Is your focus on quantity or quality?

How often do you find yourself daydreaming about writing a best-seller or developing the perfect business that every media outlet talks about? I bet during these daydreams you balance your success on something like that coming true.

It’s good to have massive dreams — it causes us to reach higher. However, we have the tendency to think large numbers of followers are going to bring us massive success, when in reality our perceptions are skewed.

We’d all love to have millions of fans who purchase, talk, and share everything you put out. However, this usually isn’t going to be the case. It’s time to switch our perceptions from the mass scale and bring them back down to earth.

This doesn’t mean the work we’ll be doing will be less successful or have a lesser impact.

In fact, by focusing our efforts on producing and attracting quality over quantity, our work may begin to matter more.

The End Of An Era

The effectiveness of mass marketing is coming to an end, if it hasn’t already. In browsing the web today, I’m sure you’ve seen several ads that you’ve blatantly ignored or had to sit through five seconds before pressing skip. This style of marketing is becoming more of an annoyance than an effective means to attract customers.

The idea of “mass” on all scales is slipping out of business consciousness.

Frankly, by focusing on large numbers of people, you’re most likely missing the ones who are actually going to buy your product.

In an increasingly noisy world, it’s the ones who are going to adapt to the needs of their customers that will thrive. When cell phone companies began to offer different, customizable options of their phones, people went wild. While most companies thought of the introduction of color as an afterthought, consumers viewed it as a necessity. Finally, a way to stand out from the millions of other people who have phones!

As humans we love being and feeling unique. If you can create this feeling for your customers, you’ll be ahead of the curve.

The era of mass-marketing and needing huge audiences to cultivate a livelihood are coming to a close. It’s a myth that you always need to focus on growth, if you want to be successful. In the future, the opposite may very well be the case.

In the world today we have more options than ever before. This means we have a lot to sort through to find what we’re looking for. When we do find that thing, whether it be a person, or business, we hang onto that thing or person for dear life. We buy up their products, and spread the word of everything they produce.

We usually don’t do it to gain anything, we do it because we feel as if they’re a part of us.

You want to cultivate this relationship with your audience. There’s only one way to get there: by focusing on quality and service.

Adjusting Your Mindset

“You need to alter what you do and how you do it so that 1,000 true fans is sufficient to make you very happy.” ~ Seth Godin

We like to think that more money, more followers and more fans will make us happy. In reality, happiness comes first. Service comes first.

By adjusting your mindset from growth to service you’ll be able to cultivate fans for life. It’s these fans who will spread the word of your business and service. After all, by focusing solely on growth and huge numbers you’re missing the point. Instead of making a dent in the world, you’re merely contributing to the noise.

However, by standing out with your service and business and truly serving one person at a time, your business will grow to serve more than you ever thought possible. Think of a slow growth strategy as one that secures the foundation for your growth in the future.

By aiming for quality you actually end up bringing in more people, in the long run.

Adopting An Organic Growth Strategy

There’s a difference between meaningful growth and empty growth — growth for a reason and growth for “vanity metrics.” Too often, we place our energy where it doesn’t matter: on the vanity metrics. We track our daily visitors and number of Facebook likes. Sure, they might make us feel good for a passing second, but that feeling evaporates, and we’re left in the same place we began.

When we shift our focus towards organic growth and turn away from numbers, we begin to take baby steps towards actualizing our goals.

The core difference between meaningful growth and empty growth is depth. You could have a massive list but have no one buying your products. You could have traffic that’s off the charts but no one interacting in the comments. You can set out to grow these numbers, but these numbers don’t matter if you’re not turning your visitors into fans.

Organic growth is slow growth — it’s sustainable and long-term. This line of thinking should be applied to your business. After all, if you could create fans for life from the get-go, your growth will only snowball over time.

Finding Your True Fans

Right from the get go, not everyone you do something memorable for is going to become a true fan. However, the chances of people becoming your true fans is going to increase if you’re making a conscious choice to nurture each and every one of your fans.

At the end of the day you’re not looking for lukewarm fans — you’re looking for fans who think of you like a rockstar.

When trying to cultivate these fans you’ll want to think about what their most pressing needs are:

• What do they feel pulled to support?
• What is a common enemy you can rally against?
• What brings you and your tribe together?
• What unifying story can you tell?

Every time you press publish, try to tell a piece of a story that your fans can buy into. The more often you do this, the more you’ll increase your chances of creating a fan and keeping them as a fan for life.

You’ll want them to put everything you create at the top of their priority list. As mentioned previously in this article, we’re inundated with marketing messages and emails every single day, so the only way to rise above the noise is to do something different.

Different doesn’t have to mean weird; often it just means showing that you care.

In the online world we tend to forget there’s a human being on the other end of the transaction.

Start treating your customers like humans and they’ll be more likely to return time and time again.

Make it your priority to astonish your readers, customers, and subscribers not just because you feel like you should, but because you want to. There are several ways to astonish your customers, but the tips below should get you started:

• Respond to every email.
• Send a personalized card to every person that buys your product.
• Send an unexpected bonus to your new subscribers.

The more you serve from an authentic place the more you’ll attract the right fans to your business or service. Most people won’t do this, because it takes extra time and work, so by actually doing some of the above, you’ll stand way above your competition.

Remember, it’s not quantity that matters, but quality.

This post was originally published at WebMeUp blog.

Tom Ewer is a freelance writer, professional blogger and founder of Leaving Work Behind and Healthy Enough. A ProBlogger “One to Watch” in 2013, Tom published over 1,000 posts across 100 blogs including Mashable, Lifehacker, Sitepoint, Smashing Magazine and FreelanceSwitch. Follow Tom on Twitter.