Frank

Narrowcasting Pt. 2

From thirty-second television commercials to the guy slapping restaurant menus on windshields, adverting is everywhere.

Now more than ever, successful companies and organizations are relying on marketing firms like Media Development to bust their message through the clutter.

Here’s how we did just that for Quincy Notre Dame’s annual fund drive campaign.

Media Development was asked to produce a short video about QND.  The video was completely edited with the viewer in mind. Left-brain viewers want to be sold on the facts - 96% of all QND students go to college.  Right-brain viewers are moved by emotion – extremely positive heartfelt comments by the students themselves.  But how do you combine both approaches while keeping the video organic and real?  The answer for us was to implement a third element – shoot the video in a documentary style.

The finished piece will be shown to an audience of heavy-hitters at the annual kick-off event in a couple of weeks.  Although this event was our target focus, we felt that we could accomplish so much more with our marketing efforts.

As I stated in my last post, Media Development turned to narrowcasting on the web.  The major challenge of marketing on the web is being able to target your niche audience.  But at Media Development we believe that it can be accomplished with huge results.  It’s all about staying true to the fundamentals.  As boring as it sounds the best form of advertising is still word of mouth.  We turned to viral marketing to do this.

We uploaded the video to YouTube on a Friday.  That night I went through my email address book and found (only) five friends that either went to QND or had children in the Catholic school system. I told these friends that we’re trying to get our clients video in front of as many people as possible.  I asked them to view the video and to share the link with others.  I told them that it was extremely important to keep their referral emails personable.

In P-to-P marketing, this is called rapid multiplication or the snowball effect.  After a referral from an acquaintance, people are 81% more likely to share a linked message to at least one person, 49% more likely to refer the message to two to three people.  Not bad.

Like I said, I sent the video link to 5 friends.  After 24 hours over 200 people had viewed our client’s material. According to YouTube’s data, all the views were local and over 75% were within our specific target audience of M/F 35-44.

Once again, at Media Development, we don't just hand over the finished work and say good luck.  That's not marketing.