By One of the fundamental mistakes I see executives and marketing leaders make over and over is investing in the wrong part of the demand funnel. In this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard, I’ll walk through an example of demand creation at the top vs. middle/bottom of the funnel, and explain why it’s critical to understand whether you have one of two problems:
- Not enough people who know about the problem you solve and/or the solution you provide
- Not enough people who know about you getting consistent nudges to buy
If you invest in the wrong problem, you’re gonna have a bad time 👇
Transcript:
I’m gonna guess you’re familiar with the classic marketing funnel idea. There’s two sides to it. One is how people experience their customer journey and the other is how marketers themselves kind of craft their funnel to expose people to their brand and content and ideas and then slowly over time, you know, get them to become customers and buy something. So this is this is that first one. This is talking about the customer journey where you discover you have a problem or an interest or passion then you become more aware of that space, you experience the problem and then you try and seek out a solution to it. This would be the the marketing funnel equivalent from the marketer side which is, you know, you expose people to the problem they’re experiencing, you hope that they discover you and your brand and your content, and then in consideration phase you’re sort of competing against the rest of the field to try and earn people’s attention and then finally you convert them to the sale.
So I let let’s check let’s make this a real example. Here’s, one of my favorite companies. This is, Benedetto Cavalieri. They’re a pasta maker in Puglia, which is the far south of Italy. And Benedetto Cavalieri makes my absolute favorite pasta in the world. It’s this super thick spaghetti. Let’s see if it’s on their Prodotti page.
See, Spaghettoni; it it’s super thick and as a result, it takes, like, eighteen minutes to cook. They say sixteen to seventeen minutes. So you’re, you know, you’re boiling it for a really long time.
But when it comes out, the taste and texture is just perfect. It’s super al dente. I I absolutely love it. Goes great with all these sauces.
And Benedetto Cavalieri, right, when they’re in the discovery and awareness, making people aware of the brand, the way they made me of the aware of their brand was they worked with a bunch of chefs and influencers, people who wrote cookbooks.
And when these people tried, when these chefs, right, these experienced foodies tried Benedetto Cavalieri, it it was a huge smashing success. In fact, I think several cookbooks that I own, pasta cookbooks say specifically you should go seek out this brand of pasta because it’s the best one if you’re gonna use dried pasta in your recipes.
I have given Benedetto Cavalieri to dozens of friends. Friends. Like I’ve sent them a, you know, gift box. It’s expensive. Right? It’s like it’s like ten bucks for a a, you know, thing of spaghettoni instead of, you know, maybe four bucks at the store. Maybe three bucks if you if you get a really cheap brand.
So it’s like three times as much. Very expensive.
Marketers don’t necessarily think about and should is the how these different phases mean that you need to make different investments. Let’s say, for example, that at the exposure phase or discovery phase Benedetto Cavalieri was suffering and struggling. Like, they didn’t have enough sort of brand awareness. There’s just not enough demand for them.
People don’t know to compare them against other products. They’re not a particularly well known brand, I think outside of Italy and maybe they should be, but that challenge is fundamentally different. That requires the kinds of things they were doing. You know, the PR efforts, the influencer efforts, getting chefs to try their pasta, working with restaurants and recipe writers to include their, their brand.
That that is a fundamentally a totally different task than down here in conversion phase where they are doing essentially what’s what’s happening here which is bidding on, you know, brand names trying to get I think if you go to, you know, for example, Amazon and you search for spaghettoni.
Spaghettoni is just like thick spaghetti. Well, I actually don’t see them. Well, okay. Yeah. I did I did purchase that. I don’t remember spending hundred and twenty eight dollars, but I maybe I did.
And these, right, these types of ads that is taking already existing demand for a brand and trying to convert it to sales which is a totally fine thing to do but very different. The way I think about content creation and marketing and you know which channels to invest in things like PR and social media, these videos that I do, the content that we create on SparkToro, that is all exposure and discovery.
It is almost none of it is consideration and conversion. In fact, right now we’re making our very first efforts. The first time ever we’re gonna be doing some paid performance marketing. And here’s my belief. My belief is what happens up here is through content, through what our SEO, social media, even email subscriptions, through events, through conferences, through PR, all those channels are great for this stuff up at the top.
And then you’ve essentially created this demand. Now there’s a lot of people who are like, yeah, I’ve heard of Benedetto Cavalieri or in our case, SparkToro. And maybe when I get to my buying consideration and conversion phase, that’s when performance style advertising, right, the kind of thing that happens here is actually quite useful.
I think it really pays to understand this and how these two dynamics work together. Because if you are struggling with not enough sort of brand impressions, not enough demand for your product, the problem that you solve, you might be shooting yourself in the foot by investing in this stuff instead of this stuff. These are two different things. If you built up a bunch of awareness and attention and brand recognition and familiarity and trust, then you probably should do some investing in performance marketing to take those folks from consideration to conversion.