Narrowcasting
If you've witnessed teams choosing to broadcast in an aim to build awareness leading to millions of impressions but bad on conversion, narrowcasting could be the answer & may as well work like a charm
“Product management wasn’t and never is about building fancy stuff, it has always been about solving problems”
The Problem
How often have you heard “we’re living in the internet era now”?
Well. It may come as a rude shock to you if I were to tell you that doesn’t altogether fit in completely with the description of our lives today. That very notion seems to have grown old now.
As of today, we’re living in the epicenter of social media / networks, they have managed to overhaul most of our daily priorities with most of them choosing to stick to those popular social channels be it YouTube shorts, videos and the related over platforms like TikTok, Facebook etc.
Here’s one such example (a rather drastic & critiqued one):
And when one is living the so called “online social life” as I’d like to term it, it becomes very easy for teams to pin on metrics like impressions as that also is a quick relief or a quick validation / justification of acceptance in the wider markets, what percentage of that market is going through and move towards conversion & whether that market has enough strength / relevance could be totally debatable. One can refer back to the pirate metrics (AARRR) and check out the numbers between the entry-point and the funnel exit.
If you see the image of the funnel above, it is down to 100 enquiries from 5000 visitors which is a meagre 2% and that doesn’t even mean the whole 2% would lead to a sure shot revenue generation.
No, I am not suggesting that the exercise is entirely bad in any sense of the word. If there is anything wrong with it, it ought to be how teams conducting this mass online marketing as a mandatory exercise and perceive it to be a precursor to endless conversion, with the post-condition that the product / service on offer isn’t niche / doesn’t have anything differentiating them from the other players / competition in the market.
So, is there a workaround here?
The Workaround / The Solution
Broadcasting messages online so as to reach out to a wide audience has been pretty common a sight right from the DOTCOM boom (well almost) but given how near-low or appalling conversion rates seemed like the order of the day the solution to it could be in Narrowcasting.
Definition:
Narrowcasting aims to reach highly specific segments that may be grouped by behavioral characteristics, values upheld, preferences, demographics etc. so as to be a picky in sending messages to a narrowed-down / niche / targeted audience.
Parallel terms: Target marketing, Niche advertising
Unlike popular belief, Narrowcasting has been around for quite a while now. It was coined by J.C.R. Licklider in 1967 when he was talking about the future of broadcasting and predicting how the future trend of television networks could point to programs exhibiting a total segmentation of the market based on the needs (likes) of smaller specialized groups of audiences.
Some of the popular channels one could think of being strategically employed for Narrowcasting so as to build awareness amongst some specifically targeted groups of users are:
As far as I have experienced, there seems to be an unprecedented onus on numbers that depict “Virality” and teams are mostly pinning on that one metric by popping the question “how is the content faring, has it gone viral yet?”. When going viral isn’t altogether bad, it becomes a problem if teams focus on and fixate on improving / optimizing for that one solitary metric.
Here’s an illustration that would get you to understand it better.
Supposing they are 2 different initiatives as tried out by a team and as you can clearly see and it’d be fair to call non-skewed with no clear winner when one compares the DAU numbers at the bottom of the funnel. But, pay some attention to the cost and the effort that may have gone into this exercise.
Narrowcasting could work wonders as it could prove to be a cost saver provided one has a total nuanced understanding of the markets, expectations / wants of the users as pitted against the choices available under the header “competition” which again routes back to immersive research.