These Aren't The Goals You're Looking For
No matter what you spend your working time on, you probably want to spend that time effectively.
But what does it mean for an action or strategy to be effective? An action is effective when it causes an effect.
However, not all effects are created equal. We often work toward effects that are flashy or even addicting but aren’t all that beneficial to us. Think followers, steps, calories, orange checkmarks, etc.
Technology mediates the effects we perceive as desirable.
ClickUp or Asana turns task completion into a desirable effect. What’s effective, then, is completing a task. Task completion helps to justify our continued use of the software, which means it’s beneficial to ClickUp or Asana because we keep paying for the product. But we can focus on task completion at the expense of checking in with strategy or conditions on the ground to know whether that task should still be completed at all.
Social media platforms are another example of how technology mediates what effects we perceive as desirable. Social media platforms recommend sharing moments from your life, snapping candid pictures of yourself, and engaging with your followers in all sorts of ways. And it’s true that doing those things will often result in more reach, likes, and comments. So in that way, those recommendations are effective.
But is additional reach, more likes, or more comments the effect you want? Or do you want to fill your client pipeline or have more people sign up for your newsletter? Because those same recommendations might not lead to those effects. Further, reach, likes, and comments are good effects for platforms because they signal that people are willing to stay on the platform longer and, therefore, view more ads.
So, really, the question to ask might be: effective for whom?
We’ve learned that “un-marketing,” the companionable alternative (e.g., show up and give value, be yourself, don’t sell, etc.) to corporate marketing, is the most successful on social media networks.1 However, un-marketing is highly inefficient. It can lead to new clients or customers, but it takes time. Since activity within capitalist systems always evolves toward efficiency, we have to assume that our inefficiency actually creates efficiency elsewhere in the system.
Platforms, of course, benefit from the proliferation of un-marketing—it’s all content, and content is data. By focusing on mediating features such as likes, followers, and engagement, platforms substitute those effects for the ones we might actually prefer—like dollar signs. In turn, we change our behavior and dub un-marketing the most effective way to produce those effects. We churn out more and more content (that doesn’t appear to be marketing), and the platforms benefit from all that profitable data.
What seems like resistance to commercialization, commodification, and the ethos of control embodied by traditional marketing practice is actually an efficient means of producing data that actually benefits capital directly by, in effect, turning every waking hour into an opportunity to resist by producing the commodity for free. Or, as critical marketing scholars Detlev Zwick and Alan Bradshaw write facetiously:
Marketing is hence transformed into a communal ethos of digital socialism based on consensual partnership with consumers who are certainly not controlled but rather are invited by the corporation as equals in the joint task of joyous co-creation.
This is not to say that creative, relational, or self-expressive forms of marketing are bad. Certainly not! Rather, they function within a system designed to create entirely different results from the ones we probably hope for. The feedback we receive through social media platforms—likes, follows, shares, etc., as well as qualitative feedback like comments—is skewed to those ends.
This feedback reinforces the effects we’ve valorized rather than the effects we ultimately aim to create. We judge the effectiveness of our actions through the metrics and reports that social media companies supply rather than the impact on our own bottom lines. So, we continue to shape our actions in ways that lead us astray from our real goals.
What are our real goals? Let’s examine three common goals for digital marketing and how they shape what we consider effective.
3 Common Goals for Digital Marketing
Let’s examine three outcomes that marketers often confuse: generating traffic, building audiences, and finding clients or customers.2
I hear from a lot of small business owners who say that they want to build an audience. Maybe they want more people to listen to their podcast episodes, watch their videos, or increase their followers on a social media platform. Maybe they want more subscribers on their email lists or have more people tune in for their live streams.
In their minds, increasing traffic, building an audience, and finding clients are all of a kind. One should naturally lead to the other and, eventually, to success. And sure, it can work like that. But it takes lots of unpaid work and, frankly, lots of luck and perfect timing to make it happen.
So first, what’s the difference between generating traffic, building an audience, and finding clients?
Traffic is typically what we call the number of people who visit your website. I would also include the social media metric reach in the same bucket as traffic, as well as podcast downloads or video views. If we think of traffic as a measure of attention, then it’s the gross amount of attention your brand or content receives. The net amount of attention is your audience. Your audience reflects the people who stick around and develop an affinity for or trust in what you put out into the world.
Your customers or clients are, of course, the people who pay for your product or service.
Your brand can generate gobs of traffic without that traffic translating into a larger audience. Your brand can build a large audience without that audience translating into clients. And perhaps most importantly, you can find clients or customers without generating traffic or establishing an audience.
What a marketer needs to do to generate traffic is different from what they need to do to build an audience, which is different from what they need to do to find clients. Determining the outcome you’re actually looking for is essentially to know what actions to pursue. Before we get to actions, let’s the types of businesses that relate to each outcome.
Traffic-Based Businesses
Traffic-based businesses are those that rely on a steady stream of people coming in contact with their products (e.g., websites, podcasts, etc.). Most commonly, ad-supported media businesses are traffic-based. An ad-supported media business needs to generate traffic and increase pageviews so that its ads are seen by as many people as possible. The more people see or hear an ad spot, the more valuable that ad spot is.
Affiliate-supported media businesses are also traffic-based. These businesses, like Wirecutter or The Strategist, create content that will rank well for purchase-oriented search terms (e.g., “best toaster for big families”) and then make money when a searcher purchases an item that businesses reviewed. Many affiliate-supported media businesses also sell ads, and vice versa. They’re complementary business models since they both rely on generating traffic.
Another traffic-based business type sells products directly. This type of business sells a product that’s specifically designed to perform well off of ads on social media. The business generates traffic by purchasing ads or working with influencers and then banks on impulse buying. The business generally isn’t interested in building brand loyalty. Instead, it gets the ad spend, page views, and conversion rate to work in such a way that, for a time, it can produce a significant profit margin. Any number of TikTok-famous products fit into this category.
Audience-Based Businesses
Audience-based businesses work to generate trust and goodwill among a group of fans or followers. Consistency, quality, and a distinct point of view generate brand loyalty over time.
Subscription-based businesses rely on building audiences. That includes independent media brands like those on Substack or Patreon. These businesses produce plenty of free content or events and work to convert a small percentage of the people paying attention to low-ticket subscription plans. Similarly, membership or community-based businesses often build audiences with the intent of converting a small percentage of “outsiders” to “insiders” behind the paywall.
Many online education businesses are also audience-based. Selling online courses or premium workshops often requires a large enough audience to convert to the appropriate number of customers for a business to be financially sustainable. These businesses likely have higher conversion rates and higher price tags than subscription-based businesses, and therefore, they can sustain a successful business with a smaller audience.
Client-Based Businesses
A client-based (or customer-based) business focuses on individual relationships. It has a much lower volume than a traffic or audience-based business, which means that it doesn’t require either traffic or an audience to be successful. Instead, it thrives on networking, referrals, and word of mouth.
While some client-based businesses might employ tactics similar to those of audience-based businesses, such as posting to social media, the desired outcomes are different. Instead of growing a list of followers, client-based businesses use social media to connect. They might rely more on direct messages or collaborations to develop relationships with people who might need them or know people to refer to them.
Traffic, Audience, and Client Math
As I’ve alluded to already, the math behind these different types of businesses is quite different. But before we move on, I want to make this a bit more concrete.
According to the ad network Newor Media, a website earns about $10 for every thousand views of a video ad. Banner ads earn much, much less—often 50 cents or less per thousand impressions. Newor Media advises that a website that generates 100,000 visitors per month might earn about $1,500 each month. To generate sustainable revenue, a traffic-based, ad-supported business needs to aim for a million or more visitors per month. Affiliate marketing tends to bring in more revenue than ads, but it also has to contend with optimizing its conversion rate to maximize earnings.
Now, consider an audience-based business that sells online courses. This business has a variety of options, but it’s average transaction is $500. To generate $10,000 per month in revenue, it needs 20 sales per month. The conversion rate of a business like this varies—but I like to see a 1% conversion rate on an email list or a 3% conversion on a sales page. To generate those 20 sales, this type of business needs to reach about 2000 new (or newly interested) email subscribers per month or generate about 670 sales page views per month. All those interested audience members might come from ads, social media content, podcast interviews, video content, etc.
Finally, let’s look at a client-based coaching business. This business has the capacity for 20 coaching clients per year at $5000 per client. A potential client books an initial consultation sales call with the coach so they can both determine whether they’re a fit. This call typically results in a 50% conversion rate (i.e., 1 out of every 2 consultations result in a new client). To fill those 20 spots each year, the coach would need to speak with about 40 people. Those 40 people come from referrals from colleagues and past clients, networking efforts, and some targeted marketing, such as appearing as a guest on podcasts or writing op-eds.
The difference here is stark. Not only are the numbers dramatically different between these businesses, but the actions required to produce them are dramatically different. A traffic-based business is likely going to need to spend money on ads to make money on ads. It’ll need a crackerjack search engine optimization strategy and a trend-watching social media plan. An audience-based business should be focused on high-quality content that gets shared organically and inspires trust fast. And a client-based business is going to be focused on developing the right relationships with the right people at a sustained pace throughout the year.
With that albeit reductive set of examples established, I’m going to set traffic-based businesses aside. They’ve become increasingly unsustainable for even venture capital-backed media companies. So, let’s take a closer look at the difference between building an audience and finding clients.
Audience-Building Tactics vs Client-Finding Tactics
As I’ve established, building an audience and finding clients are two different sets of actions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’re mutually exclusive. But they’re not mix and match. To build an audience, you need to follow an audience-building strategy completely. To find clients, you need to follow a client-finding strategy. You can do both—but that’s a lot of work.
Put another way, what you do to find 40 people who are actively interested in working with a coach is different from what you do to find 670 people who are interested enough in your course to click through to the landing page. One should be done with intentional and targeted relationship-building. And the other is most often done through attention-grabbing content. One can lead to a new client in just one or two touchpoints. And the other often requires 10 or 20 touchpoints to turn an audience member into a new customer.
A client-based business is not better or worse than an audience-based business. They just employ two separate marketing strategies. If you find yourself building what amounts to an audience-based business (e.g., online courses, subscriptions, membership, etc.) but you really prefer to talk with people one-to-one, it might pay to make a change. If you love creating content and building an audience and find it hard to book clients for one-on-one services, it might be time to consider switching things up.
Both models work well, but they’re not interchangeable.
Running an audience-based business means that marketing is a huge part of your workload. With very few, very lucky exceptions, an audience-based business takes much longer to reach sustainability.
Another way to contrast building an audience with finding clients is to examine the production process. Economist and theorist Dallas Smythe argued that the real product of any media business is the audience commodity. That is, a media business generates revenue by selling the attention of its audience. This is certainly true of a traffic-based business, but it’s similarly true of an audience-based business.
While a traffic-based business produces attention it can sell to outside advertisers, an audience-based business produces attention that it can generate revenue from directly. The subscription content, membership benefits, or educational content is ultimately what the business produces, but it can’t produce it sustainably without also producing the audience commodity.
However, a client-based business doesn’t require the production of the audience commodity. Its production process is situated in labor done for the direct benefit of the client.
An audience-based production process will inevitably fetishize attention production.3 In other words, intense focus on attention production deprioritizes the production of other forms of value. Attention production revolves around metrics such as followers, subscribers, likes, shares, and views and is, therefore, subject to value capture.
Instead of asking, “How do I find new students for my workshop?”, the marketer asks, “How do I get more email subscribers?” While those two questions may be related in theory, they are answered by two different sets of tactics in practice. We assume more email subscribers leads to more students. We might even have historical data suggesting a precise relationship between the two—for instance, 100 new email subscribers leads to 5 new students. But that relationship breaks down when we begin to focus our tactics on more email subscribers rather than new students.
What we do to produce attention tends to be different from what we do to produce trust.
Building an audience is a good choice if you want to build an audience with a business to match. But it’s not a good choice if you only do it because you should. So here are a few final considerations before I close out this excerpt.
First, take stock of your business model. Are you planning to generate revenue through traffic, an audience, or individual clients? Do the economics of your business work better if you have an audience or if you focus on relationships?
Next, figure out why you’ve been marketing your business the way you have been—and whether it’s working or not. Have you been following the “best practices?” Are those best practices the ones that correspond to your industry or business model? Have you been operating out of scarcity or FOMO? How could doing less allow you to be more effective? Pay close attention to whether the things you spend the most time on when it comes to marketing are actually the activities that bring in clients or customers.
Finally, reconstruct a minimalist marketing strategy that reflects how your business really works and what it needs to thrive.
Footnotes
“…as marketing evolves to un-marketing, it retains its raison d’être. The challenge for social media managers is therefore to achieve a level of sensitivity to this practical challenge of commodifying social relations that themselves do not want to be commodified. This paradoxical challenge is to be met by adopting the ‘correct marketing mindset’ in which marketers can show empathy and respect toward the opinions, creations, and cultural idiosyncrasies of the community while still nonetheless continuing to pursue profit.” — Detlev Zwick and Alan Bradshaw, “BIOPOLITICAL MARKETING AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF SOCIAL CONTEXTS” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing
I think there’s room for further considering “attention fetishism,” to combine Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity with Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. Update: I wrote about attention fetishism here.
