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Reach and Resonance Both Needed for Effective Marketing

Resonance is not a replacement for reach, but rather a qualitative input into it. You often see the narrative, especially when reach is getting harder to achieve like with declining organic LinkedIn, that the real focus anyway is on resonance. That much deeper resonance with a few is better than surface-level with many. Except it’s a false choice. Reach without resonance is just wasted budget that gets ignored or quickly forgotten, but deep resonance on a few can be just as problematic. It’s either a bet that you can identify the perfect segment that will be in-market out of the ~5% who do any quarter, or it’s a much worse bet than you can persuade them to be. High-frequency marketing to a small group generally doesn’t increase the odds of them choosing you by much, instead being a rapidly diminishing return as you hit them over and over for less and less impact. Marketing isn’t deterministic, where we cause the outcomes, but rather is probabilistic where we increase the odds of them happening. That is accomplished by a balanced effort where we are reaching as many relevant people as we can with messaging that resonates strongly. That is a moving target at the best of times. When reach declines, the answer is not to compensate with frequency and depth, but to reexamine where you’re finding reach to make the whole equation work at all.