Daniel Priestley: Why Reach Is Now A Warning Sign, Not A Win

Two options. Your business lands on the front page of the Daily Mail. Millions of people see it. Almost none of them are interested in you or what you do. Or: you get a list of 3,000 people who have already signalled, through their own behaviour, that they want what you're selling. Which would you choose?

Ask a room of business owners that question and the answer is unanimous. The smaller, targeted list wins every time. Yet most businesses still build their marketing around chasing the first option: the biggest audience, the widest reach, the most eyeballs on a post. Daniel Priestley, the entrepreneur and bestselling author of Oversubscribed and Key Person of Influence, spent an hour on the ActionCOACH Business Growth Podcast explaining why that instinct is now actively working against them.

The architecture of digital marketing changed fundamentally this year. Most business owners haven't noticed. Reach used to be the point. Now it's a signal you're being shown to people who don't care. "We are now going into an era where it's less about getting on the front page of the Daily Mail," Priestley said. "It's more about talking to highly targeted people." The businesses that understand this early will build demand faster than they ever have. The ones that don't will keep posting into a void and wondering why nothing converts.

The Algorithm Shift Nobody Warned Small Business About

The shift became visible in March, when LinkedIn changed how it decides who sees what. Before that, the platform judged a post the way most social media has judged content for the last decade: count the likes, comments and shares within the first hour, then show it to more people if those numbers looked good. Priestley had been doing this himself, coordinating with a small group of colleagues who liked and commented on each other's posts to trigger the algorithm. It worked, right up until it didn't.

What replaced it is what Priestley calls the semantic era - the third distinct chapter in how these platforms have worked. The first was social media proper: your friends post, you see it, because you're connected to them. The second, pioneered by TikTok, was interest media: the platform can't read a post, but it can see that people are engaging with it, so it shows it to more people with similar behaviour. The third is different in kind, not degree. The algorithm now reads and understands the content itself. If a post is aimed at dental clinics wanting to scale from half a million to five million in revenue, the platform picks that up regardless of who liked it or how fast. If there's a cat in the background of a video, it knows there's a cat in the background. It then finds the people who have shown, through everything else they've engaged with, that they're the right audience for that specific piece of content and puts it in front of them.

The number that makes the shift concrete: LinkedIn measured how many people stayed on a post for 60 seconds or more. Before the change it was 1.2%. After, it jumped to 15.6% - a tenfold increase. Fewer people see any given post. The people who do see it are dramatically more likely to actually stop and pay attention. "Less views, better quality views," as Priestley put it.

This isn't a minor tweak to a marketing channel. Ask a room what the most powerful technology of the last few years is and most people will say ChatGPT or Claude, correctly. But sitting alongside those, doing at least as much to shape what humans see, is the recommendation engine - the algorithm working quietly in the background of every platform, directing global attention. It's the same underlying technology, Priestley noted, that lets Google Gemini transcribe an hour of video in under a minute. Feed a model enough video and it develops something close to its own language for understanding everything happening inside it, not just the words being spoken.

Location, Products And Your Business Name Are Now Liabilities

For a small business owner, the obvious question is what to do differently on social media. Priestley's answer goes further than most people expect. The entire way most owners describe their business is now working against them - starting with three things that used to be foundational: where you're based, what you sell and what you're called.

Location, Priestley said, is a trap. If a business ties itself to a place, competitors with a national or global model can find and target that business's customers, while the local business has no equivalent way to reach theirs. "You've created an artificial ring fence around your business that limits your business," he said, without giving you any upside for the limitation. The same problem applies to defining a business purely by its products and services. Tell people you do landscape gardening and they'll pull out their phone, get three quotes and take the cheapest. Selling a category invites comparison shopping. There is no way to compete on category without eventually competing on price.

Trade Your Postcode For An ICP And Your Products For Intellectual Capital

What Priestley offers instead of location is an ideal customer persona, or ICP: not where your customers live, but who they are. Instead of "based in Wimbledon," it's "for dentists." Instead of products and services, he argues for what he calls intellectual capital: the story, the framework, the specific way you explain a problem, that becomes attached to you specifically. He gave the example of management consulting as a category: describe someone as "a guy in the US who does management consulting" and it could be almost anyone. Describe someone as the person who says you should "start with why" and most people immediately know who you mean. One is a commodity. The other is a piece of intellectual property that happens to live inside a person.

That distinction matters because ICP and intellectual capital both scale in a way location and product categories don't. A business built on a persona and a story can grow into any market that persona exists in, with no geographic ceiling and no race to the bottom on price.

The 95 Percent Attention Tax On Businesses Hiding Behind A Logo

The shift Priestley pushed hardest on is this: businesses need to lead with a personal brand rather than a business brand, because the platforms themselves are built to favour people over logos. He offered a comparison from within his own network: Steven Bartlett's personal profile has around 3 million followers. The Diary of a CEO profile - the podcast brand itself - has 45,000. "People want Steven, they don't want Diary of a CEO," Priestley said. A personal brand generates roughly 20 times more engagement than a business brand carrying the same content.

To the business owners in the room who resisted the idea of putting themselves on camera, Priestley framed the cost of staying hidden in a way designed to sting. "How do you feel about paying a 95% rate of tax?" Nobody likes that idea. "If you go with a business brand over a personal brand, you're actually paying a 95% attention tax. And everything's downstream from attention."

He didn't dismiss the discomfort of being on camera, because he shares it. Despite running a group of companies built on video content, Priestley admitted that when a camera is pointed at him, his instinct is the same as anyone else's: have I got something to say, is it worth saying? His own habit of posting daily only started because an agency he'd hired kept booking him for filming days until he stopped resisting.

What he offered the room instead of willpower was a mechanism. Confidence, he argued, is a technical term in the scientific sense, tied directly to sample size. He used the analogy of testing an unusual flavour of toothpaste: ask one person if they like it and their answer tells you almost nothing. Ask 30 and you have your first real confidence interval. Ask 150 and you can extrapolate with real accuracy. The same applies to putting yourself on camera. Most people who say they lack confidence on social media have posted fewer than 30 times. His prescription was blunt: do it 30 times regardless of how it feels, then do it 150. "It's just a sample game. It's just sample size."

Short Form, Long Form, Lead Form: The Discipline Behind The Numbers

That principle underpins the system Priestley uses across his own businesses: short form, long form, lead form. Every day, a short piece of content - 30 to 90 seconds - points towards a longer piece of explainer content. That longer piece points towards a lead form: a specific next step where someone reveals they're interested by giving you information in exchange for value.

The daily discipline is non-negotiable in Priestley's telling. He compared it to a phone on your desk that, if you picked it up, would auto-dial a prospect who has spent the last week showing every signal of wanting to buy. Most business owners would pick up that phone constantly. Posting content is functionally the same act, except one post can reach hundreds of people instead of one. By his own count, Priestley posted 154 pieces of content on Instagram in the previous 30 days - roughly five a day. Across his group of companies, that discipline generated 12,000 warm leads in a typical month and as many as 20,000 in the ten days after a high-profile podcast appearance.

For business owners short on ideas, Priestley offered a simple rotation: pain, prize, problem, news. Talk about a frustration your customer is living with right now. Describe the outcome they'd love to have. Explain what typically gets in the way of getting there. Or comment on something current and relevant. Cycle through those four and you rarely run out of material.

The long form content - six to sixty minutes depending on the platform and the appetite - needs a specific structure to actually move someone towards a decision: proof, then principles, then process. Open with evidence that earns trust: a result, a piece of research, something concrete. Move into the reasoning - the framework, the two or three big ideas that explain why that result happened. Close with the mechanics of how someone could work with you to get a similar outcome. Priestley compared the discipline of producing this regularly to a stand-up comedian's route to a Netflix special: the material that eventually looks effortless was refined in small rooms, in front of forty people, over and over, long before anyone saw the polished version.

Why Your Lead Form Should Ask More Than Name And Email

The lead form is where Priestley's thinking becomes most useful for anyone still capturing little more than a name and an email address. The traditional approach - name, phone, location - tells you almost nothing about the person on the other end. What he does instead is design forms that ask what someone's current situation looks like, what outcome they want, what's stood in their way and what they've already tried. That data, once collected from a hundred or more respondents, gets exported and handed to an AI model to look for patterns: which segments show up, which are missing, what price point and offer would suit each group and how the landing page should change to attract more of the right people. For a small business, the entire stack - a form tool plus an AI subscription - costs somewhere around sixty pounds a month.

The clearest illustration of why the lead form matters came from an audience member during the session: a manufacturer of outdoor roller blinds who admitted she had a rough sense of her ideal customer but struggled to describe it precisely enough to make her marketing efficient. Priestley's response reframed the entire problem. Most people buy things to solve a problem, not to fulfil a specification. There are always more people aware of a problem than aware of a specific solution. He illustrated it by asking the room who was actively shopping for a new car with their options narrowed down. Two hands went up. Then he asked who was less than completely happy with their current car. Almost every hand in the room rose. That gap - between people who know they want your exact solution and people who simply have the problem you solve - is where most of the addressable market for any small business actually lives.

Priestley closed with the instruction that ties the whole system together, and it runs in the opposite direction to how most businesses build their marketing. Don't start with content and hope it leads somewhere. Start with the offer. Work out what a lead form would need to ask to identify a genuinely qualified buyer. Then work out what the explainer video needs to say to get someone to fill that form in. Only then decide what the daily short form content needs to do to get people watching that video in the first place. Build it backwards from the sale, not forwards from a content calendar.

The uncomfortable part of Priestley's argument isn't the algorithm. It's that the fix requires a business owner to stop hiding behind a logo, define exactly who they're for and show up on camera often enough that it stops feeling strange. Everything downstream of that - the leads, the sales, the growth - is mechanical once the discipline is in place. Getting there is the part most businesses still avoid.