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The importance of audiences
Video length: 3:16
Dave Harries: Grant, in the book you talk a lot about audiences, and how one gets an audience, how traditionally, we got audiences with advertising and so on. But I know you make the point that it’s fundamentally changed. The whole thing of sales and marketing has fundamentally changed. So talk to me about that in terms of this audience.
Grant Leboff: Digital works fundamentally differently. If you think about traditional sales and marketing; traditional sales and marketing is all about interrupting someone else’s audience. If you think about traditional marketing, you put an advert in a publication, but the publication, it was the publisher that had the audience. You were paying to interrupt that audience with your transactional message. Same with TV, same with radio, even direct mail. You were technically using Royal Mail’s network. You were paying to use someone else’s audience.
If you think, today, that some of your key channels to market could be a Facebook page, a Linked In page, your own website, a YouTube channel, but none of those channels have an audience. People don’t wake up in the morning, say, “I’ve got to go on your YouTube channel.” In other words, today, rather than interrupting someone else’s audience, your job is to earn an audience and then if you’re going to pay to earn an audience, you want to maintain it, you want to keep it, especially in a world where the most precious resource is attention. It’s really hard to get people’s attention in a world of abundance of information.
Whereas old marketing was about interrupting someone else’s audience, and it was very transactional and transient in nature, we were just looking for the people that were in the market now, today’s marketing and sales is about earning an audience and then keeping it so when they’re ready to buy, they come to you.
Dave Harries: The business of earning that audience, does that then come down to content and what it is you’re actually putting out there?
Grant Leboff: Absolutely. It comes down to value. You have to create value. That’s normally through content. It could be through your competition. It could be through a great white paper. It could be through all sorts of different … Through comical value. Depends on the business, it depends what you do. Business to business, it’s often insight-led and tips and hints and other things. Ultimately, it’s about giving value.
You’re absolutely right to call it ‘earned’, because there is a fundamental difference. You used to pay for mind share, and the paying for mind share was simply this: I paid for it, and you had no choice but to see it. You may not give it much attention, but you had no choice. If I paid to take a full double page spread in a magazine you loved, you’re going to get to that double page spread. You might only see it for a second, because you might not be interested, but you’re going to see it. That was paying for mind share.
Today, when we talk about earning mind share … Of course, it still costs us money to create videos and blogs and other things, but what we mean is, is today people interact with it. Because it gives them value, they choose to interact with it. People choose to come onto my website and watch more of my videos because they get value from it, but because I’ve stuck it in a place where they’ve got no choice but to see it, and I’ve paid for it. That’s the difference between paid-for mind share and earned mind share.
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