Who matters to you and your business? Who are the customers that make the difference? Who are the key stakeholders who make or influence decisions in your favour?
Now think about the biggest room in your office.
Unless you have a really small office without a decent sized meeting room, I'm guessing you could fit your group of key people into that room. OK, you might need to move the pot plant and some of them might need to stand but you're probably not going to need to hire the Royal Albert hall.
We spend a lot of time and energy trying to raise awareness and communicate our value to people who aren't going to make a difference. Sometimes we're guilty of confusing reach with resonance. As marketing guru Bernadette Jiwa says “to be effective, our marketing doesn’t need to reach everyone, it needs to resonant with the right people.”
Of course this begs the question, "who are the right people?" If we're going to personalise our message in terms of content and delivery, we need to properly understand the people we want to reach. We need to understand their needs at a business and a human level. We need to understand their challenges, aspirations, and priorities. We need to apply empathy and develop insight.
"That sounds like hard work", I hear you cry. “Isn't it just easier to let Marketing develop and run generic programmes and hope the message gets to the right people?” Yes, it's easier. But shouldn't you be thinking about effective rather than easy? Challenger methods allow your teams to create one-to-one campaigns but you need to help them craft content that is relevant and interesting to the people who matter to you.
Invest time in really understanding the people who make a difference to your company (after all, you can fit them all into that big room at the end of the corridor). There many ways to get that insight - from disruptive research techniques, traditional desk based or even see them speak at a conference - and the more insight you gain the richer conversations you will have and definitely get more back from what you put in.