If they've not heard of us, they won't buy from us

It doesn't matter if we're a startup, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company. It seems that many organizations continue to waste money chasing people who are never going to buy from us in the immediate future. Now, you probably know the 95/5 rule from Professor John Doerr's Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, all that stuff. Okay, now regardless of whether the out-of-market versus in-market breakdown is 95/5, 90/10, or even 80/20, it doesn't really matter. Most businesses obsess over conversion rates and funnel optimization for a minority slice which might possibly, hopefully, maybe buy today. For instance, most businesses aren't actively shopping for accounting software, right? Unless something's come up that can't wait that they need to address. Everyone else is using whatever they've already got. Yes, they know they need to either upgrade or to switch at some point in time, but that decision stays somewhere between never, and eventually you may be on their priority list because they're busy with 101 other things that are more pressing. Yet here we are, continually pouring a ton of our marketing budget into Google Ads retargeting, conversion optimization, and, you know, some ebook-gated content that nobody actually reads. We're paying through the nose to fight over a tiny handful of businesses actually shopping this week. Everybody else gets written off as a failed conversion and is outside of our sightline. But our future buyers are the ones forming opinions right now about which brands seem familiar, credible, and worth remembering. When they eventually need whatever we're selling, maybe they'll do their careful research. But even if they do, and as we know, most of them don't, they're going to start their look into possible solutions with brands that they already know of. You know, whatever names sit in their head already, because it's less cognitive work than starting from zero. Now, many marketing teams are looking at brand versus activation totally backwards. Brand work gets labeled as being soft, unmeasurable, and hard to justify in budget meetings, while performance marketing gets more easily funded because we can track clicks and we can track attributions down to the micro level. And the C-suite think that's better because it's numbers and trackable and easier to measure, so it's somehow more relevant. But you know what? That's not how people's brains work, which means that's not how marketing should work. Marketing isn't deterministic any more than business as a whole is deterministic. Marketing, sales, business, and all the rest of it is probabilistic. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that we can follow all the rules, do everything that we're told to do, read that New York Times bestseller, watch all the new YouTube videos, even listen to podcasts like this one, and yet we can still fail. Yes, dear listener, there are no guarantees in marketing, just like there are no guarantees in business. Or in life. It is what it is, and I don't make the rules. The underlying premise of so-called performance marketing— boy, do I hate that term— assumes the buyer already knows who we are when they are exposed to our messaging. If they don't, our perfectly optimized landing page competes with brands that already exist in their memory. We're having to explain to them who we are before we can explain why we matter, at which point it's usually too late. Whenever a buyer finally enters the market, we're either already part of their mental shortlist or we're not. Starting from zero means fighting uphill on things like visibility, price, and probably most importantly, trust. We have to work twice as hard because hardly anyone knows who we are. Now, brand building is slow, sure, I get it. It doesn't appear in quarterly dashboards because pretty much nothing measurable happens in a quarter. Finance departments hate brand awareness marketing for that reason, because the ROI spreads across months or even years instead of conveniently over weeks or financial quarters. As a result, what gets funded is what's measurable, what's immediate, what's easily and conveniently attributable. And what looks defensible in the next management or shareholder meeting. Sales activation targets the 5-ish percent of buyers ready to make a purchase in the near future. Brand marketing keeps us visible to everyone else in the category. Most businesses only fund one or the other, based on whatever got approved last quarter. There's hardly anyone who's doing both. And both is what needs to be done if we're to win. The brand awareness work we do today makes conversions cheaper for us tomorrow. Someone enters the market already knowing our name, so our customer acquisition cost reduces and closure rates improve. We're not having to prove credibility from scratch while the competition can live off their existing market recognition. When we cut spending on brand awareness marketing, it's like we've made a small cut in our arm that's eventually going to bleed us to death. Our advertising costs increase, while at the same time conversion rates either plateau or decline. New buyers enter our category, haven't heard of us, so they're unlikely to consider us. Every sale that we do get starts cold. We're having to justify to them why we should even be in the room. Who we are, how long we've been around. We have to name-drop customers. We have to write some case studies, all that sort of stuff. This is well before we can even start to be taken seriously for solving whatever problem the buyer has. Now, buyer preferences form very slowly, and they form way outside of purchase windows when nobody's actively paying attention. Every touchpoint either builds familiarity or it doesn't. The 95 or thereabouts who— percent who aren't shopping today will shop eventually. Whether they remember us when that happens depends entirely on what we're doing right now while we think they're not looking. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.