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Comments
Cynthia Siemens January 25th, 2012
It’s a revolutionary shift in mindset to build strategies that encompass all the many-to-many relationships in the new model: many touchpoints across many channels, many recommender/opinion relationships across social-media and traditional media, etc. Influence-by-facilitation is hard, but we’re lucky to have good blog guidance like this and some great content marketing books and gurus out there, as well.
Daniel Kuperman January 25th, 2012
Great post. I think you nailed it with “facilitation”. That means focusing on content creation and ways to make it easier for the buyer to find whatever he/she needs instead of pushing out to them what YOU think they need.
Problem is, if the buyer is not walking orderly through the supposed funnel, how do you evaluate your efforts? It will have to be via engagement metrics, not via standard funnel ratios (20% go through this stage, then 30% of those go to the next step, etc.).
Is tough to live outside the funnel, but if that’s the reality then we need to adapt.
Ryan Skinner January 26th, 2012
+Cynthia Siemens Right on! The many-to-many approach fits very well with a non-linear mode of buying (which is how I buy things, I think!). It’s a tough sell, however, to marketing organizations that like their linear, like their “this does that” and like their “we’ll dictate the customer journey.”
+Daniel Kuperman Thanks. That issue – metrics – is a really interesting one. I haven’t spent much time inside the premium social monitoring apps, but presumably they’re starting to create models that work better post-funnel. Do you have experience with them?
Doug Kessler January 27th, 2012
Love this post, Ryan.
The funnel gets a lot of abuse. It’s tough our there for a metaphor these days.
For me, the part of the metaphor that breaks down is the gravity implied in it.
In a real funnel, gravity is the force that pulls the contents of the funnel down towards the destination.
In marketing, there is no such force. In fact, there’s the opposite: a force that pushes people out of the funnel – maybe they never wanted to be in it in the first place; or a competitor pulls them out; or a distraction; or just time.
I still like the idea of a large number of disengaged people morphing into a medium number of people who have exhibited a medium level of engagement, then a few people who have exhibited lots of engagement. Still feels funnel-shaped to me.
But the funnel is upside down and we have to fight gravity (the tendency to move further away) with some kind of counter-force: content, value, utility, entertainment…
Pete Jakob January 28th, 2012
Fab post Ryan.
I think part of the problem is that Funnel tends to make us think in a transactional way: the objective of the process is t make a sale; you start off with a bunch of folks here and eventually you whitle it down to a few over here.
The problem is that we don’t need transactional process thinking, we need systems thinking. There are multiple parties, multiple conversations, multiple influences, multiple objectives all at play at the same time. Simplistic models have a place, but we have to recognise that life is more complex than that.
Personally I get a great deal of inspiration (if not answers) from my back garden. Growing watercress on cotton wool in an eggbox is simple. At one level a forest grows in the same way. But the subtleties and interplay around climates, soil structure, the role of decomposition, animal grazing, airborne spores, etc are what makes nature so inspiring.
So watercress is the store. A forest is the piazza. You can grow watercress in a funnel. A forest requires a (Eco)system.
Fortunately as we start to think about unstructured social data as much as structured data from CRM systems we will increasingly see that a systems mindset is what is needed for success in marketing…unless we only want watercress sandwiches
julia October 29th, 2012
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