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Hello, hello, angry peepz. This time I’m leaning to write about marketing, but let’s see how it goes.
I am going to start by sharing an experience that I had this week. Here’s some context: for now, I am living at a Cascais, and since the beginning of this month, there are a lot of incurring constructions around my neighborhood. That means that there are many blocked roads, which can be annoying for most residents because there are a hundred people who can’t park their cars at their home, including me. What a hassle, right?
But one of the local restaurants (or the owner of it) had a bright idea. He opened his huge private parking lot from the restaurant for all neighborhood all night! Now, guess what all the locals will think on Friday night when choosing a restaurant for dinner…
“What a nice marketing maneuver,” you’re thinking (maybe) … From my perspective, that’s not marketing, just people being kind and helpful for others.
With this example, I’m just trying to come across a topic: after all, what is marketing?
Let’s begin with a modern overview of a marketing strategy: the marketing funnel – the gold mine that will conduct you all the conversions. Muahah (jk)!
Marketing funnel
A marketing funnel arises as a way of breaking down the customer journey all the way from the top-of-funnel until the bottom of the funnel, from awareness until purchase.
Top of funnel
Let’s review some terms:
Awareness: when prospects are aware of your product or service (conceivably, they have seen your social media ads), they have not or are about to engage with your brand.
Interest: prospects have engaged in an activity that indicates interest in your product, maybe a website visitor that fills in a form on a landing page.
Middle of funnel
Consideration: at this stage, they engage in more targeted information-gathering attempts, and they start to consider your product or service more seriously but haven’t yet made any buying decision,
Intent: the lead has taken action that indicates they intend to make a purchase, i.e., they’ve placed an item in their online shopping cart, for instance.
Bottom of funnel
Evaluation: they are making final comparisons with similar products, but perhaps they have also seen a useful review of it on the website.
Purchase: prospect makes a purchase and turns into a costumer. Instantly, you can follow-up on this costumer by sending him your next newsletter with new suggestions based on his last purchase.
I described a top-down growth. The classic funnel. Pour more in, get more out. Most businesses can thrive with it, especially when the product/service is good. The team and the technology are agile to nurture and personalize the lead experience down the funnel. Here’s the problem:
- At a turbulent world where people are overwhelmed between social ads and cat memes at Facebook, acquiring new customers from scratch is hard;
- Funnels go in one direction;
- Growth is linear.
Now what?
Allow me to suggest this: instead of talking about funnels, let’s talk about loops.
Loops feed themselves. The actions of one user generate an output that creates a new user.
User → Action → Output
For this to happen, you don’t need a marketing funnel and tons of KPI’s to measure its efficiency. You’ll just have to focus on building an essential product. If you design your work efficiently, it’ll promote itself.
Example 1: Doubletree Cookie (https://www.doubletreecookies.com/)
On check-in at any Hilton Doubletree hotel, every sole guest gets given a warm chocolate chip cookie.
75,000 are given out each day. 34% of guests tell their friends. That’s 25,000 stories being told about Doubletree, every single day.
The unit cost of a cookie is $0.20.
Let’s sum up:
Q: Who is the user?
A: The guest who does the check-in and receives cookies.
Q: What is the action?
A: The guest describes to his friend how those cookies are amazing, maybe even post an instastorie.
Q: What is the output?
A: 25000 stories being told about Doubletree, every day.
Example 2: Dropbox
Some products, like Dropbox, include financial incentives to invite new users.
Q: Who is the user?
A: User that runs out of space at Dropbox
Q: What is the action?
A: User invites a friend to get free 16GB
Q: What is the output?
A: % of friends sign up to Dropbox
Example 3: Angry Reports
This week, we did our first Angry Report focused on retail and e-commerce of a world driven by the current Covid-19 pandemic. How did you share it? We solely built a nice e-mail requesting feedback and forwarded it to our friends:
“Subject: feedback request
I wanted to share with you the last angry report we made about e-commerce and retail. I would like to know your opinion.
Link: https://v2.angry.pt/angryreport-retail
Take care”
Q: Who is the user?
A: Our friends that acknowledge their opinion matter to us
Q: What is the action?
A: They offer us feedback and if they recognize some value in the report, they will share with their network. Every so often, they also share new challenges in which we can help.
Q: What is the output?
A: Nice feedback for us and an increase in the angry report’s reach.
Marketing is the product
What these three examples have in common? The product doesn’t precede marketing – neither Dropbox, Doubletree, nor Angry Reports “market” the product after building it.
Marketing is the product.
This is just one answer suggestion for today’s title question, and I’m sure there’s many more,
P.S. If you want to know how and on what channels you can promote your great product, I recommend reading Tiago’s blogpost about Bullseye Framework.
P.S.S. You surely have already noticed the several links for a handy tool called Bullshit Free Dictionary. It’s our business dictionary with no bullshit or fancy words. You can check the entries, ask us for a free physical edition and suggest new definitions. Enjoy!
