Definition: The spray and pray meaning is similar to “throwing spaghetti at the wall” and is used to describe a marketing approach where a company sends a large volume of marketing material perhaps across many sales funnels at once without strong audience<>value prop pairs to a wide audience in the hopes that something will resonate with a few people.
Often someone engaged in spray and pray is also making the classic one and done mistake.
The opposite of spray and pray is using a strong ABM funnel strategy, hyper targeted PPC ads campaign, only focusing on money phrases in SEO, etc. to ensure that only the right messaging is reaching the best fit audience.
The correct order is “spray and pray,” not “pray and pray.” You put the message out and most likely wait (pray) and wait (pray some more) and then fix your go to market strategy.
Avoiding spray and pray should be table stakes for any fractional CMO or Head of Growth.
Use It In a Sentence: Not sure how many of that new email list of 100,000 are in our ideal customer profile…I guess it’s more spray and pray this week.
For Further Reading: When Does It Make Sense to Order a Sales Funnel Audit
More Definitions: Drinking the Kool-Aid Definition, Fishing in a Barrel Definition, Firing a Shotgun Definition, Insert Magic Definition, Yield Management Definition
