Back in the day, decision-makers had a significantly easier job than today when choosing the best marketing strategy for their services and products. There are so many options today, but mass marketing is among the more attractive ones.
Should you invest in it or not? It’s a serious business decision.
Before you can make the right choice, we need to go over its pros and cons and look at some examples. Below you will be able to find everything about this type of marketing to decide whether it is the right course to pursue.
What exactly is mass marketing?
Mass marketing, as the word suggests, is a strategy, unlike any other marketing strategy. It doesn’t target a specific market niche. Instead, it aims to attract a vast audience. It considers almost everyone in a market as a potential customer, and while doing so, it completely ignores the customers’ needs and wants, demographic differences, and prospects’ preferences.
Other names for mass marketing are undifferentiated and scattergun marketing strategies. The names were derived from this strategy’s goal to appeal to an entire market. Instead of having to segment a market, mass marketing strategists have one uniform approach to all potential customers in a vast target audience.
The role of mass media
Every marketing strategy targets a specific marketing channel. Very often, there are several marketing channels in the mix. Given the nature of mass marketing, it’s logical to see it leans on the reach of mass media. Remember, its goal is to reach as many people as possible in the target market. The best way to do this is to use media that most people access daily.
Back in the day, mass media exclusively targeted TV, radio, and newspapers. Today, in the digital marketing era, it started using digital channels. There are billions of social media users, making social media platforms suitable for mass media campaigns.
In addition, companies use email marketing to expand their reach and send their message even to more people.
Advantages of using scattergun marketing strategy
A scattergun marketing strategy is marketing at scale. It was developed to target and sell products to big markets, and the first advantage of using this type of marketing is that you can reach a considerable number of people.
The second advantage is cost-efficiency. Instead of having to segment the market, personalize your approach, and come up with different campaigns for every segment, you will have one marketing campaign. It significantly reduces the costs and time needed for research because you don’t have to dive into the details of your market research.
Finally, when you have one marketing strategy that targets an entire market, you send a consistent message to all potential prospects. That’s precisely why many experts look at mass marketing as a branding effort. It helps increase brand awareness and reinforce the brand in the consumers’ minds.
Disadvantages of using a scattergun marketing strategy
Using a scattergun marketing strategy has some downsides as well. For starters, with one global marketing strategy, you won’t have much room to fine-tune it to achieve better results. If anything significant happens in the market or the industry, you will have to start all over and come up with a new mass approach.
You cannot develop truly meaningful relationships between your brand and consumers when you cast a net this big. That’s because you won’t be catering to the very specific needs and wants of a smaller group of people.
To counterbalance this downside and stand out from the crowd, you will need to bring prices down, which leads us to another downside – minimal profitability.
The noteworthy examples of mass marketing
Mass marketing is perfect for advertising products used by many people, such as necessities, including sanitary products, clothes and footwear, and food and beverage. Examples of mass marketing are on your favorite TV and YouTube channels, Facebook, newspapers, and outdoor hoarding.
All those Nike, Coca Cola, Colgate, and McDonald’s Commercials are, in fact, scattergun marketing strategies in action. Yes, some of these brands did move to segmentation and targeting, but they still target entire nations with one commercial, which is a huge target audience.
Mass marketing is effective if you want to sell a product or service many people need. It can help you save money and streamline campaign management. However, if you want to stand out from the crowd, build customer relationships, and create a unique brand image, chances are that segmentation and niche targeting will provide better results.
I’m is an owner of Venostech.com, blogger, Android and technology enthusiast. Individual who are educated in the IT and like to write according my scope.
