Author: Alex Reed

Written By: Alex Reed
Published On:

Unlocking Growth: Why Audience Clarity Is the Most Underrated Growth Strategy

Most marketing “growth strategies” aren’t growth strategies at all. They’re just ways to spend more money. When performance drops, it’s easy for marketers to default to what’s comfortable

  • Expand the audience
  • Add more channels
  • Tweak creative

It feels like progress. But without the right insights to support your approach, it can often result in brands trying to be everything for everyone, spreading themselves too thin, and just adding to the noise consumers are inundated with every day.

Here’s the truth: If you don’t deeply understand your audience, more marketing doesn’t create growth—it just creates waste.

Let’s look at a well-known example, JCPenney. In 2011, they tried to “grow” by modernizing and going after a new, more affluent audience. New strategy. New experience. No more coupons. From a strategic perspective, the move made sense. The result. A loss of 25% in sales in a year. Where they went wrong was, they didn’t actually understand what their current audience valued. It wasn’t just price. It was the *feeling* of getting a deal.

So many marketing strategies start and stop with identifying target audiences by demographics. Age. Income. Location. But where we’ve seen the most growth happen is going past demographics and going deeper into audience insights. At Jump we’ve helped clients grow significantly year over year. Not by adding more budget or channels. But through better targeting and understanding of who your right audience is.

In our work with clients across a variety of industries we’ve helped:

  • A university double enrollment when we focused on belonging—not demographics
  • A healthcare brand grow leads by 5x by targeting an overlooked audience and removing barriers to conversion
  • A sports and entertainment brand generate a sell out event by tapping into a new audience with different backgrounds but similar values.

In each case, the shift was not about doing more. It was about being more precise.

Here’s the shift more teams need to make:

**Stop asking: “Who can we reach?”**

**Start asking: “Who do we actually exist for and what do they care about?”**

Because those are not the same thing. The brands that are winning right now aren’t necessarily the ones doing more. It’s the ones who are clearer on the audiences who can drive their success.

They know:

→ what their audience cares about

→ what motivates action

→ what creates hesitation

→ and how their brand fits into all of it

How do you get that clarity? A simple framework for growth is:

  1. Discover. Understand who your audience is beyond demographics. Conduct research that helps unlock their motivations, values, and behaviors.
  2. Define. Translate the information you gather into insights. Develop personas that give a clear picture of your current and prospective customers
  3. Prioritize. Get honest about the personas that will actually drive growth for your brand. Get disciplined in where you should focus.
  4. Activate. Leverage personas across every facet of your marketing and business strategy.
  5. Optimize. Monitor performance and learn from what works and doesn’t. Stay on top of market trends and customer behavior to ensure your personas continue to be backed by data.

So the next time you find yourself trying to grow by “reaching more people,” or deploying a campaign that’s focused primarily on demographics, challenge that. Because growth doesn’t come from reaching more people. It comes from reaching the right people with greater clarity and purpose. And when you do that:

  • Your message hits harder
  • Your media performs better
  • Your budget goes further

The goal isn’t to do more marketing. It’s to make what you’re already doing work harder. And that starts with being really clear on who you exist for, and why it matters to them.

Written By: Alex Reed
Published On:

The Benefits of Working with an Independent Agency 

Over the last several decades, the advertising industry has undergone massive consolidation. Many independent agencies have been acquired by holding companies like WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe and others. Whether it’s to take advantage of a client base or leverage service offerings, holding companies have been on a buying spree and now own most of the mid-to-large size ad agencies. 

Small agencies remain mostly independent, but they often struggle to evolve amid increasing client demands for data sophistication and AI integration. They’re also competing with clients themselves, who are bringing their creative and media needs in-house to save costs. 

Today, mid-sized independent agencies are relatively rare, and it can be easy for clients to discard the idea of working with an independent agency altogether. However, for clients that value agility and personalized service, an independent agency has distinct advantages:

1. Proactive evolution

Some independent agencies offer niche industry experience or specialized services. Others, like Jump, deliver a full-service model that spans creative, media, digital and analytics. In either case, an agency’s survival depends on evolution. The right agency will anticipate market shifts and adapt its services to best support their clients. This degree of nimbleness is hard to find outside the independent agency model.

2. Personal, flexible and scalable service

No client or project is the same. Independent agencies, like Jump, are flexible and can adapt to a client’s needs. Sometimes that means serving as the lead agency. Other times, it means plugging in as a specialist partner alongside an in-house team. Either way, you should expect scalable support designed around your organization (not the other way around).

3. Collaboration and integration

An independent agency’s ability to collaborate with internal teams and other partners is critical. But the best independents take it further by integrating multiple disciplines under one roof. Regardless of how a client collaborates with Jump, we leverage all our capabilities (creative, media and data) to deliver the best recommendations and results.

4. No “fussiness”

Some agencies are tough to work with. They can prioritize awards over outcomes or nickel-and-dime clients for every out-of-scope request. As an independent agency, Jump doesn’t have to answer to a parent company or shareholders. We make decisions based on what’s best for our clients and our partnership. 

5. Senior-level expertise

Independent agencies often bring senior-level talent to every client, regardless of size. At Jump, that means our most experienced voices will always guide a client’s strategy and execution (not junior teams learning on your time). The result is more thoughtful work and faster decision-making.

A smaller, independent agency may not be the right fit for everyone. But for clients who value a true partnership that prioritizes collaboration, flexibility and innovation, the right independent agency has the potential to not only help you achieve your goals but make your life easier along the way. 

Written By: Alex Reed
Published On:

Have You Outgrown Your Brand?

When Jump Company was founded, we focused primarily on brand development. Over the last 25 years we have developed hundreds of logo identities and helped countless clients develop brand strategies and awareness campaigns. While our agency has an expansive track record helping brands succeed, we’re no longer just a brand shop. 

As marketing dramatically shifted over the years so did our clients’ needs, which is why our agency evolved to add media planning, performance marketing, research, video production, brand experience development and more to our list of services.  

Our market changed, our target audiences’ needs and mindsets changed, and so did our ability to deliver and add value. We outgrew our original brand, and hence our brand strategy needed to evolve. 

Ironically, many clients approach us for help with the exact same thing. They have outgrown who they were, they need to evolve to stay relevant, they need to grow to survive or, quite simply, things just changed. Many of them are wondering where to go from here. 

While our services have expanded, Jump will always be passionate about helping clients navigate through successful brand evolutions. Here are some key steps to our brand development process: 

  1. Audit and discovery. We conduct research to understand where you have been and where you’re going. To determine who is within the competitive set, we consider the market dynamics, how the brand is perceived today and what opportunities exist moving forward. Often, research includes stakeholder interviews, consumer interviews/focus groups/surveys, brand workshops and general market research.  
  1. Reporting and insights. Synthesizing our research, we report out findings along with key takeaways and insights that will drive future brand strategy, planning and messaging. While the research fuels the brand strategy, it also often helps clients identify additional opportunities for their organization and align to their business needs. 
  1. Brand strategy development. What is your brand opportunity and aspiration? Who do you exist for? What do you offer that no one else can? What attributes and reasons to believe make your brand compelling, relevant and unique? These are all critical considerations for building a successful brand strategy. 
  1. Experience guidelines. Brands are no longer just what we say they are; they’re also what they do and how consumers experience them across each and every touchpoint. To ensure your brand strategy goes beyond just words on paper, we build out guidelines with examples of how your promise and personality should come to life across messaging/tone, look/feel, user experience of the website, and customer experience across interaction with staff, services and more. 
  1. Identity exploration and change. Sometimes the evolution of your brand requires a shift in identity. This could be a modernization of your current mark, a shift to reflect the addition of other products/services/sub-brands or a complete overhaul to signal change. Jump’s process starts with an identity brief fueled by insights and the new brand strategy. From there, we lead our clients through a collaborative process to find the best identity approach that signals where they are going without losing who they have been. 

If you’re contemplating what’s next for your brand, give us a shout. We’d be happy to review where you are today and recommend a path to position you best for the future. 

Written By: Alex Reed
Published On:

The Missing Element to Your Recruitment Strategy 

One of the biggest challenges companies face is recruiting and retaining employees. COVID-19 fundamentally changed the workforce shifting employee values and, in some cases, motivating employees to abandon their jobs for a different career path altogether. The great resignation caused employers to stretch their benefit packages to remain competitive — ultimately resulting in unsustainable overhead and layoffs. Today, trends such as “silent quitting” are emerging, which is ultimately causing a decrease in the quality of customer service and even the ability to provide some services. 

There is by no means a silver bullet that will fix the dynamic challenges the workforce is facing today. But there is an essential piece to the puzzle that many organizations are missing, which is ensuring marketing has a seat at the HR table. 

In 2021, one of our long-term health care clients asked us to rethink their approach to HR marketing. Like how Jump approaches most marketing problems, we took a step back, researched the market dynamics and audited the current approach. We identified where the organization stood in context with its competitors, researched what employees cared about and identified where the organization was losing candidates in the recruitment journey among other things.  

As a result, we developed personas and articulated the employer value proposition, built an always-on marketing campaign to establish brand awareness and help build reputation, revamped the application process and website experience to simplify the journey, and targeted campaigns to meet candidates where they are. While none of these deliverables are necessarily revolutionary in the marketing space, they are often simple strategies that are forgotten when it comes to recruitment and retention. And when put into action have game-changing results. 

We no longer live in a world where we can simply post a job on a job board and candidates come running or expect a paycheck and typical benefits to be enough to keep employees motivated and loyal. It is critical that companies stop working in silos and bring marketing and communications teams in so that best-in-class HR marketing strategies can be implemented. Here are a few examples of what your HR/Marketing teams should be bringing forward for your organization: 

  1. An employee value proposition to better employees that are the right fit for your organization and a brand promise that considers the employee experience and is something employees can believe in and rally around 
  1. Research-based personas for prospective and current employees 
  1. Journey maps of recruitment and onboarding practices to identify gaps and opportunities in the candidate experience 
  1. Website and content audit to showcase key differentiators, inspire action from applicants and ensure a seamless experience 
  1. Campaigns that leverage persona-based messaging and targeting capabilities across an omnichannel experience 
  1. Up-to-date database that helps fuel targeting opportunities  
  1. Always-on brand presence across key channels to ensure the brand is top-of-mind, engaging and helps build perceptions around the employer brand 
  1. Holistic reporting that demonstrates the ROI of recruitment marketing for the organization 

If you are interested in learning more about optimizing your recruitment efforts, give us a shout. We’d love to have a seat at your HR table.