How to Reach and Retain Your Audience

Here are seven top tips for reaching and retaining your audience;

1. Pick your target carefully. Too often the scattergun effect is employed in promotion and marketing – anyone and everyone is targeted. Now, whilst this may give the illusion of reach it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. By attempting to appeal to everyone you connect with precisely no one. Just because people can see it doesn’t mean they’ll want it! Research your market and specifically target them alone – the results will be vastly more impressive.

2. Consistent Activity. Grand gestures, spontaneous events and touring interactive roadshows are all very well – but they are very little use if your audience can’t remember who you are due to the infrequency of your efforts. Whatever it is you intend to do to promote your product, make sure you do it regularly and often! Get yourself in the public eye and then stay there.

3. Message Positioning. Awesome interactive events and radical new advertising campaigns may gain you critical acclaim and the respect of the media…but what use are they if your target audience can’t make head or tail of the central message? Clarity of message is paramount to the success of any ad campaign – and all the cool in the world won’t save you if people have no idea what it is you’re trying to tell them. Make sure that any campaign you run has a clear, uncomplicated and easily deciphered point.

4. People delivering your message. Too often the staff chosen to deliver your message are a last minute addition to any campaign. Just as regularly the first part of the budget to be subject to cuts is that devoted to staffing. This is patent lunacy. The operatives delivering your brand message should be exceptionally versed in your campaign intentions, they should be well-trained in message delivery and, most of all, they should be people that your target market aspire to be. This kind of thing doesn’t come cheap and takes a lot of effort to get right! Don’t stint here for goodness sake.

5. Delivery. Following on from the previous point is the idea that the delivery of your message must be perfect to create the impact required to make your brand a success. Delivery is about performance and quality performance comes from a mixture of talent and practice. Once again the selection and training of your staff is vital here. Give yourself and your campaign time to recruit, train and develop staff – don’t leave it to the last minute.

6. The Memories. If there’s one thing guaranteed to make people remember your campaign (and by extension your product) it’s tangible, physical artefacts…and by that we mean presents. Make sure people who attend your events leave with some kind of branded promotional material – there’s every chance they’ll show it off to their friends (if it’s of sufficient quality) thus increasing your campaign reach and effectiveness. And, of course, every time they look at the item they’ll remember where they got it…

7. Consistent measurement and refinement. Finally, it’s hugely important to actively seek out and act on market feedback. Make sure that you regularly petition your intended audience for their view of your campaign and how it could be improved. This interaction with your audience will only result in more satisfactory and correctly targeted promotional work – and that’s what you want!