So you’ve pinned down your ideal audience for your marketing campaign. Great, that’s the right place to start, but the next challenge is reaching enough of them to make your campaign effective. And the issue here doesn’t necessarily relate to weak messaging, but rather to the campaign not being seen by enough people.
Improving audience reach isn’t always about spending more money or producing more content; it comes down to distribution.
It’s where the campaign appears, how many places it appears, and how easily people can encounter it across different parts of their day.
Improving audience reach is looking at the campaign as a whole, not individual channels, and how you can push the campaign to the right places to reach the people who need to find you. Let’s take a closer look.
Expand Beyond a Single Channel
This is a great place to start. You need to stop thinking of channels in isolation and how they slot into the bigger picture, i.e. the overall campaign.
If you’re only running a campaign on one channel, your results are going to be limited. If you’re only running that campaign across social media, a person might see the ad a couple of times when they log on during the day. However, if you pair that ad with, say, physical posters in train stations they use to commute to work, they’ll see it there on their way to and from work as well as on their social media channels. You’re reinforcing your messaging, you’re not relying on one single mention or a flick of attention. You’re increasing the likelihood of the audience noticing and remembering your brand.
Use Partnerships
Another useful way to increase audience exposure is to collaborate with brands that are in the same circle as you and can share your company with their audience, and vice versa.
The trick here is to be in the same space and overlap, but not be identical. For example, a hair brand might collaborate with a beauty brand to cross-promote looks or products, i.e. hair care products and hair styling tools, to help the audience see the potential of both brands together. And when integrated naturally and authentically, you can reach audiences in an easier way that benefits all parties and move your reach far beyond what you can manage alone.
Invest in High Traffic Environments
Not just in high-traffic digital spaces like search engines. But in physical, real-world environments. It’s being in spaces where more people are, because the more eyes that see your messaging, the more it will be reinforced day after day.
Let’s look at transport networks specifically. Commuters move through stations, platforms and walkways daily. They’ll follow the same routes, and their morning and evening routines will be largely predictable. This creates repeated opportunities for the same campaign to be seen by the same people over prolonged periods of time.
Advertising in these environments, for example,e advertising posters in tube stations allow you to reach more people without solely relying on digital engagement. Expert marketers in these areas, such as Tube Adverts, can help you pinpoint the right stations for your marketing to improve audience reach with ease.
Encourage Audience Sharing
You need to make your audience your amplifiers. What this means is you need to create highly sharable marketing that people want to share and it doesn’t even need to be your marketing materials either. It can be packaging that people want to share when they receive their order, it can be encouraging them to share reviews publicly, or it can be using interactive installations as part of your marketing campaign, people want to share.
On social media this can be content that encourages people to like, share and comment and this pushes it through to similar audiences or their own friends and follower lists. In physical environments, people might take a picture of an installation and share it with family and friends. It kind of works the same way as word of mouth: you’re giving people something positive to share, and this pushes your brand out to others who might not have otherwise come across your company.
Repurpose Content
When you create your marketing campaign, you’re investing a significant amount into your assets. But that doesn’t mean once they’ve been rolled out, you can’t use them. Far from it. You should be using your assets in different ways across different media to not only get more value for your investment, but to build a stronger campaign. People will remember if they’ve seen this messaging before, even if you’re not delivering it in its entirety on the same channel. A strong concept can be updated over different formats without slinging its message.
For example, if you create a visual campaign for outdoor advertising, you can adapt it into social media graphics, short-form video content, website banners, etc. Each version should be slightly adjusted to suit the platform, but it will still be recognisable.
