Your marketing probably feels like it’s not working. You’re posting content, running ads, putting effort into your presence, and the sales aren’t flooding in. So you do what feels logical – you sharpen your call to action, make your offers more prominent, add urgency to everything.
You’re optimising for the people who are ready to buy right now. And that’s exactly the problem.
Only about 5% of people who might buy from you are actively looking to make a purchase.
Here’s what’s actually happening. At any given moment, only about 5% of people who might buy from you are actively looking to make a purchase. They’ve got their wallet out, they’re comparing options, they’re ready to commit. These people are gold. They’re also incredibly rare.
The other 95% aren’t ready yet. Some don’t even know they want what you sell. Others are vaguely interested but the timing isn’t right. Some are researching for a decision they’ll make in three months. Some saw your product once and forgot about it.
When you optimise everything for that ready-to-buy 5%, you’re making a trade. You might convert a slightly higher percentage of that tiny group. But you’re also making yourself invisible or irrelevant to the 95% who will eventually become customers.
Think about how you actually buy things yourself. Not impulse purchases from Instagram ads at midnight – proper considered purchases. You don’t just stumble across something and immediately buy it. You see it mentioned. You think about it. You see it again. You read reviews. You compare it to alternatives. You wait for the right moment.
This process takes days, weeks, sometimes months.
During that entire journey, you’re forming opinions about the brands you encounter. The ones that feel relevant and useful – not pushy – earn your attention. The ones that only ever talk about buying get filtered out as noise. By the time you’re ready to purchase, you’ve already decided who you’re buying from. The decision happened long before you hit checkout.
Your customers are going through this same process right now. Most of them aren’t ready to buy from anyone yet. But they’re forming the shortlist of brands they’ll consider when they are ready. If your entire marketing presence is designed to extract immediate action from the 5%, you’re not even in the consideration set for the 95%.
This is why aggressive, conversion-focused marketing often feels like it’s working less and less over time.
This is why aggressive, conversion-focused marketing often feels like it’s working less and less over time. You’re fishing in an ever-smaller pool. You’re competing harder for the same tiny percentage of people who are ready to buy today, while ignoring the much larger group who will buy eventually.
The alternative isn’t to stop optimising for conversion entirely. It’s to accept that most of your marketing needs a different job. Not to close sales immediately, but to build familiarity. To be the brand people think of first. To be useful and present before someone needs you. To earn attention when they’re not yet in buying mode.
This means creating content that addresses the questions people have before they’re ready to buy. It means being present and helpful without constantly pushing for a decision. It means understanding that someone who engages with your brand today might become a customer in six months, and that’s perfectly fine.
Whether you’re selling to other businesses or directly to consumers, the principle is the same. People need to know you exist and trust you’re credible long before they’re ready to hand over money. The businesses and brands that do this well aren’t necessarily more visible in the moment. But they show up repeatedly in purchasing decisions because they’ve been part of someone’s world for long enough to feel like the obvious choice.
You can optimise for the 5% and fight harder for a shrinking pool of immediate buyers. Or you can build marketing that works for the 95% who aren’t ready yet but will be eventually. The second approach feels slower. It’s also how you actually grow.
