Get your targeting right. Be more pigeon.

How thrilling it must be to be a pigeon.

I know, I know. Pigeons are manky, idiotic, filthy creatures. The vermin of the skies. But they don’t know that.

What pigeons see is a world rich with opportunity; a world they’re free to navigate, explore and crap upon with gleeful abandon.

What pigeons have is choice. Cars? Office buildings? Bald men? Bouffant hairstyles? Hats? Children? A target-rich environment, for sure.  

But not even the most voluminous pigeon can crap on everything at once. For a start, there are only so many hours in the day. They can’t spend ALL of it defecating.

Then there are the sheer number of targets. Let’s assume a pigeon can drop a minger every 30 minutes – some brief Googling would suggest this is broadly the case. They sleep about 10 hours per day. So that leave 14 hours of available strafing tine; equating to approximately 28 rounds in the chamber for most pigeons, most days.

A pigeon, therefore, has to choose its targets carefully (I appreciate there’s a leap of logic here to assume that pigeons are anything more than barely sentient and therefore unlikely to exercise any degree of judgement over their bowel movements, but let’s make that leap together). It cannot possibly crap on every window, every car, every hat, child and hairless pate in a single day. Not even with 10,220 live payloads per year could a pigeon begin to conquer the entire crappable surface area of possible targets.

I’d encourage you to think of yourself as pigeons, my friends. You cannot possibly do everything and moreover it would be absolute folly to try, for you will surely fail.

Marketers, pick your targets based on arguable facts and logic, and listen to that gnawing feeling in your gut which tells you the draft version is probably still too ambitious. Bosses, know your marketing teams can’t possibly communicate 17 key messages to every market sector and deliver exceptional growth in the next six months. It simply cannot be done.

The advantage we have over pigeons (granted, there may be others which haven’t yet occurred to me) is that we can choose, and we can measure our efforts. By choosing too many targets, or failing to choose at all, the job of measurement becomes a great deal more complicated. Often this can be to the point where measurement lacks any real business benefit and becomes a flabby, meaningless slide in a powerpoint deck which is quickly forgotten.

Choose your targets wisely. Which are the closest? The easiest to progress? Those where you can claim a genuine advantage over competitors? The simplest to measure – and those metrics properly understood and which mean something to your organisation?

Choosing one or two targets and sticking with them means you can direct effort, resource and budget into a clear and consistent tactical plan. Learn from the results. Then, when it’s time to go after the other possible targets, you’ll be in a position to make your next campaigns even better.

Being a pigeon would be simpler, though, right?