Everyone has their way of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A lunchtime classic, everyone prefers their individual amount of peanut butter and the correct ratios of bread to filling. Have you ever had to make a PB&J with little peanut butter and jelly packets you can get from a hotel or restaurant? You’re given two plastic packets of peanut butter and one plastic packet of strawberry jelly. This is all you have to use for the sandwich.
Do you put all your peanut butter on one piece of bread and all the jelly on the other? Do you try and spread the peanut butter evenly across both pieces of bread? Distribution is everything when it comes to a sandwich and is no different than when it comes to your marketing.
If your peanut butter is your distribution budget as well as your message. This is how much power your message has to get out there. Look at the bread as your mediums: television, digital, traditional. Will you place a lot of your peanut butter on traditional or will you try to cover all areas evenly? Say the jelly is your competitor’s message. They throw everything on one corner of one piece of bread, one medium. You’ve covered both slices evenly. You’re getting noticed, but only a little bit. The jelly-covered corner commands that audience. No one will notice peanut butter coating at the bottom when they take a bite out of that part.
You want to be jelly. Don’t worry so much about covering all mediums, your visibility must be backed up with evidence. Make an educated decision on what part of the market you plan to command and then do it. That is shooting with a rifle instead of a shotgun. Grow your budget so eventually you can command several mediums, several pieces of bread. Getting noticed by the right people is the important thing, not covering every medium.