• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, February 6, 2019

I recently learned a valuable lesson: Noise can be overwhelming, and it can shadow the truth, blinding you to what you should be doing because it makes you do something else.

Exactly what am I talking about?

When you are developing a marketing strategy, you have to know your customers to better understand what makes them gravitate to you and your product. Once you know what they like, you can find ways to surface that in your marketing, then find others like them with the same challenges — and convey the benefits in an artful, creative way that breaks through the clutter.  

That is far easier said than done.  When you spend ad dollars, you look at an entire funnel and you tend to gravitate toward the gross numbers for click-through, conversion and volume.  Unpacking these three numbers, you can easily get focused on the folks who are not paying, and the noise associated with them.  

One great example is Facebook advertising.  Facebook ads are highly valuable if you can get them to work, but they also invite commentary that can be massive.  Facebook is a social environment, so advertising there requires you to staff a team focused on the comments and engaging with consumers.  This is a tactic that creates significant noise and can take you away from your core audience of high-value, paid users.  

This can be said for other social platforms too, and has to be weighed when you are considering dollars there versus other standard display or contextual ad units.  Is the creation of noise truly offset by the feedback you get in a socially enabled environment?  Is the balance worth your time — or should you simply advertise in a non-socially enabled environment?

Social ads are one easy example, but the larger learning here is that you should focus on your best customers and try not to get distracted by the rest of what you see.  It’s good to know what works and what doesn’t, but your attention and resources are best spent on the people who love you, rather than the people who don’t.  

You may be able to convert a few of those folks who weren’t that into you at first but eventually come around. However, that’s a strategy that burns out your team and de-motivates them because you hear more bad than good.

If you focus on the people who are raving about you, you can find people just like them and grow your audience from there.  That’s highly motivating and significantly more functional than the former strategy.  It creates positivity in your team, energizing them and making them excited to come to work.  

Those other folks can come around on their own schedule. Don’t expend energy pushing the stone up the hill when you can simply nudge it down the mountainside.

You may read this and say, “That’s just common sense.” From time to time we all get mired in the weeds, so you may need to have someone else be “Captain Obvious” and restate the case.