The Point Of Advertising Is To Gain Customers

Don't Advertise To Gain Likes And Follows

Several advertising platforms are telling you that they are the best platform to advertise on but before you even choose an advertising platform, what is the real goal and purpose of your advertisements?

Was This Article Helpful

Branding vs Sales

There seems to be a polarization in marketing these days where the CMO, VP, and Directors are shifting from marketing that drives the pipeline to focus on marketing that builds relationships, brand, and reach.

While this can be good, I believe marketing got lost and shifted too much in recent years and started caring more about reach and followers than generating revenue.

I've personally seen it go so far that I've seen people spend money to gain followers on a platform but not have a plan on what the next steps would be to get those new followers to purchase a product and the only metric that was measured to prove the success of the advertisement was, did we get followers?

Rise Of Social Media

Most of this switch started with the rise of social media platforms and how most people are tired and annoyed with salespeople.

Social media platforms gave us the ability to connect and build a following of people we never had the chance to connect with in the past. These platforms gave us the first true opportunity to target a very specific audience and being able to measure their interactions.

Gone were the days when you advertised on a billboard or a tv network that had a broad reach and had no clue whether it was the billboard they drove by or the tv commercial they saw that was the advertisement that led to their purchase unless you ran two entirely different advertisements.

Social Media Is Different

Unlike TV and billboards, where the medium was just a location and the audience was generalized. With social media, you could be a part of the show and target the exact people you want to engage with and the entire world sees your following amassing, it's all in the public eye.

And over the years, I feel a lot of marketers got sucked into wanting to be a part of the show, building their personal brands and in a way becoming an actor/actress for the brands they represented.

And when you're an actor/actress, it's like high school all over again where everyone wants to be popular and it's important to be liked, so marketers became personalities and entertainers more so than marketers trying to generate pipeline because no one wants to be sold to.

The 2023 Correction

This brings us to 2023, where you hear the echo chamber of LinkedIn and other big platforms all saying this is the year of the "conversion".

Businesses and marketers got sidetracked trying to build massive communities and followers, spending millions of dollars, but only connecting with people who wanted to be entertained.

Now owners are starting to feel those decisions in their back pockets and are telling themselves things need to be different.

But how?

How Do We Do Things Differently

The tricky part is, most people these days do engage with a lot of brands, purely for entertainment purposes.

I'm a fan of Red Bull Racing but I don't drink it. I'll watch the Lego TV show but hardly ever go out and buy any. I'm a fan of a lot of marketing software newsletters and blogs but have no interest in buying their software.

So how do you go from thinking of yourself as a content machine that is trying to catch everyone's attention, mostly with entertaining messaging, to reverting and focusing on what drives revenue?

A Shift In Goals & Priorities

It's going to come down to a shift in goals and priorities and understanding what metrics matter and drive pipeline vs those that are fun, exciting, and, bluntly speaking, large.

It's almost like we are going back to the beginning of the digital age, in the early days of Facebook, and instead of going after the masses, going after the select few.

Instead of our egos running the show and amassing large publicly visible followings, it's time to focus on those who actually wanna buy what you have to offer.

It All Makes Sense

This approach also makes sense when you explain why intent software and account-based marketing strategies have become increasingly talked about over the last couple of years.

But with these shifts in priorities and marketing strategies comes the reality that

• Instead of driving massive amounts of traffic to your website, it's going to be less
• Instead of looking for paid advertising where the reach is broad, it's going to become even more select
• Instead of focusing on a large target market, you're going to hone down and focus on one vertical at a time

And to do this properly, as an organization you're going to have to slow down, think through the process, and research what matters to your audience.

Really Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile

To create effective advertising that drives results again, you need to know your ideal customer profile and what matters to them.

As all the intention software says, you need to understand those who engage with your brand and if there is an actual intention to buy or if they are engaging with you because they liked your marketing for entertainment purposes.

It's for this same reason, that business owners are always told to make separate social media accounts and separate their personal brand from their business brand.

Some people will follow you on social media because they like your personality, not that they would buy something from you.

If you don't make this separation, your team could continue creating content that goes viral and reaches millions of viewers but doesn't drive a single dollar in revenue.

It's also why when you think about partnering with personalities and social media influencers, it's not always the people with the most followers who will drive partner revenue to your brand.

We're owners, marketers, and sales executives working at a business, we need to remember what we're trying to accomplish again.

The point of advertising is to gain customers.

Where Branding Makes Sense

I can hear the branding people going crazy at this point. If all you care about is money, people aren't going to want to engage with you.

Two thoughts.

If someone is engaging with your brand but not wanting to purchase what you offer, is it that bad that they stop engaging?

And there is still a place for brand-building, it's just not promoted with paid advertising.

Branding should all come naturally and organic through the interactions of your teams at conferences, trade shows, and social media platforms. The need for SEO still exists and you should still even be engaging on social media and trying to build a following.

The Key Difference

When it comes to paid advertising, the key difference is that advertisements should be targeted toward a growing pipeline, not just amassing a large email list or social media following.

If you have thousands of contacts in your CRM and only a few hundred customers, that should be a red flag.

Was This Article Helpful

Share it with your colleagues or network.