Every small or midsize business wants growth. Yet, many find themselves hitting a wall—even when their performance marketing efforts seem to be firing on all cylinders. Why? Because they’re so focused on harvesting the “ready-to-buy” customers that they forget to plant the seeds for tomorrow’s growth.
Let me explain.
A Real-World Example: Stuck in the Lower Funnel
Recently, we worked with a company rented office space at different locations around the country. Their team was diligent: Google Search ads, retargeting, email blasts to their list, and they tested, conversion-optimized landing pages. Their metrics looked solid—steady sales, strong conversion rates, and a loyal core of repeat buyers. But growth had stalled. No matter how much they optimized, their customer base wasn’t expanding.
When we dug in, the answer became clear: nearly all their marketing targeted people already in-market or familiar with their brand. They were harvesting the same field as it were, season after season, but never planting new seeds. Our advice? Start thinking about the top of the funnel. Invest in awareness, education, and brand-building—activities that might not pay off immediately, but would create new demand for months and years to come.
How Lower-Funnel Marketing Can Lure You to Sleep
Lower-funnel marketing—think Google Search ads, retargeting, and email campaigns to existing leads—is powerful. It’s measurable, efficient, and produces results you can see on this month’s P&L. For small and midsize businesses, it often feels like the safest bet.
But here’s the catch: the pool of “ready-to-buy” customers is finite. Research shows that, at any given time, only about 5% of your total addressable market is actively looking to buy. If you focus exclusively on these buyers, you’re ignoring the other 95%—and missing out on future growth.
This creates the “performance plateau”. You keep spending on lower-funnel tactics, but your business doesn’t grow. Worse, as privacy changes and competition increase, the cost of acquiring in-market customers rises, and the pool shrinks. The hand-raiser bucket is not a self-renewing resource.
Why You Need to Plant the Seed: The Case for Demand Creation
To break through the plateau, you need to create demand—not just capture it. This means reaching people before they’re actively shopping, building awareness, trust, and preference for your brand. When they do enter the market, your business is top-of-mind.
Brand marketing and demand generation aren’t just for big companies. In fact, small and midsize businesses that invest in these activities often see outsized returns, because they’re competing in markets where most rivals are stuck in the lower funnel.
The highest-performing brands invest over half of their marketing budget in top-of-funnel activities. (Yes, these tend to be bigger brands who have the money now that they’ve made it.) But what they’ve come to realize is that building a brand can very well be the magic bullet that trumps all other marketing activities. To put it back in metaphorical terms, they know that planting the seed today leads to a bigger harvest tomorrow.
Five Ways Small and Midsize Businesses Can “Plant the Seed”
Ready to create demand? Here are five proven strategies, with examples and tips for each:
No 1. Be Really Aggressive with Top-of-the-Funnel Content Marketing
There’s honestly no excuse in today’s day and age not to publish unique content. And do it often. With AI, in particular, you can customize your research to just about anything you need. Publish blogs, guides, videos, or webinars that help your audience solve problems or learn something new, without a hard sales pitch.
- Why it works: Valuable content builds trust, positions your business as an expert, and attracts people who aren’t yet ready to buy. And it reinforces your brand narrative over and over and over again. So that you become known for that particular thing.
No. 2. Form Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations
You shouldn’t have to go it alone in marketing. And indeed, you don’t have to. Why not team up with complementary brands, influencers, or local organizations to co-create content, host events, or cross-promote each other’s offerings?
- Why it works: You tap into new audiences and build credibility through association with quality organizations and individuals. In some cases, that may cost money, but this is about taking some risk in order to grow.
No. 3. Invest in Targeted Advertising – And Stick with It
YouTube and many of the social platforms provide a great opportunity to “just put your brand out there.” Why not share your brand story, values, behind-the-scenes moments, or an explanatory video about how your product or services work or help? Demand creation is often about visually showing how your solution can be effective for a particular challenge or issue that the customer faces. That alone can make customers start to consider you (even if they never thought about that particular issue in the first place).
- Why it works: Think of the iPhone. No one really asked to have their calendar intertwined with a camera, a calculator, calling, voicemail, and Internet and app access. But Apple did what it always does – it created demand for an all-in-one device that fits in your pocket. Now, we can’t live without it.
No 4. Start Getting Involved with Your Local Community and Local Events
One great way to plant the seed is to sponsor local events or industry events, host workshops, or participate in community initiatives, especially if your target market is also participating in those particular events.
- Why it works: It puts your business in front of new people in a positive, memorable context—often before they’re thinking about buying. The more you do that, the more you create a trigger associating you with that particular industry you’re in. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local restaurant, a solopreneur, or even a non-profit.
No 5. Always Think About Creating Authority Through Thought Leadership
If you’ve read our blogs, you know we’re really big fans of companies creating social currency –the kind of content that gets shared by others, who in turn seem smarter, more interesting, funnier, or more in-the-know. The more that you can do this, the more of an authority you become in your industry. Share your expertise through speaking engagements, blogs, videos, guest articles, or industry reports.
- Why it works: Anytime you make someone think, laugh, or consider something in a way they hadn’t done before, you become a go-to resource for that person. In turn, that makes it more likely that prospects will remember you when they need your services or when they recommend you to their own network.
Conclusion: Growth Comes from Planting, Not Just Harvesting
Let’s be clear: The companies that break through that “growth plateau” are the ones that invest in planting the seed—creating demand, building their brand, and nurturing relationships long before a sale is on the table. This isn’t just a strategy for big brands; it’s a growth imperative for every small and midsize business.
Start small. Pick one or two of the approaches above and commit to them for the next quarter. Track your results, refine your approach, and remember: the seeds you plant today will be the customers you harvest tomorrow.
Need more help? Contact us at Marketing Nice Guys for a free consultation anytime.
