The past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how to sell niche audiences. Most marketers continue to use mass metrics when evaluating niche segments and therein lies the problem. The mathematics will never add up for niche opportunities based on mass metrics.
Every day I come home and check my mailbox. To my shock there are no secret love letters from long lost admirers. Shocking, I know. What I do get by the truck load is lots of direct mail.
First 50 customers get free gym memberships.
Hurry, condos are selling fast in your area.
Limited time offer, free delivery on sushi orders over $20.
And every day I do exactly what everyone else does in my condo - I quickly scan through the mess and then in one fell swoop deposit the entire stack into the recycle bin.
If only these companies really knew what happens to their scarce resources, maybe just maybe they would stop bothering me with their direct mail.
So, how can these companies justify spending their budgets on a medium where anywhere between 95 - 99% of it goes to waste? The model is broken yet nobody in the room wants to admit it.
This doesn’t apply solely to direct mail but also tv, radio, OOH - essentially any medium that justifies its cost based on the size of the audience.
What these metrics fail to capture is who is actually paying attention. If the size of the audience was based on those that actually read the direct mail or paid attention to a commercial would marketers still be willing to invest the same amounts of their budgets? I doubt it.
How does a marketer justify paying a premium for a niche audience? It’s an easier internal sell to say you are going to take $50 K and reach 100,000 consumers compared to trying to stand up in a boardroom and explain how you’re going to instead spend your energy focusing on 1,000.
I would love to wrap this all up in a single post with a magical answer, like a Full House episode where everything gets solved in 30 minutes, but alas I don’t think it’s that simple.
More on this to come. Stay tuned.
This post is tagged direct mail, marketing, measurement, metrics, nish shah
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