

My last article talked about identifying your ideal client. The more you understand about your ideal client, the more focused and effective your messaging will be. Do that consistently enough and you will build an audience that you’ve earned over time by being relevant and meeting their needs better than anyone else.

What does that mean? No matter what channel you publish it on, the quality of your content is significantly more important than the quantity of it.?Bombing individuals with irrelevant email, social posts, paid ads and direct mail will never work.

Think about the way in which you sort through the firehose of content coming at you every day. How do you decide what to focus on and what to ignore? Chances are, you cull it mercilessly to get to the most relevant ideas, insights and actionable data. Your ideal prospects are the same way.

How do you break through the clutter and become a trusted resource in the minds of your ideal prospects? How do you leverage marketing channels to work for you? Here’s how to get started:

1)?????Understand that you can no longer treat your audience like a monolithic group, where everyone receives the same generic messages. Audiences continue to get more fragmented into micro-groups that reflect specific interests within it. For example, it’s no longer about skiing, it’s about downhill skiing, snowboarding, racing, freestyle, and backcountry skiing. Each segment has specific interests and hot buttons. Treat them all like skiers and they will ignore you – potentially forever.

2)?????This also holds true for information sources, which are not only multiplying but also targeting increasingly narrow specialties and communities of interest. Identifying and leveraging those smaller groups ensures that you are reaching the right audience. Segmenting your content to match their unique interests creates credibility for you and your product or service.

3)?????Central to all this is data segmentation. It’s a must if you want to scale your business in today’s increasingly diverse and fragmented marketplace. Companies that do this right design and manage their data and their content to focus on key customer segments and their needs. Their mission is to deliver greater value to each of these groups. This approach enables them to create unique experiences that attract the right people and move them faster through the process of becoming a customer.

4)?????Make it personal. The more you understand about your audience segments, the easier it will be to find the right messages that resonate with them. You still need to make a connection, however. How you deliver the message is still critical to success. For example, people respond to stories. They retain much more of your information than if you simply hit them with a succession of facts. Stories sell. Be real and share your passion as you tell your stories. People value passion, emotion and authenticity. Be human.

So, don’t give up on the channels. Getting this right is a long journey, even for those who are doing it “right.” Everyone struggles at first. If you commit to understanding the micro-groups that make up your target audience, discern their needs and gather data that helps you understand how you’re doing and deliver the best, most relevant content, eventually you’ll win.