Wolf&Grayson EditorialSocial media budgets keep climbing while the returns get harder to explain, and most brands respond by posting more of the same. Hilal Koseoglu, who came to the industry through financial modelling and valuation before turning to what performs for creators, argues the problem is not effort but accounting. Companies are measuring the wrong things, spending against the wrong goals, and quietly abandoning the customers who already pay them in pursuit of ones who never will. Her read on the purchase journey is less a marketing theory than a cost discipline, and it leads somewhere uncomfortable for anyone whose quarterly report leans on reach.
The Path From Feed To Purchase Is A Trust Curve
The funnel most companies still draw on a whiteboard assumes a tidy descent from awareness to conversion. Koseoglu describes something slower and messier. “It’s not a straight line anymore. It’s a relationship, and it starts with frequency,” she says. Someone encounters a piece of content not because they follow the brand but because it happens to be relevant to them. They see it again. And again. Each repetition buys a sliver of familiarity, and familiarity is what eventually earns the follow. Only after that does the real work begin: the audience starts watching how the brand behaves, “your face, your style, how you talk, how you treat people in the comments.” Trust accumulates without announcement.
The commercial implication is sharper than it first appears. If trust is built through repeated low-stakes exposure, then the campaign model – concentrated bursts of spend around a launch – is structurally mismatched to how buying decisions now form. Koseoglu takes it further by reframing the essence of the transaction. “When they finally buy, they’re not just buying a product or a service. Deep down, they’re asking themselves: ‘What am I becoming part of?’ People don’t buy only what you sell. They buy into who you are, what you stand for, and the community around you.” That shifts the burden from product marketing to identity, and it explains why brands with weaker products and stronger character routinely outsell better-engineered competitors. The journey, as she puts it, runs from seeing you, to knowing you, to belonging with you.
When Attention Gets Expensive, Vanity Metrics Get Dangerous
Koseoglu’s financial background gives her a blunter diagnosis of the current squeeze than most marketing commentary offers. “Building financial models taught me that rising costs always tell you a story. Usually, it means competition is rising. More players want the same resource, the resource becomes scarcer, efficiency drops, and inputs get more expensive.” Attention behaves exactly like any other contested input. More brands are chasing the same feed, organic reach contracts, audiences tire of generic output, and production standards ratchet upward. None of that is a creative problem. It is an input cost problem, and it should be governed like one.
What follows is a test most social media reporting would fail. “Every cost has to earn its place,” she says. “If you spend more, it should bring real revenue or real future growth, not just bigger numbers.” Views record that people saw something. Saves, shares, and genuine conversation record that they cared, and caring is where purchasing starts. Her second point is the one boards should sit with longest, because it cuts against the growth instinct. “Protect your core business. Many brands chase new audiences and trends and forget why their existing customers chose them in the first place. Returning customers are the most valuable metric of all.” In an environment where every new customer costs more to reach than the last, the economics stop favoring the biggest spender. “The brands that win aren’t the ones who spend the most. They’re the ones whose customers keep coming back.”
The Content That Sells Rarely Looks Like Selling
Koseoglu’s content framework is built around three questions a buyer is silently asking, and each one maps to a format. Can I trust you? That is answered by showing the work: “your process, your mistakes, your team, your 6 a.m. preparation. It turns a brand into people, and people trust people.” Is this for me? Answered by real-life use, not the polished product shot, but the product inside somebody’s ordinary day. “When viewers can picture themselves using it, they’re halfway to buying.” Does it really work? Answered by proof, meaning customer stories, honest reviews, before-and-after results. “Nothing convinces a stranger like someone just like them saying ‘this worked for me.'”
Then there is the format she considers most undervalued, and it is sitting unread in most brands’ notifications. “Every comment asking, ‘how much?’, ‘does it fit?’, ‘is it worth it?’ is a sale waiting to happen. Turn those questions into content, and you remove the doubts before people even ask.” Service teams treat those comments as support tickets. Koseoglu treats them as a free, continuously updating list of purchase objections. If a brand could do only one thing this year, though, she would pick none of these formats. She would pick rhythm. “Showing up consistently as yourself. Not going viral, not chasing every trend, not perfect visuals.” Small brands typically do the reverse: two weeks of frantic posting, no results, a month of silence, or imitation of whatever is trending until they are indistinguishable from everyone else. Both destroy the familiarity that the whole sequence depends on. “Big brands can outspend you, but they can’t be you,” she says. “Pick a rhythm you can keep, stay relevant to your people, and keep showing up.”
Follow Hilal Koseoglu on LinkedIn for more insights on social media strategy, audience monetization, and building brands that turn attention into revenue.
