Reaching your Audience with Changing Media By Laura S. Wharton Wharton Communications The Big Three networks are very much a thing of the past. Media fragmentation and skipping commercials through electronic zapping make it hard to reach a given audience if this is your primary form of advertising. Magazines are folding or putting more content online. Newspapers continue to shrink while advertising costs rise. With all the changes to traditional media, how will your company advertising survive? You adapt to the changes. Most Americans are increasingly having to multi-task to cram as much into 24 hours as possible. To reach them, your advertising and promotions will have to multi-task, too. This might mean introducing direct mail, Internet marketing and pod-casting to your traditional promotions campaign, or testing new forms of publicity like radio sponsorships. The variety of media channels can be dizzying. To help you navigate, here are some suggestions: 1. Narrow your target audience as much as possible. The more you know about your target and the types of media they enjoy, the better your chances are of reaching them. Case in point: Commuters may have time to listen to NPR for their daily fix of news, so a radio sponsorship might make more sense than advertising in your local paper. 2. Clearly identify your goals. If you are trying to increase awareness, your campaign may be different than if you want to generate leads or web site traffic. Your marketing efforts have to correspond to your desired results. 3. Be flexible. It’s going to take more than one channel to reach your audience. Whichever mode you take, be prepared to test, test, and test some more. You will want to test headlines, colors, benefit statements, and a lot of other subtle parts of your message to get the perfect pitch. Your best promotional tool is still your employee. Get your internal message right, and let your employees help spread your company’s gospel. This word-of-mouth is still crucial to any promotional plan.