By Last week, I showed you how Internet buyer journeys have transformed from the cleaner, more predictable funnel model of the 2000-2015 web into something shaped like a ball bouncing around a pinball-machine. These modern buyer journeys bounce back and forth between channels and content in ways that can’t be readily modeled nor cleanly attributed (despite what your analytics tool tells you).
But this isn’t the only problem our industry faces thanks to these pinball-slapping routes. This week’s follow-up covers the seven major issues I’ve seen marketers (at tactical, strategic, and management levels) facing in the modern buyer journey era. 👇
Transcript:
Last episode, talked a bunch about pinball user journeys and how customers, whether B2B or B2C bounce around in this world of looking at blog posts and reading news and asking friends and going to chat and YouTube and Reddit and Google and reading white papers, all this stuff and how different that is from the funnel that marketers are used to. But this also has knock on effects on the things that we need to think about and solve for as marketers, not just find where your customers are at. That’s problem number one, but also we need to know who that right audience is.
Sometimes we target the wrong people and thus we come to the wrong conclusions. Obviously we need to reach them in the right places. We have to know where that is and what their pinball like journeys look like when they bounce around. But we also need the right message.
We need the right content that is saying, Hey, our brand is associated with solving this problem this way for these people. And if you fit that mold, if you’re one of these people and you’re trying to solve this problem, then we’re for you and everyone else not so much. When you try to do everything, that’s when you fail at messaging. But there’s a whole bunch of problems that the classic sort of funnel system doesn’t need to worry about nearly as much as the pinball customer journey does.
These include product over marketing. I can’t express to you how huge of an issue this is.
I don’t know. I wanna take every CEO aside and be like, hey, that marketing problem you think you have seventy percent of the time, it’s a product problem. You think that the problem is, you know, going back to our example from last week, your citizens bank and you think the problem is, hey, we need to tell more people about our high yield savings account. But the real problem is your high yield savings account isn’t as high yield as the ten people, ten banks that all your customers are comparing against when they go to Google and ChatGPT and Bankrate and Reddit and all these other places.
There’s also this siloed departments issue where essentially because the SEO team is doing different things from the PPC team, is doing different things from the social media team, which is doing different things from the PR team.
They don’t convey that same consistent message. They don’t say, hey, we’re the bank for people looking for high yield savings accounts, or we’re the bank for people who want a bunch of features and tools, or we’re the bank for people who are looking for a better alternative to their credit union because they can’t get cash out in all these places or they don’t have a good promotional program for their credit card, whatever it is. You need to be the right product, but then that message has to be consistent throughout paid, throughout social, throughout PR. Otherwise you get lost in these places and these departments have to work together to say, Hey, we’ve got this asset, this value. You should be promoting it across these channels. We should be doing it in these ways. We need to make sure we don’t have conflicts.
Third problem is all demand, no brand.
Look in the funnel world, right? Of like twenty ten, where you were basically looking at almost exclusively top of funnel was like maybe social and blogs. And then the middle of the funnel was all Google and getting people on your email list, getting them to your content marketing. And then you basically had conversion stage at the bottom of that. In that world, you could serve a lot of demand without building a brand. And there were a ton of companies that did and did so relatively successfully.
But today, almost all of the rewards that Google or ChatGPT or Reddit or YouTube or any of these channels are gonna give you comes from building a brand first.
That marketing is essentially a reward for doing brand marketing well, building up a brand that people wanna talk about, that they’re inspired to talk about, that they know, like, and trust those click through rates, right? Which are driven by brand knowledge are huge there. And so you have to invest in brand, not just demand.
Sometimes they see marketers just ignoring, entirely ignoring a key channel. Like they’re looking out there, they’re like, gosh, why aren’t people choosing our bank? And it’s like, well, turns out a ton of people are going to, you know, Reddit or they’re finding information from a bunch of podcasts that have gotten popular in the personal finance space, or they are looking at Substack and like no one on Substack is writing about you or including you. And so missing those key channels can be a huge part of this too. If you have missed one of those things in the pinballs, it’s like you’re missing a flipper, right? And you just, you can’t bounce the ball back into play.
Attribution addiction, I’ve talked about this one a bunch, but the idea that you can attribute every single user journey perfectly, totally impossible. Absolutely impossible. Mentions in a podcast, ninety nine percent of PR, most mentions on YouTube, most mentions on social, especially like video, TikTok, and Instagram reels. You’re just not gonna get it. You’re not gonna get it no matter what you do. Being able to attribute that and knowing which user viewed those things before they converted, forget about it. So if you do attribution, you’re gonna hugely overweight to paid and to branded search in Google, and you’re gonna miss almost everything else.
Another big problem I see is in house obsession. This idea that like, hey, we’re good at these sort of three tactics or, you know, three parts of our funnel.
So we’re not willing to outsource. We’re not willing to call up, you know, an expert in Reddit marketing and say, Hey, we really need to be present in, you know, the personal finance subreddit and in the Philadelphia subreddit. And like, do you have people on staff who like contribute to Reddit regularly and can sort of upvote the right things and downvote the wrong things and leave comments in a way that is not gonna be, you know, astroturfing and false and just blatant marketing and instead be authentic and useful in a way that Redditors will actually see an upvote and it’ll get visible in there.
Well, if you try to do it all in house, my friend, you might be okay at Reddit. Maybe you already have core competency there, but I guarantee there’s channels in this pinball world that you’re not great at. And finally, a big one I see is sabotage by survey. The CEO or CMO or CFO or whoever, someone in leadership says, hey, I wanna run a survey and see where our customers came from.
And if you only survey your existing customers, you get two problems. One survey bias from people forgetting how they actually heard about you because people think they can remember and they absolutely cannot. You can prove this yourself a million ways. But two, if you only survey the people you’ve already reached, you will never know anything about the people you don’t reach and cannot survey.
That’s just a natural consequence. Another big problem with surveys that I see is people over focus on the, hey, that last channel attribution or the thing that they think people perceive to be the highest value one, but not the thing that actually was part of their consideration stage. And so I cannot recommend this enough. You need to layer in, real audience behavior at scale from like a click stream provider or, if a smaller business, SparkToro can be helpful for this.
And consider doing some large-scale market research as well. I know it’s expensive. I know it’s time consuming, but it can be really worthwhile because otherwise you’re gonna mess out on this. Now you solve these and you are ready to win at Pinball Marketing.