Three Ways to Think About Your Marketing in the Context of Customer Actions

Marketing is about bringing your target audience along on a journey (if you’re not familiar with the hero’s journey for branding, Building a Story Brand is the place to start!) Because that journey is broken up in to pieces, it’s important to think about how and where you’re showing up in a way that can connect with your audience at different points.

There are two main ways that people talk about their marketing in relation to getting their audience to buy, but I use a third - especially with consumer goods and brands that are trying to create pull through retailers they have less control over (and less data).

Marketing Funnel

The concept of the marketing funnel has long been used to plan, strategize, and measure a brand’s efforts to reach their audience (for good reason. It’s true). Especially for businesses where you can track your audience actions, thinking about your actions as moving people “through” a funnel makes a lot of sense. My peeve with the marketing funnel is simply that in this day and age, your marketing activities don’t happen in a vacuum (or funnel). Social Media for example, can cover the entirety of the funnel depending on the individual post.

Customer Journey

I like talking about the customer journey when it comes to marketing activities because it feels a bit more personal than the funnel! It also is easier to use when thinking about platforms that cover multiple “stages” of the funnel - you simply focus different communication points to customers at different points in the journey. But this also is extremely linear, which often doesn’t work for disjointed industries like CPG and Alcohol, where you’re not necessarily getting to walk a customer through a flow.

Make it stand out

I like this depiction of marketing activities because it turns the idea of a funnel a bit on its head (or point, I guess). Rather than think of each activity or platform as a piece of the funnel, think of each activity as a dart. Your goal is to throw that dart as close to the bullseye, but you need to be prepared to hit another part of the target. A great example of a campaign that works for the marketing target is L’Oréal’s “Because Your Worth It” - the tag line on Point of Sale material grabs attention (awareness) and encourages picking up L’Oréal’s product specifically (action). You don’t need a multi-million dollar campaign to come up with a tag line that you can use at POS and in digital advertising - just the right combo of brand strategy and copywriting!