It’s never quantity, it’s quality.

And audience matters!

• The majority of people who follow a celebrity aren’t following because they want pitches.
• The majority of people who follow a major influencer aren’t following because they jive with that influencer.
• And those that follow a minor influencer are following for a reason and are generally of a certain consumer class (based on the common reason). Don’t ask a fashion influencer for low cost apparel to sell a high end luxury watch, and in our space, don’t ask an influencer whose only use for tech is to make brainless content for followers to consume to sell an enterprise product.

These are hard truths that have been the case since even before influencers, so the following linked post from Phoebe Sophia Russell from “In the Style” (on how 150,000 on a celebrity Instagram post only produced $800 in sales) didn’t surprise me. It’s like the new startup that forks over 100K for a big bash at ISM only to come back surprised when they didn’t even manage to get a single follow up demo scheduled.

Think back to the days when Oracle, SAP and IBM (and almost no one else) used to advertise everywhere, but see almost nothing for their stadium sponsorships, airline magazine ads, etc. All it bought them was name recognition — which was important IF you could get in front of a client who’d seen your business name (repeatedly) and not your competitors (and then instinctively thought of your company as successful), but they still had to get those RFPs and meetings, which means investing in traditional sales channels that would enable that. But that’s not a strategy the vast majority of companies can afford!

SI, which has been giving away free marketing advice (including great advice from Pinky and the Brain^#) since it began (because 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳 has no intention of being a marketer … but still knows what works^*), including this piece on Marketing 101 which appeared with the FAQ in 2007, always advocated for intelligent spending for smaller companies which focussed on publications (on & offline), events, and thought leaders who had the necessary audience, even if it was small. 100 buyers who actually want the type of products covered by the publications, events, and thought leaders is better than 100,000 individuals who have zero interest.

And the good news is that, even though many marketers during the heyday of free money would say I was off my rocker, the best marketers today pretty much agree with me, include the Marketing Maven Sarah Scudder who has teamed up with Dr. Elouise Epstein (in their DualSource Discourse podcast) to help educate you.

(Which is great since there aren’t many of us left trying to … going back to when I started, it’s just Jason Busch, Jon W. Hansen, Peter Smith, and Pete Loughlin who haven’t given up. Fortunately, we were joined by Kelly Barner and Philip Ideson of Art of Procurement and now we have David Loseby, Tom Mills, Joël Collin-Demers, and James Meads as well … )

Focus, Audience, and Education matter!

^* Every single sponsor of SI before 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳 joined Spend Matters in ’16 (to ’22) [and suspended sponsorships] was acquired by ’19.

^# The Brain Gives Pinky a Marketing Lesson
^# Where Pinky and the brain devise a plan to market their strategy