It struck me the other day that we may now be living in an ever-present version of reality TV.
Stardom has been decentralized, Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame was not only prescient but potentially conservative, and our online and offline lives are blurring together in a constant state of self-conscious performance.
For example, I was on the train the other day when I saw a small confrontation. Nothing scary or serious, but one of the people, during the altercation, pulled out their phone and started recording the other party. Instead of just saying, “hey, you bumped into me, please don’t do that,” they thought, “the world might want to see this, too.”
In our world, waves of influencers are bringing media thinking – which is a business that truly does run on attention at scale – into B2B marketing.
Shows and streams and songs and memes.
And beefs!
After calling out Adam Robinson, CEO of RB2B, on LinkedIn, Clark Barron agreed to debate him this week.
Actually, Robinson has mastered this form of marketing – conflict, drama, intrigue. He has also called out 6Sense and posted cease and desist letters.
“Nice post!” comments have turned into the popcorn emoji. It’s wildly entertaining. But does it work?
Attention vs Intention: Do Pageviews Drive Pipeline?
The short answer, in this case, is “yes, it works.”
It seems like Adam Robinson is doing it perfectly, and his target audience is probably all LinkedIn junkies like you and me who could be potential users of his product, which is a good product.
Clearly, his numbers are growing like crazy, hitting $2M ARR like 6 weeks after hitting $1M ARR.
How much of that is due to LinkedIn feuds, and how much due to the unique value of his product? Who knows, but I think we can safely assume some of the attention he’s garnering here is being siphoned into actual user and revenue growth.
Everything that follows in this essay will debunk the idea that attention for attention’s sake is valuable, but I wanted to highlight an example that actually does work and why.
Robinson, first off, is very good at this. He’s a great copywriter, understands LinkedIn as a platform and the audience there. He’s also reaching highly relevant audiences. His product is also always front and center in the conversation, unlike other creators who speak more broadly about marketing or business.
This means that attention, when combined with relevance (both audience and product alignment), translates into business outcomes.
So far, so good.
However, mere attention doesn’t mean much. Just because someone knows about you doesn’t mean they will purchase from you.
This is obvious to anyone who does SEO “the right way.”
We’ve talked before about the “traffic trap,” where you drive a bunch of traffic with TOFU content that doesn’t drive business value (no matter which generous attribution model you use), and because you’ve driven traffic, growing that traffic becomes the goal and primary incentive to the degradation of your revenue strategy.
This may sound like a strawman argument. Surely, you’d think, marketers would use critical thinking and instead of just growing the traffic line, they’d ask, “is this content relevant to my target audience?”
But you underestimate the power of incentives, which form the crux of nearly all human decision making.
I’ve seen it at companies I’ve worked at.
When I was at CXL (many years ago), like half of our organic traffic came from a post targeting the keyword “value proposition.” I imagine a significant portion of searchers were college students studying for a test, because it certainly didn’t convert in any meaningful way.
I literally just got off the phone with a friend who told me this is what happened at the very large company he joined. Two old blog posts drove the vast majority of traffic, barely contributing to the business, yet because they held such power, holding their SERP position became a critical priority for the company.
Oof. Opportunity cost, meet sunk cost fallacy.
It takes courage to alter your path at this juncture. Gaetano just did this with a client heavily reliant on glossary pages:
“What’s the harm in keeping these pages?” Even if they don’t drive conversions, some traffic is better than no traffic, right?
No, because traffic growth is proximate and revenue growth lags, and it’s much easier to set your goals on proximate metrics.
And eventually, this company gets tired of content & SEO teams reporting on increasing traffic and then they fill out our lead form with the context, “we’re growing traffic but not growing leads, can you help us?” And then we have to tell them to prune their pages, adjust their organic strategy, and essentially, change their philosophy regarding the utility of content. Which is great for us, I suppose.
Okay, so assuming you’re with me regarding SEO, surely social media reach has to be looked at differently?
To an extent, yes. Because your audience targeting is mediated by an algorithm, you can only guess at the relevance of the content (whereas you can do a ton of research and analysis before producing any SEO-focused content).
But still, it’s not clear that attention alone results in business value.
This post from James Zayner explores this in relation to content creators versus the brands they represent.
For what it’s worth, I think HockeyStack’s product marketing is pretty clear, though I actually haven’t seen any of their media / creator initiatives (only their UGC dashboard templates).
But the foundational point is true. Which is, as Seth Godin put it in Purple Cow, “Kmart has plenty of awareness – so what?”
All Press is Good Press?
You’re just going to have to believe me when I tell you the successful people I personally know are pretty much invisible online.
Ryan Holiday, in Ego Is the Enemy, observed the same:
“Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”
All press is good press if you’re P.T. Barnum, but for the rest of us, the quality of attention matters more than the quantity.
I could probably get a lot of attention by screaming and flailing wildly in a bar, but it’s not going to get me a date. Instead, I’ll certainly attract the attention of a bounce who will promptly remove me from the premises.
So valence and the quality of attention or press matters. For me, and anyone in B2B marketing, it comes down to reach (attention) plus three additional factors: targeting, timing, and trust.
You want to target decision makers, building trust with them so that when they’re in-market and ready to buy, they think of you and trust that you have the right solution for them.
There’s a reason B2B marketing is “boring”
I have a podcast. We interview smart people and do Kitchen Side episodes where we three co-founders talk about SEO and growth issues of the day.
The audience is small, but we’ve acquired many clients directly from the show as well as heard it mentioned in the majority of interviews with employee candidates.
I could, theoretically, grow my reach a ton, if say I (hypothetically) recorded an episode extremely drunk and said a bunch of outlandish stuff and personally insulted a bunch of thought leaders and companies in our industry.
Most likely, I could even get more of my target audience (say CMOs) to listen to this particular episode. But I wouldn’t want them to. I’d pay them not to listen to it, right?
It’s easy to say “B2B marketing should be more fun” and many people do say this, and many B2B brands, especially the prosumer ones like Mailchimp and Jasper and startups trying to differentiate themselves, should be more fun.
But fundamentally, B2B marketing is boring because decision making at the enterprise is primarily based on risk aversion. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. It’s just the way the world is, and that’s why B2B marketing isn’t edgy.
Which, by the way, doesn’t mean it’s not “fun” in its own way. Entertainment is a broad spectrum, and if you don’t happen to like documentaries (Python tutorials), it doesn’t mean that all content should resemble reality TV or game shows. Horses for courses! Sometimes I just want a tutorial telling me how to write an email sequence, not a narrative exposition brimming with personality.
Influence > Fame
The great Gary V once wrote, “numbers don’t matter, influence does.” Which is really obvious and the entire thesis of the essay summed up in a sentence. You have to first reach people to persuade them, but if you only reach them without resonating, it does zero for your business.
It reminds me of a tangent Finn McKenty went on in our last podcast talking about how he hates YouTube Shorts, primarily because they drive views but have zero stickiness. People consume them in a zombified state, barely aware of whom they’re watching.
Conversely, visibility does matter. If you’re not visible, you’re simply not considered for opportunities (whether you’re selling a product or service, or just trying to grow your own career). That’s the whole point of my Surround Sound SEO concept.
That, however, does not mean that you need to play the same game that everyone else plays.
You can find customers in many places. Most of them are still actually unsexy places like Google search, direct mail, and outbound calls and emails, despite the constant “World Has Changed” narrative in MarTech.
I’ve done deals on the pickleball court.
Do you have to be on LinkedIn or [insert channel here] to be successful?
No. Of course not.
I know a 1,000 person agency with essentially zero active LinkedIn posters, and I know a $1M agency whose entire team is active and collectively has 100s of thousands of followers. That’s not to say either is right or wrong, or that the smaller agency won’t grow into a bigger agency. It’s just that they’re different and both can work.
All things equal, attention is better than no attention. So on the margin, this 1,000 person agency would benefit from having a LinkedIn presence.
But clearly they’re also fine without it.
I know another successful agency that does $25M in annual revenue after only like 6 years in business. The secret? The CEO knows all the Fortune 500 CIOs and sells directly to them, in person usually.
This is still attention, but in my opinion, the right kind of attention.
Attention is attention. Money is money.
All of this reminds me of an essay I wrote a few years ago about brand awareness. It’s one of my favorite essays I’ve written because I got to dive deep on another vacuous term everyone used without defining it. Here’s a quote from the piece:
“Who gives a shit if lots of people are talking about you on social media if you’re not selling products?
So the question here is, do you want to be rich or do you want to be famous? If you want to run a business, measure business metrics. If you want to be an influencer, measure your social media mentions.”
Attention isn’t money. Money is money. (Yes, I did write an entire essay inspired by a “Bored Elon Musk” tweet).
In summary, attention matters but it’s a terrible distal goal. In business, attention is a means to an end, not the end itself, and should be couched in audience and product relevance.
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