Is mass marketing dead?

I’d say so – the scattergun approach of chucking your message out there via any means possible, and at any cost, seems oddly incongruous with any sense of a business that understands where its customers may be.
Not everyone realises it. Look at the ads that still run throughout the commercial breaks you fast forward at x30 when you’re watching X Factor or Strictly on Sky Plus! All that money and effort, reduced to a comedy timelapse sequence…
The way to reach people now is to narrowly target your marketing campaigns, and then distribute widely, because it costs very little to do so. It used to be that you designed your initial message to attract as many people as possible (the masses), and trusted that some of those people would be interested enough to  filter through and become customers. Once created, the message would then be churned out to as many people as you could afford to –  via TV, Billboards, Magazines… The problem now, however, is that we are all overloaded with the hundreds of generic messages that we see every day – we are zoning out because most of them are not relevant to us.
Social media has given us immediate messaging – instantaneous delivery. Fabulous! Now we can design our message so that it appeals only to a narrowly defined market of the “right people” who buy our service or product, and we can make it so unique that it is almost impossible for the “right person” to ignore.
Then send it out everywhere and often – how? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn – all the relevant social media platforms for your brand. Ensure you are not intrusive with too much info by using these platforms simply to get the message out – and then directing your potential customers to your website where they can access all the detail they want via video content, downloads etc.
Most people will completely ignore it, but the people it is intended for will embrace it with open arms because the content will be exactly what they want or need. Communication is no longer expensive – no longer the realm of the advertising agency with thousands of pounds to spend on the latest film shoot. The customer wants information relevant to their needs – not a slogan. You can give them what they want using the technology available, at a fraction of the marketing budgets we’ve all been allocating.

How to get your ideas to spread

As Seth Godin says in How To Get Your Ideas to Spread, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. We totally adhere to this belief – and the Saucy Horse version of this is #DontBeVanilla – but it doesn’t take anything away from the truth that is YOU NEED TO TARGET YOUR MARKETING

I love this – a sense that playing fields are being levelled for all businesses. Is what you are saying “remarkable” to your prospect customer? Or is your message being lost in the morass of boring mediocrity as you interrupt people in a place where they don’t want you to?
Social media brings true power to the customer, but also to the businesses, large & small, that want to understand how to use it in their marketing strategy. What do you think?