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To stay competitive and build relevance and interest among real potential purchasers, today's marketer must be smart and more personalised. While entertaining or inspirational material might help you capture customers’ attention, it's time to move beyond broadcasted high-level brand videos and start thinking about how you can focus your message on specific audience segments. This is known as 'narrowcasting,' which is referred to as targeted or niche marketing as well, and it's the key to increasing audience engagement and conversion.
Most people are familiar with the terms broadcast and broadcasting as they have been used excessively over the past few years. Broadcast advertising is the promotion of services or products using out-of-home media such as television, radio, and billboards to a large audience.
There's also social broadcasting, which is highly used these days, broadcasting video, text, and images to an intended audience via social media channels such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and other platforms.
But what about narrowcasting?
Narrowcasting, in a nutshell, is the practice of targeting a broadcast to a certain audience or geographic area. It is based on the postmodern idea that mass audiences do not exist. Narrowcasting is the distribution of precisely tailored content to the right people at the right time and in the right place. Digital displays are the most common form to broadcast commercial or informational messages, primarily in an out-of-home setting. An example of that is an advertisement in a shopping centre targeted solely at female shoppers.
Narrowcasting opens up a whole new realm of opportunities for any company searching for a better way to engage with specific audiences, and it offers various advantages over standard broadcasting media.
Although some argue that narrowcast can be more expensive to plan and execute, as adopting AI, ML, and IoT can add up to the budget, still, broadcast is not an alternative if businesses want to succeed today.
Think about it this way, what happens when you want to have people make decisions based on the information you share? What do you want the recipient of the message to do with that information?
This conceptual framework will assist you in determining how to structure your message. This is what it looks like:
In short, if you just want to share information, a broadcast method might look like the ideal option. (Note that this is not always the case, as you may find yourself using a narrowcast model to share information anyway). However, if you are looking to drive a decision, then a narrowcast approach would work best.
1. Targeted messages based on time, place and customers’ activities, reaching and communicating with the target audience directly with personalised content that could influence potential buyers
2. Diversity of content displayed — promotional content, customer service-oriented, entertainment-oriented, or used to assist operational functions. Content can also be delivered in a variety of formats, including video, flash, static or moving images, and can be updated and modified in real time for certain occasions.
3. Cost-effectiveness as digital displays are usually purchased only once, and the content is handled through an integrated content management system (CMS), so, the cost of generating and adjusting content is very minimal when compared to printed content.
1. If a company sells protein powder, they would place motivational ads promoting strength on digital signages in gyms/sports fields, on ESPN, or through social media ads on Facebook, or Instagram for example, while selecting the data of their target audience. But what if they really want to go the extra mile? They would sell the product at the gym where the target customer exists and could be influenced by the ad displayed, and where the decision can be made faster and on the spot.
2. Text message marketing is a prime example of narrowcasting since it sends messages out to a targeted group of individuals, as opposed to the mass-market messages broadcast via Facebook and Twitter. Mashable.com recently posted an insightful infographic by Mogreet that demonstrates how narrowcasting can make a big difference in marketing performance, as follows
A broadcast is a mass media message delivered through visual content or ads to please the masses, risking capturing their attention and building long-term loyalty. However, a narrowcast sends a message to a small group of people, captivating their interest. This is an approach sought by artists who take chances in the hopes of creating something that speaks to a specific audience, and are willing to sacrifice time and effort in thoroughly understanding the people they are talking to, delivering content that would certainly relate to them.
If you want to make the best out of microtargeting and optimise your communication with your customers, it is time to get Intouch!
