Instead of moving through a traditional linear funnel, or engaging in a looping decision journey, customers are choosing their own adventure, charting their own path across all channels.
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Turing Fest 2021
Ashley Faus The Funnel is Dead. What Comes Next?
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Hi, everyone. I'm Ashley Foss, and I'm thrilled to be here at Turing Fest twenty twenty one. Today, we're gonna talk about why the funnel is dead, so what comes next. So I wanna start with a little question, and I don't want you to take it too seriously.
I want you to just whatever comes into your head, you can shout it out, pop it into the chat, yell it out to your dog or your roommate. But here's the question. What is the best piece of playground equipment? Is it the slides? Is it the swing?
Is it the merry-go-round? So when I ask people this question, my biggest takeaway is that there's actually not one best piece of playground equipment. Now you may be asking yourself, why am I talking to you about a playground at a professional conference? Well, we're gonna get there, I promise.
But for now, let's pretend that I put you on the merry-go-round, spun you around, you fell off, hit your head, and we're now in a place where we're talking about the linear funnel. Rough ride, I know, but I promise I will bring it back around.
So at its core, the linear funnel is three phases, awareness, consideration, and decision. And what a lot of marketers do is they whip out their editorial calendar, and they say, I'm gonna do two pieces of content per phase. That's six pieces of content. I'll publish once per month.
I now have six months of content strategy. Right? This is gonna run all these people through the funnel. Good job, marketer. Now if you are a marketer in the audience, you're sitting there shaking their head and saying, no. No. No. That's not at all how it works.
It's much more complicated than that. And you are correct. These are the Google results for the linear funnel. And as you can see, we've got some additional phases in there. We've got it turned on its side and scooting across horizontally. Like, this is real complicated.
And so clearly we need a newer model. And so, being the smart people we are, we came up with the looping decision journey. And at its core, it's four phases, awareness, consideration, purchase, and then some sort of post purchase, retention, cross sell, upsell step that kind of for some reason just like pops you back into this circle and puts you back in the awareness phase.
And so, again, being the smart people we are, we say, you know what? I'm gonna add two additional pieces of content for that fourth phase. That's eight pieces of content published once per month. Now I have eight months of content strategy. Good job, marketer. Right?
Eight months of marketing strategy by just adding an additional two pieces of content. How smart are we? And again, as you're sitting in the audience, I'm sure you're shaking your head and saying that's not at all how it works. It's much more complicated than that.
And in fact, you are correct. These are the Google results for the looping decision journey. Now I gotta tell you, the most terrifying images on this screen for me are actually down in that bottom right corner, and it's the Mobius, that infinity symbol.
Right? How many of you have ever been stuck in the infinite loop of marketing and sales content? It's terrifying. So I decided we clearly need a new model. Right? Nobody goes on this linear journey or this real weird infinite journey. Like, how are people actually buying today?
And I thought I was really smart. I was so proud of myself. I came up with a jungle gym because it allows you to kind of go sideways in every which way. But there is one problem with the jungle gym, and that is the fact that there is still really only one objective, and that is to get to the top of the jungle gym.
And so it is still me as a marketer forcing you to go on this journey that I want you to go on, which brings us back to the playground. What's the right way to play on the playground? Is it to go slides, then swing, then merry-go-round?
Is it to skip the swings altogether? And what about the people who are sitting on the park bench watching people play on the playground? Are they using the playground in the park the wrong way? Of course not. And so as we think about the buyer's journey, we need to treat it as a playground.
People can enter and exit as they desire, they can go in any order, and they can engage with content the wrong way. So what does it mean to engage with content the wrong way? Let's take pricing as an example. Now pricing is generally considered a bottom of funnel or a purchase level decision.
But when my boss came to me recently and said, hey, we are going to buy this tool. How much budget should I ask for? Well, I have no idea. So I start Googling around and I find the big players in the space and I say, hey, can you give me a rough estimate for this many licenses at this SLA level so that I can go get budget to buy your tool?
And so many of those reps came back to me, oh, you need to book a demo or you need to download this white paper. And I am like, I don't even have budget yet. And so I am not even in kind of this awareness phase because I have to go ask for budget.
So I finally get the budget. I get on the call and I am like, listen, I am bought in. I know I have this problem. I know a tool like yours will solve this problem. Please tell me why your tool is the best.
And they started all the way at the top. Well, do you know that technically this is a problem? And I like, no, guys, sell me your tool. And so as we think about this buyer's journey, this idea that people are going in a linear fashion does not work anymore.
So we need to be building this playground for our audience. So if we're not gonna map our marketing and content strategies to a linear funnel, how are we going to map them? So first, I want to show this narrative framework, and it is based on content depths.
Now first, we have the conceptual depth. This is theoretical and philosophical in nature, and it focuses on the what and the why of the idea. This helps your audience frame up and think about the problem space. Next, the strategic level. This focuses on the process, tools, and key knowledge components that must be included to make the conceptual ideas reality.
So this is helping your audience think about and evaluate solutions. It is equipping them to do their own research based on the criteria that you have helped them define for what will solve their problem. And finally, the tactical level. This is the prescriptive step by step instructions.
It is the nitty gritty where the rubber meets the road. And this helps them implement the strategic and conceptual ideas. Now, you will notice that nowhere in there did I say it is only the problem you solve using your product or service. This is holistically helping people think about problems, solutions, and specific tactics to implement the solutions for their problems.
So once we have created our narrative framework, we need to think about a distribution framework. And here we want to think holistically. So what kind of asset types? Is it written? Is it visual? Is it audio? Is it interactive? Long form, short form, live, recorded?
And what I often see happen, particularly in bigger companies, is that people get very focused. We are the blog team, so everything is a blog. We are the video team, so everything is a video. We are the sales team, so everything is sales enablement.
You need to widen that perspective to think holistically about the asset types that are best for telling the story at each depth. Next, your channel and platform mix. So this is your mix of paid, owned, and earned channels, and it can be a place to host content or a place to share content.
And as the platforms have evolved, in a lot of cases those are actually the same. A lot of the platforms today want you to both host and share your content on their platforms. And finally, metrics. So I wanna make this clear. All metrics are not applicable to all channels and all assets at all times.
So if you're trying to optimize for reach, it's highly unlikely that you will also be able to measure the engagement and the CTR at the same time. You can measure them, but optimizing for those two things, they're kinda gonna be at odds. And if you're intentionally trying to generate engagement in the feed, you're gonna struggle to get people to click over to your owned property.
So make sure that you're pairing the right metric with the right channel and the right asset type as you go through this. So once you've completed the narrative framework and the distribution framework, you should be able to fill out a table that looks something like this.
What's kind of the topic that you're trying to share and the story that you're looking to share? What depth are you covering it in each asset? What is the asset? Video, written, recorded, live, etcetera. And then where are you potentially sharing and hosting that asset?
So what does this look like in the real world? So in my bio, I say that I am a fitness fiend. And so I love to give this kind of real world example. And from my perspective, this would be a question of conceptually, you know, what does it mean to be healthy and fit?
Now, people agree it is some combination of diet and exercise, but you are going to answer this question very differently if you are Runner's World versus Muscle and Fitness versus Yoga Journal. So I personally really enjoy bodybuilding workouts. So let's click in and see how we would answer these questions as muscle and fitness.
At the conceptual level, you would say that you are healthy and fit if you have big, strong muscles and if you eat a high protein diet. At the strategic level, you might see things like having good form while you lift, or the value of compound lifts, and the differences between fast digesting and slow digesting protein.
And at the tactical level, this is your ten tips to build bigger biceps or five chicken dinner recipes to eat this week. So what does this look like for B2B and B2C audiences? So I want to talk through a couple of real world examples and tactics to implement the content playground for yourselves.
First, we're gonna talk about content pairing. So I wanna showcase this, example from Canva. They are a design firm. They're trying to make design accessible to everyone. And so if you go into Google and you type in brochure design, you'll see that they've done an excellent job securing the search engine results page.
They've got a couple of ads at the top that they bought, and then they're the top organic search results there that says free online brochure maker. Once you click in, you start to get some information kind of at the strategic level talking about the value of brochures, how you should structure them for the most efficient way of producing that information and sharing that information.
And then there's a direct path that takes you right into product to say, hey, get started today. They've got templates over there at the tactical level to help you get started. And the thing that you'll notice is that you can explore this pairing that strategic level content talking about here's the best way to make a brochure with tactical level content that walks you through step by step actually doing the creation.
And then there's again a direct path into an account where if you've already got an account, you can save it by signing in. Or if you don't have an account, you can save your designs and download them by creating an account. And so this is a free way to take people all the way from strategic, tactical, right into product.
Next, I wanna showcase this example from Atlassian. So in this case, we've paired two pieces of tactical content, but across different channels and different asset types. So we run a series called DemoDen, and this is where different product managers, engineers, and in some cases, marketers share information about how to use a new feature.
And so we pair that with an ask me anything in our community so that users can ask the direct product manager or the direct engineering person, how did you build this? Why did you build this? How else might I use this? And so in this case the biggest value is that we are using real people.
It is not voice over actors. It is not necessarily the most polished use case, but you can see in real time how you would use that feature and you can ask your questions of an expert. We also use this on our Agile Coach microsite.
And in this case we pair a mix of conceptual and strategic level content with tactical content that speaks specifically about agile methodology. We have also used different asset types. We have a long form article to help us rank for SEO, and then we have a short form video series that is in a playlist on YouTube.
And then we also embed those videos directly into the article. So this gives the audience the opportunity to choose whether they want to read, whether they want to watch, whether they want to read and watch, and it gives us an opportunity to reach people on different platforms.
We also use this pairing tactic at Duarte. So Duarte is a communication firm and they actually wrote a book talking about how leaders tell transformational stories. And so there are ten types of stories. There are five warning stories and five motivating stories. So we broke those into two, and we published one set of the warning stories on SlideShare and another set of motivating stories on a gated landing page.
So if you were trying to use kind of that traditional inbound strategy in doing gating, you create this landing page, you put one set of stories behind the form, and it's linked to the free set of stories. Now I will say I have actually moved away from using gated content for the most part because I think it fosters this idea of an MQL, which is a marketing qualified lead, and it basically says anybody who fills out the form is a sales lead.
I disagree with that. And if you look at the nature of this content, you'll see that it's much more educational. It's much more about helping people implement practices and adopt ideas versus specifically trying to sell them something. We also use this tactic at Duarte to pair some strategic level content with tactical examples.
So in this case, our CEO Nancy wrote an article talking about the value of adding humor to your presentation. Then she created a series of use cases showcasing different types of presenters using different types of humor. We then published that on SlideShare, embedded it back into the LinkedIn article, so you could see, okay, what are some tactics to add humor and why is it important?
And then specifically, how are real people doing this? And no matter where you found it, if you landed on the LinkedIn article first or if you landed on the use cases first, you have that ability to go back and forth among the different content depths.
Next, I wanna talk through republishing content. So there's a couple of ways to do this. You can do it on LinkedIn. You can do it on sites like dZone. If you've got some syndication partners, can prop partner with them to do this as well.
So first is comparing the problem and the solution. So you frame up the problem on one site, and then you link to details of the solution on another site, and you cross link those two pieces. So the Muse did this one time. They had shared an article talking about how to make yourself look like the most valuable candidate with a resume.
And in the article on LinkedIn, this editor talked about the fact that they had thrown away a resume. And it turns out that it was an employee referral. And so the employee came and said, hey, why'd you throw this resume away? My my friend is great.
They ended up digging it out of the trash, interviewing the candidate, and hiring them. And so they framed up this problem of, man, we threw away the resume for the perfect candidate. And then they linked over to say, see how to make yourself the perfect candidate, see how to structure your resume on their own site.
Next, for case studies and research, there's a couple ways to do this. You can tee up the problem of what it is and why it matters on one site and then link to the solution, or you can say here's what we found, go dive into the deep dive of the methodology, the specific statistics, etcetera, in the research report.
So we did this for our state of diversity sentiment analysis a couple of years ago at Atlassian. Our head of balance and belonging at the time teed up why we wanted to run this research and a couple of the key findings, and then she linked over to a blog post that detailed some tactics to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and then a link to the actual research.
And finally, you can just straight up republish existing content. So take the long form content and republish it verbatim on other sites. So we've used this tactic very successfully at DZone. In my case, the topics I cover are for a lot of a developer audience, and so DZone is the perfect place to put this content.
The big key here is to make sure that you mark the original as the canonical link and that you include a link back to it so that you've got a nice backlink, high authority backlink, and it doesn't confuse Google about which piece of content they should prioritize.
And finally, if you have syndication partners, make sure that you are republishing with them. So the Muse works with a number of different, pieces. I've published with them a number of times, and they have partnerships with Mashable, Time, and Forbes, and so they can directly publish that content on those sites.
In this case they include a link both to my original article on The Muse and also a link to my bio. And so this is great for all parties because The Muse gets more content to share, me as an author gets more content to share, and then obviously these syndication partners get high quality content with a lighter lift.
Now it's not just long form content that's changed. Social has changed as well. And so I wanna talk through a couple of things here. This example is from a cloud access security broker called Polara. And so prior to being acquired by Oracle, we went to AWS re:Invent, and we were talking about security.
And so our booth giveaway was an Amazon tap, and we put it in a locked case with a bowl of what looked like identical keys. And if you drew a key that unlocked the lock, you won the tap. Now given that this had a lot of security professionals, of course, all of them were very skeptical that there were any working keys in the bowl.
So every time someone won, we asked if we could snap a picture and post it on our company Twitter account, and then we'd ask them if they would retweet, share, and like the post. And so anytime someone came up and said, there's not even any working keys, no, look, follow us on Twitter.
You can see the last time someone won, and so we were able to grow and engage our following. Now my biggest pet peeve about social events, particularly for in person, is people just shout at their followers. Visit us at booth one, two, three.
Come visit us at booth one, two, three. Most of your followers might not be at the event, and so you're just spamming them for three days. So what we did to get around this is we created an e book that tied in directly with the messaging and the booth giveaway.
And so whether you were following us online or whether you were engaging with us at the event offline, those two strategies were paired. And then we used this digital asset as the email follow-up to all the people we had scanned at the booth.
And we had much higher open rates because everyone saw that connected journey both online and offline. I also want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn and the fact that using personal profiles can be huge. So, in this case, we had one of our product managers share about a new feature release that they had personally worked on.
So first, she gave a personal perspective. She used a personal tone. Next, she tagged our company. Now this is key. You can't just use the hashtag. You have to mention company pages if you want them to engage, but also tagged other members of the team so that they could engage on the post.
We also included the LinkedIn comments. So there's been a bit of a shift. Sometimes LinkedIn will prioritize the link in the post. Other times they're prioritizing content that keeps you on LinkedIn, and doesn't force you off the platform. So LinkedIn comments is a hack to get around that.
Next, we used a carousel to increase clicks so that would drive the engagement in the feed. And then, LinkedIn is also prioritizing reactions and comments. They wanna see that people are engaging. So we asked the entire team to swarm on this post to help increase it.
And finally, the time to first engagement. If you can get people to swarm on a post within the first hour, that significantly improves the reach and then starts a nice snowball of engagement. And finally, this aspect of Twitter. So we have had people ask questions on Twitter, and we go in specifically from PMs, product managers, engineers, and marketers to answer these questions directly from a personal handle.
And as you can see, this person likes it. I like this trend of PMs directly answering some questions, direct accountability, and direct feedback. Now, of course, that is not necessarily scalable. Marketers are often very concerned with CTR, CTR, CTR, how many people clicked.
But the problem is that the platforms are greedy and people are lazy. The platforms wanna keep you on LinkedIn or on Twitter or on Instagram, and people don't wanna click over to read an additional thing. They want the content right now. So we measure holistically across video, brand paid search, organic traffic, and social media.
And so think holistically about matching your assets, your metrics, and your channels so that you can truly understand the engagement and conversion rates of each item. And I love this quote from Jay Acunzo. It says, Marketing is no longer about grabbing attention. It is all about holding it.
Today's best marketers understand marketing isn't about who arrives. It is about who stays. So, I want to close with one last kind of counterintuitive example from the city of Vienna. And they said, enjoy Vienna, not Vienna. And they specifically didn't want people to share.
Instead, they wanted you to come to the tourist office, ask for an Instamax camera and only take ten photos for the entire trip. And so then they ran an out of home campaign using enjoy Vienna, not Vienna. Come. Engage with us. Have that relationship with us. Be present. Be in the moment.
So what is the ideal customer journey? In the past, it was about rushing people with as few purchase points as possible. How do I get you to hustle up and give me money? But today, it is about creating the most seamless experience no matter which journey the customer chooses.
So I hope you will join me in building the playground. Focus on delighting your audience, building that long term relationship, not focusing on a single transaction, and influencing at every touchpoint. So who's ready to build the playground? I hope you will join me on LinkedIn and Twitter if you have questions or if you'd like to continue this conversation.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here at Turing Fest.