Spread Your Coverage Thin...

Do you spread your coverage thin? By this I mean, do you have many places to promote your blog (product, service, message, etc.)? If you have a message that can appeal to a broad audience, spread the message in many places. Advertisers rely on broad audience. When Coca Cola, Ford and Google advertise, they go after most people. They don't know who likes their products but it does not matter much. In most B2B products and services this is not the case. It is the case for Google, Microsoft and Amazon. These are companies that offer something to most businesses. Of course there are big many factories that only need a few copies of Microsoft Office and the decision to choose a new version is minimal. Yet this does not account to the decision to advertise.

Broad message techniques is also useful if you don't know who would like your product. If you have a mobile application like a smart keyboard (see AI Type), you may want to test the market by first sending out a broad message. Once you figure out that doctors and lawyers are more interested in an accurate typing and have a vocabulary of 1,000 words they use on a daily basis, then you can narrow your campaign. A broad approach can be better than focusing on groups in Linked-In. It can also be much better than a Facebook campaign. How can you go broad with a software or a mobile hardware product? Advertise or write posts on large blogs like TechCrunch, Engadget and Tim O'Reily's RADR. You can even go more broad and comment or contribute on general news blogs like the New York Times. One thing to remember, when you go broad the percentage of people who care goes down considerably. If on a Linked-In group 3% would buy your product, that number will go down to one in 100,000 or more in a New York Times reader pool. Yet, a NY Times blog can have 10,000 times (yes TIMES) more exposure than a Linked-In group or a Facebook page. So it may be worth going after a broad range strategy sometimes.
In the end, you need to test. That comes down to effort, energy and resources. On the web you can get your word out, just that everyone in the world is also doing the same thing and your message is lost in the noise. So what's next? Lots of interesting ideas about messages, audience and effective use of broad and narrow channels.