I was at the pub with someone recently and, as often happens with me, we ended up talking about work. They were telling me about a business post they’d shared in some local Facebook groups that had generated loads of engagement, with people commenting, interacting with it and generally giving the business plenty of attention.
Naturally, they were thinking about how they could recreate it. What could they post next, which groups could they put it in and how could they get the same level of engagement again?
There was only one problem… Their business is incredibly niche and hardly any of the people engaging with the post were ever likely to become customers.
As we carried on talking, they mentioned that there were probably only around 100 companies in the entire country that would make genuinely good customers for what they sell. So I asked what seemed like a fairly obvious question: “If you know there are only 100 companies you really want to do business with, why aren’t you focusing your time on getting in front of them?”
It got me thinking about something I see all the time in business, and probably something we’re all guilty of in our personal lives too, to some extent. We chase attention because attention feels like progress, even when it isn’t necessarily moving us any closer to what we actually want.
Attention feels good
There’s a reason we like attention. It gives us an immediate response and, thanks to social media, we’ve become accustomed to getting that response very quickly. You publish something and within minutes you can see the likes, comments, views and new followers appearing. Every notification gives you a little dopamine hit that tells your brain whatever you’re doing must be working.
Compare that with the slow burn of intentionally building a relationship with a potential client. You might spend time researching the business, find the right person, introduce yourself and hear absolutely nothing. You might meet someone at an event and stay in touch for six months before anything commercial comes from it, or build a brilliant relationship with someone who doesn’t have an opportunity for you until next year.
There’s no immediate validation attached to any of that, which is exactly why I think attention can become so distracting. We’ve become used to having visible evidence that what we’re doing is working, but some of the most valuable things you can do for your business and life won’t give you that straight away.
Social media has given us an illusion of success
I’m a marketer, so I’m obviously not going to tell you that reach, engagement and brand awareness don’t matter. They absolutely do, but the numbers need context.
If 50,000 people see your content and none of them are remotely relevant to your business, what have those 50,000 views actually achieved? Equally, if 300 people engage with a post but none of them could ever buy from you, introduce you to someone who could or help move your business towards its goals, was it really as successful as it looked?
That doesn’t mean the post was worthless. Awareness has value and sometimes reaching a wider audience is exactly the objective. The problem comes when we automatically interpret more attention as more success without stopping to ask whether the attention is coming from the right people.
It’s very easy to look at a post with thousands of views and another with a few hundred and assume the first one performed better. If one of those few hundred people happens to be the Managing Director of a company you’ve wanted to work with for two years, the maths suddenly looks very different.
Vanity metrics can become a comfort blanket
I think vanity metrics are particularly seductive because they give us something tangible to point at. Followers, impressions, likes, website traffic and engagement rates all make it very easy to feel as though things are moving, but the harder question is what they’re moving towards.
If your objective is awareness, measure awareness. If your objective is generating opportunities, measure whether your marketing is creating conversations with the right people. If your objective is sales, eventually you need to be able to connect what you’re doing to the pipeline.
Otherwise, there’s a danger that marketing becomes a very busy-looking comfort blanket. You can spend hours creating content, posting into groups, attending networking events, having coffee meetings and watching your engagement increase while avoiding the much more uncomfortable job of deciding exactly who you want to do business with and going after them.
Activity is very easy to mistake for progress when you’re measuring the wrong things.
Attention can become a bandage for avoiding sales
This is probably where the conversation becomes slightly less comfortable, because I think some businesses use marketing activity as a bandage for avoiding proper business development.
It’s easier to publish another post than contact the company you actually want to work with. It’s easier to attend another general networking event than deliberately build a relationship with the ten people in your market who could genuinely change your business. It’s also much easier to celebrate another 10,000 impressions than ask how many meaningful conversations those impressions actually created.
Proper business development involves putting yourself in a position where you might be ignored or told no. It requires follow-up, consistency and patience, and you can spend months building a relationship without knowing exactly when, or whether, it’ll turn into revenue.
That doesn’t give you the same dopamine hit as watching a post take off, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. In many businesses, particularly niche B2B companies, it’s probably far more valuable.
Quality changes the maths
We talk about quality over quantity so often that it’s almost become a cliché, but I think we forget to apply it to attention. You don’t necessarily need more people engaging with your business. You need more of the right people engaging with it.
The same applies to your network. Having hundreds of contacts isn’t particularly useful if you don’t have meaningful relationships with any of them. A smaller network of people who know you, understand what you’re good at, trust you and think of you when the right opportunity comes along can be significantly more valuable.
That requires a completely different mindset because it means being much more intentional about where you put your time.
Going back to those 100 companies, imagine the difference between spending the next year trying to generate as much general attention as possible and spending it systematically building awareness and relationships within those 100 businesses.
You could identify the decision-makers, understand where they spend their time and work out what challenges they have in common. Your content could be created specifically with those people in mind, you could attend the events they actually go to and you could look at your existing network to see where introductions might be possible. When there’s a genuine reason to start a conversation, you could contact them directly and then stay visible without relentlessly trying to sell to them.
Suddenly your marketing, sales and business development activity all have somewhere specific to go.
Intention requires you to choose
I think this is the part that makes intention harder than attention. Attention lets you keep collecting more followers, connections, views, opportunities and people who know your name. There’s always another number you can make bigger, whereas intention requires you to decide what you actually want.
Once you know that, you can start asking much better questions about how you spend your time. You can decide which customers you actually want, which relationships are worth investing in, which opportunities take you closer to your goals and which marketing channels put you in front of the people who matter. More importantly, you can decide which numbers genuinely tell you whether any of it is working.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting attention for your business. I certainly want people to know who I am and what Big Reputation does. Building a strong reputation requires visibility, and visibility requires attention, but I want that attention to have a purpose.
I’d rather have the right person properly understand what we do than have 1,000 people vaguely recognise our logo. I’d rather build a handful of strong commercial relationships than collect hundreds of contacts I’ll never speak to again, and I’d rather create something that resonates deeply with the audience I actually want than chase a viral post because the numbers look impressive.
Attention can give the illusion of success very quickly, but intention is what gives you a much better chance of actually becoming successful.
So if there are 100 companies that could genuinely transform your business, stop worrying about whether the whole internet is paying attention and work out how you’re going to become known, trusted and chosen by the 100.