SPIDERbytes

Marketing to your audience has and always will be about the message, not the channel or the medium. Time was when the internet and the world wide web were an overly revered medium and channel that some companies decided to move to almost entirely.

Take Lands End, for example, who in the mid-90′s decided to abandon their almost ubiquitous direct mail catalog channel entirely for the web. Their thought presumably was that their market was already on the web and they could save tremendous expense by cutting back on the cost of print, directing everyone to the web. While their sales from the web channel rose significantly, their overall sales dropped so much that they quickly returned to direct mail, using both channels. Some people didn’t move to the web, others needed the direct mail piece to cause them to take action, on the web as well. Lesson learned!

Marketing channels exist to communicate with your audience where they are, not where you want them to be. Understanding who and where your audience is one of the most critical and difficult aspects of marketing, whether it be on or off line.

Social media channels on the internet has offered web marketers an opportunity to locate our target audiences in measureable ways that we only once dreamed of. Just by the very nature of these channels, people gather on them for very specific reasons of interest. Identifying and marketing to them is then a matter of understanding who your target audience is.

Facebook and Twitter, for example, both have accumulated massive amount s of information on their users, and can offer you the opportunity to get in front of whatever slice of the audience you can identify. The mistake we want to avoid is picking a single channel that we want to market through, simply because we want to without considering where your audience is and how they best respond to messaging. While the social media wars are playing out, your audience is sure to migrate and merge, but they will likely not hang out in place.

Traditional channels such as print, television, web sites (yes, it’s now traditional) should always be considered a part of your marketing mix, and carefully coordinated with newer ones such as PDA applications and social media. Having more than one channel to market through is almost always sensible. Your audience changes channels frequently, and so should you.