Marketing Substance Over Scale: Mittelstand Businesses Prioritize Relevant Reach
A viral video about fax machines-yes, fax machines-demonstrated a critical lesson for businesses: raw reach doesn’t equate to revenue. The experience, shared by a marketing professional, highlights a common pitfall for companies, particularly within Germany’s Mittelstand, chasing broad audience numbers at the expense of connecting with genuinely interested prospects.
Many businesses mistakenly believe insufficient reach is their primary marketing challenge, leading them to pursue trending topics unrelated to their core offerings.this pursuit of fleeting virality often yields impressive view counts but fails to generate valuable leads or contribute to enduring growth.The speaker’s own experience with a video titled “Neues aus Faxhausen,” sparked by a large German magazine’s 2024 fax machine comparison, exemplifies this. While the video gained notable traction-fueled by commentary on stalled digitalization and practical justifications for fax usage from healthcare workers, lawyers, and even a CEO of a featured device manufacturer-it didn’t translate into business opportunities. The feedback centered on the video’s entertainment value, not the speaker’s area of expertise. This underscores a vital principle: it’s not how many people you reach, but who you reach that truly matters-relevance is paramount. The incident illustrates the need for Mittelstand companies to focus on targeted marketing strategies, prioritizing quality connections over sheer volume, and building processes around a clear, defined position.
