Why you shouldn’t be trying to reach EVERYBODY with your marketing

By Lcid Crescent Fernandez

“And when everyone’s super, no one will be”
– Syndrome, The Incredibles movie

In the previous column, we discussed the importance of avoiding the one marketing mistake businesses shouldn’t make: not marketing enough. In that column, we talked about the importance of defining one’s audience and then marketing appropriately for that audience.

Let’s dive a little deeper into that.

In my experience working with Prometheus, our marketing agency, several of our clients and potential clients had problems understanding that reach and engagements don’t necessarily translate to brand equity or market share. Just because everyone sees you, doesn’t mean they get what you’re trying to say. When you ask them who their ideal customer is, it is not unusual for the answer to be “lahat”.

Here’s why that approach, while admirable, may be misguided.

Picture yourself as the commencement speaker of a university with its graduating batch ready to listen to you. Your job is to deliver a message to the graduating students. But the crowd isn’t just filled with the graduating students. It has the faculty, the staff, the families, and even the viewers on social media watching. You then try to speak to all of them. But they all have differing backgrounds, interests, and beliefs. Yet you try to communicate this one message in such a way that it encompasses and applies to all of them.

Your message would then become so diluted and muddled. Perhaps people would lose interest and not pay attention at all. Perhaps everyone just waits until you’re finished because you have become irrelevant in your attempt to appease everyone.

And in that example, you have the microphone, people are predisposed to listen to you. What if you didn’t?

But take a look at this graduating batch of students, who you’re supposed to directly speak to. They all come from the same university, have reasonably similar backgrounds and demographics. You speak to appeal to them. You craft your message based around them, making your entire speech relevant to this specific audience.

Hopefully, your message is not just heard, it’s understood, even more so, discussed. That’s exactly how you would approach your marketing.

Let’s take a real-life business example. In Daily Guardian’s Coffeenated podcast, we had Bam Araneta of Ill City Clothing as our first guest of season 2. He told us that the way he approached Ill City’s marketing was through the DJs of Iloilo City clubs. He put his shirts on those DJs for all clubgoers to see. He then built content around his brand to target the underground hiphop culture, and the geographic market of Iloilo. In the time before the pandemic, when parties were still allowed, you couldn’t go for a night out without coming across at least a dozen Ill City products. Then you started seeing them in wider and wider audiences, but it first began with that approach. People started asking about his product, and the captured market began talking for him.

As Bam captured one market, it enabled him to expand into the next.

And it’s that mindset we should have when we approach our marketing. Focus on more surgical approaches to break into individual markets first, so we can start capturing more. And it’s not just with your communication. You can design products for specific markets as a gateway to all your other offerings. Don’t look at the whole of Everest, but look at it one step at a time.

Everyone can be special/super to your marketing, just not all at the same time.

And there you have it! That’s why you shouldn’t be aiming to reach EVERYBODY with your marketing. Do you have thoughts? Shoot me an e-mail at lcidfernandez@prometheus.ph!

Listen to our Coffeenated episode with Bam Araneta here:

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