So, you've moved beyond the "spray and pray" approach to your marketing promotions. You're segmenting. You're targeting. You're messaging. And still, the response you're getting is marginal at best. What gives?

This scenario is more common than you think and equally frustrating. So, what went wrong? Oddly enough the problem may not be that you misidentified your audience, but rather that they misidentified your message.

You found them, but they didn’t find you.

While most target marketing efforts increasingly focus on segmenting the audience, which is good, many efforts don’t take into account that the audience increasingly does the same thing in reverse. Good target marketing can account for many demographics, including: location, industry, occupation, occupational level, age, gender and a mixed bag of additional demographics depending on the data quality of the audience.

But, does your overall messaging strategy speak to those people? It’s one thing to identify your audience, it’s another to speak to them on their own terms. Identity by definition is more than just who you are. It’s also what you relate to.

3 Tips for Adding Heart and Soul Back Into Your Segmenting Science

1. After you’ve identified your audience, choose your most important demographics and simply count how many people fall into those categories. You’ll see that a list emerges and that list helps shape priority.
   
   
2. As the priority of your major audience segments emerges, place yourself in the shoes of each grouping and create a simple messaging profile. The profile will help you create a message that’s less about I.D.’ing people and more about speaking to them.
   
   
3. Don’t be scared to alter your grammar, your written diction and the color of your word choices. People are only a reflection of their categorized identity and its human nature to not want to be categorized in many instances.

Embrace these dynamics and you’ll find that segmenting your audience is not just about better categorizing your target groups, it’s about them better understanding you.

By: Natalie Klein

With budgets in television newsrooms tighter than ever before, the media is more receptive to well-produced b-roll instead of packaged, narrated video news releases and marketing tapes. To clarify, b-roll is background video. It’s a series of shots and interviews edited together that give an overview of a particular subject. There is no narration or specific story angle because only certain portions will be used depending upon the intended purpose, audience or outlet using the footage.

Here’s a hint: What looks fantastic to the client is actually terrible in the media’s eye. Give broadcast reporters exactly what they want - the content they would use if they had the time and resources to shoot it themselves. Think simple – nothing flashy – with steady shots and natural sound. Have it done by a professional video crew, and have it done correctly. Good b-roll can and will secure television news airtime.

It’s no secret that the content that plays best to a mass audience deals with health-related issues. A medical miracle can impact everyone. But, in many cases – no matter what the story – satellite  distribution is simply the wrong direction to go. Instead, do your homework and find the dozen or so targets that are truly interested in your service. From there, that $25-$35K required for VNR production and satellite distribution comes down to $5-$10K for b-roll production and strategic delivery of hard copy tapes.

Because of its versatility, b-roll can be used in many ways including: