You probably don’t need that complex marketing funnel

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Marketing funnels can be a fantastic way to generate sales for your company. We help companies set up marketing funnels from time to time, and they work great! However, in most cases building a marketing funnel should be fairly far down your list of priorities.

At its core, a marketing funnel is just a series of techniques to get a lot of people interested in your product (starting at the top of the funnel) and then work them through other information and offers to get a few clients out the bottom of the funnel.

They’re great, but you probably don’t need to set one up — at least not yet.

Before you worry about a big, complex funnel, I encourage you to get the basics in place first, such as:

  • Make sure your website is rock-solid.
  • Track usability of the site and improve as needed.
  • Produce consistent fresh content on your site, likely through a blog.
  • Develop an appropriate level of social media interaction.
  • Build an email list.

If you’re doing great with all of that, then perhaps a marketing funnel is a good next step. However, 99% of companies are missing at least an item or two on that list and should focus there first.

It reminds me of the famous gun scene from “Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark“, where the “Arab Swordsman” was showing impressive sword skills but was killed very easily by Indiana’s gun. See it here:

I see a lot of companies that are the man with sword. Flashy and flamboyant, very impressive looking, but they’re lacking some key pieces.

Make your website awesome, develop fresh content, be engaging on social, send helpful emails, and once you have all of that humming along then (and only then) it might be time to look at building a funnel to take things to the next level.

Social media isn’t for content, it’s for distribution

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I’m not sure how you found this post of mine, but there’s a good chance that it was from a social media channel. Social media can be a great way to share thoughts and ideas, but it’s generally a bad place to develop deep content.

A little over two years ago I told you about the concept of POSSE (“Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”), and it’s more true today than ever. I bring this up because I continue to see more and more solid content on social media that quickly becomes vapor and is no longer available to any of us.

Mark Schaefer recently unpacked this more on a Medium post that he wrote, which included some fantastic insights. In his case, it was a response to people that are using LinkedIn as a primary content platform. LinkedIn is my favorite social media channel for now, but it absolutely should not be the main place to create your content.

His entire post is excellent, which I summarized in the title of this post. Among other things, he said:

Here’s where people get confused. LinkedIn is not a content platform. It’s a distribution system.

His final sentence of his post really tied it up nicely:

If you take one thing away from this post, I hope it is this: If you’re only posting your content on LinkedIn, you’re grotesquely sub-optimizing your personal branding and content marketing effort. LinkedIn and other social media platforms can play a crucial role in personal branding. But please post all of your content on your website first and then send it into the social media distribution system.

Social media can be fantastic for you and your business, but don’t mistake those channels for being proper content platforms. Publish somewhere that your content can last for years, and use social media to do the job of bringing people over to see it.

Check out Mark’s full post to learn more.

Why should your website rank higher than theirs?

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A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and he was upset that his site wasn’t ranking first on Google for a particular keyword. We ran the search, and sure enough he was in fifth. I proposed a very simple challenge: click the top ranking, and then tell me if his site really deserves to rank higher.

In this case it was incredibly clear. His page for this keyword consisted of one sentence of text and a small photo gallery, while the top ranked site had a more text, photos, testimonials, and other great information. I told him that if I were Google, I’d absolutely leave that other site ranked at the top. He reluctantly agreed.

You can do the same.

If you’re being outranked for a particular search term, look at the pages that rank ahead of you and then make your page better than the ones at the top. Most of the time it’ll take some effort to simply match the top page, but go further. Give your page more info, better photos, clear calls to action, incredible resources, fast loading times, etc. Make it so it’s not even close.

There are certainly times when the top ranked page really isn’t very good, and figuring out why can be frustrating. In most cases, though, the work you need to do in order to take the top spot is pretty clear and you simply need to put in the effort to get there.

Your notes are not my notes

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While sharing notes with other people can be helpful, it’s often troublesome because the notes that you take are generally far more valuable to you than anyone else. In his book “Outsmart Your Brain“, author Daniel Willingham shares more:

The notes you get from someone else will not be the same as those you take yourself. Notes are cues that will jog your memory back to the understanding you had during class, and you’ve seen how particular those cues can be; grocery-deficit coffee is different from neighbor-gift coffee.

Good notes should speak for themselves, but there is always a bit more in our brain that gets triggered by the note that others won’t be able to see.

I’ve noticed this with our team; if one of us goes to a conference and comes back to share their notes, it’s just not nearly as effective as having been there ourselves. I’ve found that having more of us at the event leads to far greater understanding than one person trying to share some pieces of what they learned.

This is challenging, because the effort and cost for one person to attend an event and take notes is far less than for a group. At what scale does it pay off?

Over the years, this has somewhat limited to the events I’ve gone too when Ali is unable to attend with me. I know that going alone offers value, but it seems that going together offers 10x value (though it’s at least 10x the effort as well).

The best solution I can find is to take better, more comprehensive notes. I can still only share a fraction of the value, but I can do it in a fraction of the time. If someone misses a three-day event and I give them a 15 minute recap, that’s less than 1% of the time investment for them but hopefully a bit more than 1% of the value.

What do you do with your notes to make them more beneficial for others to read?

Writing exposes your gaps

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I’ve shared a few times on here that I often don’t know what I’m wrong about, so I work to try to expose those areas. Reading helps with that a lot, as does writing.

In Adam Grant’s new book “Hidden Potential“, he shares:

I’ve seen many people shy away from writing because it doesn’t come naturally to them. What they overlook is that writing is more than a vehicle for communicating—it’s a tool for learning. Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking. Or as Steve (Martin) himself quipped, “Some people have a way with words, and other people, uh . . . oh, not have a way.”

I’ve found that the people with the clearest minds tend to be the ones that write the most. It might be books or blog posts or even personal journals, but getting things out of your head is a fantastic way to clarify what you think.

I still believe that publishing in public helps more because it forces more polished thoughts, but any kind of writing that you can do will put your clarity of thought miles ahead of where it is right now.

Our customers don’t need more content

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The amount of content generated on the internet every day is staggering. Using YouTube as example, you’d need over 11,000 computers all streaming YouTube channels just to keep up with the new content being added in real-time, and that wouldn’t touch the billions of videos already uploaded. It’s crazy!

Despite that, it seems that AI is about to make this problem much worse. When people can upload 100x more videos with the same amount of work, they will. The race to capture eyeballs will continue to accelerate, and it’s likely going to create a big mess.

That said, the people we’re trying to reach don’t need more content. Heck, they can’t deal with the volume of content already, so creating more won’t help. This was summarized very well in a post from David Berkowitz where he discussed why he’s leaving Twitter/X and going to Threads right now. In that post, he shared the following:

I’m reminded of a line I heard on an AI panel recently hosted by Knotch, one of my favorite lines in part because the speaker spelled out such an obvious point. When we were talking about using AI for content generation, Jamie Roô, Head of Wealth Management Digital Content at Morgan Stanley, said something like, “Our customers don’t need more content.”

Most of us don’t need more content, more people to follow, more news sources, or more connections. Most of us don’t even need more of an audience; we just need to better engage with those we’re reaching or provide more value to them.

Mass-generated AI content might attract some viewers, but that will lead to an increase in the value of people that focus on true engagement and connection. You don’t need more content to do that, you just need to do a better job of building authentic relationships through direct conversations.

Marketing isn’t magic

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I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago that was working with a new company. That company had been outsourcing their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work to another firm for a few thousand dollars a month, but it was unclear exactly what that other firm was doing.

When asked for details on what work was being done each month, they were denied and derided for daring to ask such a question. I don’t know the details of that situation, but I’ve seen similar before where companies were “doing SEO” for company but didn’t disclose what they were doing. Short answer: usually not much.

Marketing isn’t magic. Even SEO, which can be a little complicated at times, includes tactics and practices that are easy to define. If you’re working with a firm that doesn’t disclose details (even for “proprietary secrets”), you need to break ties with them immediately. The lack of transparency is not acceptable, and often means they’re hiding something — usually the fact that they’re not doing much work for the client.

When it comes specifically to SEO, it’s pretty straightforward, though it can take a good bit of work to keep it going strong. In most cases it includes:

  • Keyword research to determine what specific phrases to go after.
  • Work on the technical side of the website to make sure nothing is badly broken. This can take some time, but it’s not an ongoing expense aside from baseline security after a point.
  • Generating strong content. This is often the bulk of the work, and companies deserve to be paid well if they’re doing a good job, but it’s not a secret.

Don’t let companies hide what they’re doing. Good marketing takes effort, but there’s no magic secret to any of this stuff. Follow best practices, know your audience, produce great content, measure the results, and repeat.

If a company says “We’re going to do A, B, and C for you every month for $x,xxx“, that’s awesome.

If they say “just trust us“, don’t.

The attention span of a goldfish

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Every few weeks I hear someone talking about marketing and how humans have a shorter attention span (8 seconds) than a goldfish (9 seconds). It comes up frequently, but frequency doesn’t equal accuracy.

In short, it’s just wrong. It spreads because it’s interesting and eye-opening, but it’s based on faulty (and often fabricated) data. Dr. Maria Panagiotidi digs deep into it here.

In short, there are two main problems:

  • First, if your attention span is really just 8 seconds, you wouldn’t be reading this far into this post. You also wouldn’t watch movies, read books, or even be able to drive a car.
  • Second, how do you accurately measure the attention span of a goldfish? There’s not an easy answer, but some studies have shown that their memory can actually be quite good.

We’re certainly drifting more into the quick hits world of TikTok and further from people reading long books, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the memes make it out to be. As Dr. K. R. Subramanian shares in this paper from a few years ago:

The idea of an “average attention span” is very much meaningless. It is task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task varies depending on task demands.

Some things, like TikTok, encourage super short bursts of attention, but we also do things that require longer focus without much of a problem. We certainly tend to skim and bounce around more often than we have in the past, but if you produce compelling content people will stick around far longer than 8 seconds.

Can your notes be read on a 60-year-old computer?

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At our technology and tools continue to improve, we’re increasingly losing our ability to own what we create. Not from a legal standpoint, necessarily, but a technical one.

If Squarespace doesn’t agree with your platform, they can delete your site.

If you ever posted on Myspace back in the day, that content is long gone.

Even things like Google Drive, which I use quite a lot, could someday disappear and take all of my files with it.

I try to mitigate some of that risk by using tools such as WordPress and Obsidian, but a recent article caught my eye. Earlier this year, Steph Ango wrote a post called “File over app“, where he argued that we should be more focused on technology that lets us use files versus technology that buries our content in their custom app. The challenge, as he sees it:

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.

One of his solutions, that I use as well, is Obsidian (for note-taking). It’s a powerful bit of software, but all of the notes are saved as plain text files on your computer. From his post on the Obsidian blog:

Obsidian notes are stored in simple, plain text files, which have been in use since the dawn of computing. If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, we think it’s important that your Obsidian notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

As he points out, Obsidian won’t last forever, but your files can. Even if/when Obsidian goes away, you have a folder full of plain text files of all of your notes, and you can use some newer software to view them if you want.

WordPress files aren’t easily read offline, but it’s simple to make a copy of your site and bring it with you (which is far better than Squarespace, Shopify, and most other platforms).

Google Drive keeps things in a proprietary format, but you can (and should!) download backups of your files using Google Takeout from time to time.

Whatever software you’re using, make sure you have a way to take your stuff with you when you leave (or when they shut down). You may not have a concern about your files being viewable in 2160, but thinking that far ahead might keep you more safe tomorrow.

Remove something else

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Throughout Henry Ford’s life, he always pushed to make things simpler. The Model T was an engineering marvel when it was first produced, but that’s in part because Ford was constantly finding things to remove. Every item he took out would reduce the weight, and it would also leave fewer items that might break.

Steve Jobs was the same way. Apple products and interfaces are famous for their relative simplicity. He worked hard to keep things as simple as possible (at least on the front end) so that users would more quickly understand how a product worked.

It’s not easy to be effective at reducing. As attributed to Blaise Pascal are the words “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter“. It’s easy to add features (and words) to things that you produce, but it’s considerably more effort to trim things back down.

In marketing, the best trimmers tend to win. If you can get your message to be clear and concise, your emails short and effective, and your website full of whitespace to help users see your main message, you win. It’s not always easy, but it’s always effective.