Friday Feedback: Have You Run Through Your Audience?
Let’s say that you’re a small, local business.
You may have been advertising like crazy on a specific medium or spread it out a little bit. You may have done everything that you can to get the best value out of the relationships you have with your media partners. You may have even spent some extra money to get some creative and production done.
Your advertising (or “communication”) may have worked for awhile.
Then, out of nowhere, it may have stopped working. It could have been a slow boil or a severe drop.
And you can’t figure out why that has happened.
There are plenty of reasons why something like this could happen. But, there is one often overlooked aspect to communication and advertising: you may very well have just run your course with the audience.
The fact is, you have to stay very close to your communication. If you’ve been a long-time advertiser, say, on radio and you haven’t changed your message much, you could be in trouble. We’ve heard single commercials that have run, as-is, for months. Listeners get fatigued by this and will most likely tune you out. If it worked before and you have nothing new to say, it’s possible that your audience became more transactional than relationship-based.
Even if it’s subtle, you should always consider ways to mix it up so that the consumer can keep “getting to know you.” Keep giving them reasons to like you. Give them reasons to trust you. You can still retain the core of your message but you can present it in ways that keep the consumer interested.
The other to consider is that you may very well have saturated the audience. In this case, it may be worth considering moving on to a different medium or partner. It’s not always the case here since audiences tend to overlap — but it is something to consider to get the audience excited about you — new and old.
Tags: advertising, blog, media, media audience, run spot run
