How do you get more bang for your buck from your marketing and make it really effective?

In this Vlog Grant explains how it’s all down to the ‘homogenous unit’ principle.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the homogenous unit principle… but just in case you haven’t, let me explain.
The homogenous unit principle is the concept that people feel comfortable around others who they perceive to be like them.

It came out of Christian missionaries working in India who were finding it difficult to encourage Indians to convert to Christianity. It wasn’t easy for white middle class males to encourage Indians from another culture to adopt their religion – but – if they could convert the few Indians and those Indians then and went and converted others, who they perceived to be like them, they had more success.

So what’s this got to do with marketing? The sociologist Manuel Castells explains that when people feel unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world down to the size of their community. In this global world, where we have unprecedented media choices, people are self segregating into their own gated communities.
In other words, their own homogenous units.

Today, information dissemination is happening more by social sharing than any other way. Therefore, if you have a small marketing budget, you need to think about what homogenous units you’re targeting in order to get serendipity and people talking about you.

What many people mistakenly do is spread their marketing far too wide, trying to target many homogenous units, where they don’t seem directly relevant to any, and then simply don’t get bang for their buck.

When your audience is your main channel, because of social sharing, then you really need to think about the homogenous unit, or market segment, that you really want to go after in order to meet your marketing truly effective.

So… next time someone asks you how you get bang for your buck from your marketing and make it really effective, just tell them you stick to the homogenous unit principle. It’s as easy as that.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English