Brand Marketing Misconceptions: The One Thing Most Companies Still Don’t Understand

If you’re working on your brand’s marketing, you want a bigger following, plain and simple.

More website visitors. More Facebook followers. More email subscribers. More!

It’s only natural. But the other day, I had a conversation with a client that completely opened my eyes: most small businesses completely misunderstand one key aspect of brand marketing.

The conversation went something like this:

Client: Look at our competition’s Facebook page. They have 100,000 likes!

Me: Yeah, but look at their posts. They’re getting about 3 likes apiece and no comments.

Client: …So?

Me: WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘SO?’ DON’T YOU SEE THAT THOSE 100,000 LIKES MEAN NOTHING?!?

Okay, so it wasn’t quite that dramatic. I’m nice to the people I work with, I swear.

But it did show me something super important: most business owners are fixated on sheer numbers, even though those numbers might not translate into any return for the business.

Today, I want you to change your way of thinking about getting *more* followers. Instead of focusing on the number of Facebook likes, page visits or email subscribers, I want you to focus on what those numbers are actually doing for your brand.

Let Me Show You What I Mean

To help show what I mean, let’s look at an example.

At the time of this post, the Facebook page for Ace Hardware has more than 530,000 subscribers. That’s a number most of us small-time guys can only dream of.

But take a look at the recent post above.

48 hours after being posted, it had received just 10 likes and three shares. That’s a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the people who ‘like’ the Ace Hardware page engaging with the post.

And while we can’t tell how many people clicked on the link in the post, we can make a pretty strong assumption it’s not many more.

So, what good did those half-a-million page likes do for Ace Hardware in getting people to click through and enter their contest? Nada.

You and I may not have half-a-million likes, but we could probably achieve similar results on a post.

Now, let’s look at an example in the other direction.

Here’s a post from a company I work with that caters to new parents. Their Facebook page has around 1,700 followers—pretty standard for a small business.

Now take a look at their recent post, which contains content that’s highly relevant to their target audience of new moms and dads.

It received one comment, two likes and three all-important shares, plus 54 clicks to the article on the company’s website. That’s an engagement rate of 3.5%, which is awesome for an organic post (one with no money spent to promote it) on Facebook.

Now is that crazy, or what? Despite the fact that Ace Hardware has literally hundreds of thousands more page likes than the second company, in this case it made absolutely no difference in the amount of engagement with their posts—the stuff that actually matters when it comes to converting followers into customers.

The Explanation

So what’s the reasoning behind this? If page likes don’t matter, does it mean you should give up entirely on building your brand’s following?

Of course not.

What it means is that you should shift your focus from acquiring more followers, regardless of who they are, to acquiring laser-focused followers—people who are a walking, talking embodiment of your perfect customer.

In the first example above, I didn’t mean to hate on Ace Hardware. Lots of major brands have the same problem; they’re so well-known that their following is a complete and total mish-mash of the general population, rather than the niche customer base who actually buys their products.

On the other hand, in the second example, the company isn’t a household name yet. The general public has no idea what they’re all about, so there’s a higher threshold for someone to click the ‘Like’ button on their page.

But, because of this, the people who actually have clicked ‘Like’ have done so because they’ve truly loved the content being shared. They’re new moms and dads who find the content highly relevant to their current life. And thus, they’re far more likely to convert into actual customers buying what the brand is selling.

That’s what we’re all trying to achieve, right? More revenue?

Right.

The Bottom Line

To sum it all up, you can have a million followers, website visitors or email subscribers, but they mean absolutely nothing if they’re not your pinpointed, ideal customer.

Instead of getting caught up in the “more, more, more” game, work on getting the followers—not just followers, fans!—that truly love what you’re all about.