"Solution providers don’t move buyers into market with clever messaging about themselves and their products and services.
Rather, buyers move themselves into market when they gain an understanding of a need they have."
I saw this in a post by Perry Rearick on LinkedIn the other day.
This - based on my experience - is one of the most overlooked truths in marketing, and is particularly problematic in the digital context.
Too many still operate under the assumption that if you target the right people, at the right funnel stage, with the right message, and do it often enough, you can push these would-be customers through the funnel - from unaware to qualified lead to customer - regardless of whether a real need (that would provide an "impetus" for purchasing) exists.
The problem with this thinking is that it leads to over-investment in performance marketing tactics designed to convert prospects now - and under-investment in awareness building, which is more important for putting you in the frame when a buying decision eventually occurs (the timeline for which you cannot typically control)
You see this play out all the time: campaigns engineered to squeeze form fills out of uninterested prospects who are forced to handover their details to access cursory information, email nurture sequences, and retargeting ads that follow you around the internet (when they aren't being displayed primarily to bots) all trying to force an urgency to purchase where none exists because there is no need.
This approach of "tactical funnel progression" won't work if the buyer simply isn’t in-market, and you can't just bash the would-be buyer around the head enough times with enough messaging in order to make them in-market.
Think about it long and hard from your customer's perspective.
If there’s no project into which your product/service could fit, then there's no need and no priority, and if there's no need or priority then there's no budget, and if there's no budget then there’s no deal to be had.
But when the need arises for that would-be customer, will your business be on the list of potential vendors that they turn to? If you've spent all your time and budget on reaching in-market prospects only (and/or trying to prematurely force others to be in-market) then there's every risk the awareness aspect has been overlooked.