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.

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 

2. Research-based personas for prospective and current employees 

3. Journey maps of recruitment and onboarding practices to identify gaps and opportunities in the candidate experience 

4. Website and content audit to showcase key differentiators, inspire action from applicants and ensure a seamless experience 

5. Campaigns that leverage persona-based messaging and targeting capabilities across an omnichannel experience 

6. Up-to-date database that helps fuel targeting opportunities  

7. Always-on brand presence across key channels to ensure the brand is top-of-mind, engaging and helps build perceptions around the employer brand 

8. 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. 

On-premise Brand Video Is the Customer Communication Channel You Are Missing

Environmental Graphics. Digital Signage. On-premise Video. Whatever your terminology, marketers intuitively understand the digital evolution from physical point-of-sale signage and endcaps to monitors, screens and projectors inside a retail space. While the tactical use of this channel is common – timely promotion of sales, digital menus and wayfinding signage – don’t overlook the broader brand lift that on-premise video provides. Here’s a quick analysis of why you should be doing it and some considerations in how to structure your execution.

Why it makes sense

The first reason it makes sense is that hardware and technology costs have made it a much easier investment. LED screens are less expensive and operate at a higher efficiency for lower energy costs. Additionally, technology provides multiple paths for creating applications or using out-of-the-box application solutions that present polished results with the flexibility to scale and optimize. And most importantly, your competitors are doing it and your customers expect it.

Have something interesting to say

When you place on-premise video in your location you can be sure of one thing – your brand is top of mind when your customers see it and they connect whatever they see on it to your brand. Capitalize on this captive, focused audience with content that informs and entertains as well as promotes. Any positive experience customers have with their interaction reflects on and impacts their perception of your brand. Date and time, weather, local news, community interest or trivia can exist alongside promotion to encourage interaction and engagement.

Set the mood

The pace and the tone of content should be reflective of the display’s location and the customer frame of mind to be truly relevant and engaging. How long are people likely to be looking at a given display should dictate how much variety of content is included and how often that content changes. The entrance to a building and a waiting room are very different approaches. Similarly, if the content is being shown in the customer service area, your customer may be less interested in a humorous distraction than if they are standing in a checkout line, and a healthcare setting requires different sensitivities than a retail location.

Jump Company has an in-house video team that handles everything from pre-production to post-production including sound design, motion graphics and 3D animation. They were disappointed this information was shared via a blog article and not a YouTube video.