Memo to marketers: Media has changed and so should your strategy

Do you ever envy marketers from a generation ago?

They had the luxury of not having to think too deeply about how their customers consumed media. Customers watched only a handful of TV stations, read the newspaper, listened to the radio on the commute to work, and caught a movie on the weekends. Marketers knew exactly where the eyeballs were — and who to pay in order to reach them.

Today, however, to say that the media landscape is “fragmented” is like calling the moon “a big rock.”

It’s rare for two people to consume the exact same content from the exact same sources on the exact same device.

You might, for example, have two 30-year-old male professionals who work in the same industry and are in the same income bracket. Heck, as long as we’re pretending, let’s say they work for the same company and live next door to each other.

But while one stays up-to-date through a carefully curated selection of subreddits on Reddit, another prefers to check his Twitter feed and his favorite blogs through his Feedly account.

While one gets his entertainment fix through binge-watching sitcoms on Netflix after work, another prefers listening to storytelling podcasts like The Moth, Snap Judgement, or This American Life. Perhaps one manages his professional network through LinkedIn, while another is so secure in his career and so close to his colleagues that he does it through Facebook.

Even though these two people might perfectly match a particular demographic you’re targeting, the tactics you’ll need to reach them are very different. A LinkedIn prospecting campaign, for example, would only reach one of them. But you can’t do everything. If you’re working with limited resources, you’re going to have to focus your efforts on content and channels that will give you the most bang for your buck.

Are you generating the right kind of content with the right kind of people?

If we ever expect to reach our ideal prospects on their home turf, we’re going to need to define what “home turf” means. And that means asking the right questions about how they interact with content.

Questions like:

1. How much content do they consume? Are they a binger or a nibbler? Are they willing to read through a 2,000-word blog post or is anything longer than 140 characters intolerable?
2. What are their channels of choice? People used to joke that 500 channels on television was excessive. When you add in all the digital ways of getting content, 500 seems downright quaint.
3. What devices do they consume content on? Laptop? Mobile? The TV in their living room? A combination of all of three at the same time? In 2013, Microsoft partnered with Flamingo Research and Ipsos OTX to produce a great report on this very topic.
4. How much of their favorite content is informational as opposed to educational? Are they a sober-minded consumer of strictly non-fiction? Or are they a pop culture geek who attends Comic-Con every year to see their favorite actors and writers? Or somewhere in between?
5. What triggers their content consumption? Do they pay attention to influencers? What content sources are most trustworthy to them? Digital influencers are booming – driving engagement and sales.

Answering these questions can help you drill down to the essential digital strategy questions.

For instance, should we focus on earned, owned, or paid media? Which social networks should we target? What is the subject matter and format of the content we produce?

Blockbuster’s business model was literally based around making it easy for their customers to consume video content, but they didn’t pay attention when the consumption trend moved towards delivery and streaming. For them, the question “how and where do our customers like to consume content?” was literally life and death. But they answered it too late, so death it was.

Even if your product isn’t content-based, your marketing is. No marketing campaign can be successful if you don’t reach prospects where they are. And unfortunately, “where they are” is more complex today than at any other time in human history. Marketers must understand that media choices are as complex as their prospects’ personalities, and create campaigns that respect that fact.