Attention is only the start

When growth stalls, the most common answer in marketing is to post more. It’s easy to approve, easy to measure and easy to look busy doing. It’s also, more often than not, the wrong answer.

Picture a small restaurant. Someone posts a Reel of the signature burger and it takes off: two hundred thousand views, thousands of likes, the comments full of people tagging their friends. For a week, the algorithm is in love.

Friday night arrives and the restaurant is half empty.

So someone in the room suggests the obvious fix: more Reels. Maybe a series. Maybe the burger gets a personality. And this is where a lot of marketing goes wrong, because the problem was never a shortage of content. The content worked. People looked. They just didn’t come.

Volume is the easiest lever, so it gets pulled first

I understand why “post more” is so popular. It’s visible. It produces a calendar, a content plan and a satisfying report full of rising numbers. It doesn’t require anyone to question the offer, the pricing, the location or the booking process, which are the uncomfortable parts of the business.

But volume is a multiplier. If what you’re multiplying is attention from the wrong people, or attention that hits a dead end, you just get more of the problem, faster.

Going viral isn’t a strategy. It’s an outcome. Strategy is what you do with the attention.

Three questions to ask before making more

When attention isn’t turning into customers, I try to work out which of three things is broken. I think of them as the Attention Gap.

1. Is it the right attention?

If 150,000 of those burger viewers live nowhere near the restaurant, you’ve entertained the internet. That’s nice, but it doesn’t pay the rent. Reach is only valuable when it includes people who can actually buy. For a local business, that might mean far smaller, far more targeted content. For a training provider, it means attracting people who are eligible and ready to enrol, not just curious.

2. Is there a reason to act?

Attention without a compelling offer is window-shopping. Sometimes a business doesn’t need more visibility. It needs sharper positioning, a clearer offer, or a reason to choose it this week rather than one day.

3. Is the next step easy?

This is where good marketing quietly dies. The menu is hard to find. The landing page doesn’t match the ad. Booking a table takes more effort than applying for a mortgage. Every bit of friction between interest and action loses people, and no amount of extra content fixes a broken next step.

What this looks like in practice

In my current role, some of the biggest improvements came from the opposite of “more”. Bringing ad creative and landing pages in-house meant the page someone landed on could match the ad that sent them there, and we could fix things quickly when the numbers suggested a problem. That kind of change rarely makes a content calendar look impressive. It does change how many enquiries you get.

Running my own food business taught me the same lesson more bluntly. What mattered wasn’t how many people saw us. It was how many came back. Our marketing became more local and more focused on people who had already visited, because that’s where the money was.

So, should you stop making content?

Of course not. Brand awareness matters, great creative matters, and sometimes a viral post really does fill the room. Content is often part of the answer.

My point is about order. Before you scale content, find out where the gap is. If it’s reach, make more, but for the right people. If it’s the offer, fix the offer. If it’s friction, fix the journey. Then, once attention has somewhere useful to go, turn up the volume.

Attention is nice. Revenue is better. And as far as I know, no landlord has ever accepted payment in likes.