How to Reach Hard-to-Reach Audiences (and Why You Should)
At Codeword, we believe the smallest, smartest, hardest-to-reach audience is almost always the most valuable one for a brand to reach. They care the most, they’re informed, and they tend to have the most influence.
But marketing to them is a dangerous game, for all those same reasons. And these niche audiences often have their own language, behavioral markers, and skepticism toward brands encroaching on their turf.
A few examples of these “dangerous” communities that we’ve worked with: The maker community, Minecraft players, body hackers, whiskey connoisseurs, military veterans, EDM fans, physics students, IT VARs, etc. And, of course, tech media and early adopters.
Each of those communities is accustomed to being pandered to by brands who want their time and affection. They’re extra sensitive to marketing, and they can read into subtle cues to figure out if a brand or a piece of marketing is going to add to their community or detract from it. Say the wrong thing, and a campaign intended to breed goodwill can instead breed hostility.
When campaigns misfire like that, it tends to stem from not understanding the audience and its actions and motivations. And in my experience, despite the dangers, there’s massive goodwill available for brands who take the time to understand a niche audience — and build something of value to them.
So as we develop our ideas and strategies, a crucial step is asking ourselves a simple set of obvious questions:
“Would I click on that? Share that video? Enter that contest? Wear that watch? Identify with that brand?”
Those are the baseline questions. Strangely, they get overlooked all the time. So many campaigns fail this rudimentary test, and so they go nowhere.
The next step is taking yourself out of the equation. Can you answer those questions the way the audience would? The campaign isn’t about you after all, and it’s often not targeting your demographic, or your interests.
To do meaningful work with small, smart communities, we have to understand them. That comes down to three factors:
- Empathy
Empathy in a marketing context means being able to imagine ourselves as members of the audience and understand their motivations.
There are a few ways to boost the team’s level of understanding. For content and PR agencies like Codeword, having a bunch of journalists on-staff helps a lot. They tend to speak the community’s language, they’re familiar with the influencers, they know how to talk to the audience, and they’re often embedded in the community they’re writing about.
Everyone has stories about out-of-touch creatives and planners who wouldn’t be caught dead near the client’s product and badmouth it in the break room. I think that’s partly an empathy issue, and it’s helped along by groupthink. Which brings us to the next point…
2. Diversity
Phew, this is a tough one. And I don’t just mean racial and gender diversity — it’s about having members of the audience on your team, if you aren’t in the audience yourself. If you’re targeting millennial moms, are there millennial moms on your team? Do you know anyone who actually uses the product? In cases where recruiting isn’t an option, can you bring in an outsider to help — a media partner, or a consultant, or a partner in the space? They’ll bring a new perspective, a bit of extra street cred, and a list of useful contacts.
The most important thing they do is get us out of our agency mindset. The lack of diversity in the marketing industry is systemic (Codeword certainly struggles with it), and homogenous teams lead to missed opportunities.
Of course, the best solution is simply to recruit as many different types of people as possible. We like people that bring different professional and educational backgrounds, interests, cultures, even personality types. It’s not easy and we’re still figuring it out, but one thing we do know is diversity directly impacts the quality of our work.
3. Research
There’s no shortcut for doing your homework. We’re especially looking for behavioral insights that can impact our work, but effective research should also lead to empathy and possibly even diversity. At Codeword, we try to embed as much as possible into the community. We join their forums, follow their leaders on Twitter, read what they read, and care about what they care about. It takes time, but we consider it mandatory.
Sometimes we use community listening tools like Radian6 or Sysomos, sometimes we rely on free options like a shared Feedly and social feeds, and other times we incorporate more formal audience research results. And sometimes it’s simply about going out and having coffee with people and asking for their opinions. Our research phase isn’t always swift or easy, but it can be the difference between success and failure.
We see some real benefits to our small-smart-audience approach. For one, it demands smart work of us, and we don’t have to worry about mass appeal. It requires us to create programs, campaigns, and content that actually address the needs and values of the audience. That means the briefs are different, the challenges are different, and the work ends up being different.
And better.
