If you work in marketing or sales, there is a fair chance at some point in your life you’ve woken with a jolt in the night, as you scream the words “but we had enough leads in the funnel”.
The sales funnel is a well-worn description of the full sales and marketing process. The slowly narrowing pipe, which depicts the different stages within the buying process from awareness through to purchase. Lots of leads go in the top and a percentage of those turn into customers at the bottom. Or at least, that’s the theory.
Making money out of supporting this process, particularly at the top of the funnel in the Awareness and Interest phases, has been turned into a fine art by a few of the biggest players. Google’s ability to help businesses hit a bull’s-eye by repeating a small task with utmost precision, over and over again has earned it an undisputed position as the global champion.
From this position, it’s hard to see how Google can ever be toppled. It’s just too efficient. And yet the company’s own executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, publicly admitted Amazon was the biggest threat to its business. Where Google is the King of the Funnel Top, Amazon has undoubtedly become Prince of the Funnel Bottom.
Traditionally, the bottom of the funnel is the hardest place to make money. Often you’re the business, which has to really get its hands dirty, both in getting those customers over the line, as well as then either building or at the minimum delivering the goods.
However, traffic volumes are precisely why Schmidt is a little nervous, because for many of us, Amazon is the first port of call when we’re thinking about buying something online. Amazon has built an incredible machine entirely focused on offering and delivering a gigantic variety of products to almost anywhere in the world, in a timely manner.
The user experience and logistical efficiency are almost impossible to match. Amazon Prime and One-Click purchasing are just two of the weapons in the Bezos armoury and have served to bring about a fundamental change in the sales funnel.
In September 2015, Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark Capital and one of the tech industry’s most respected venture capitalists outlined this journey and described the change as the “reversal of funnel”.
We think Funnel Reversal has a better ring to it.
Amazon isn't alone in taking the battle to Google. Gurley cites some of his own investment portfolio, Uber and OpenTable, as great examples of where creating a "dramatically better user experience" has brought about a shift towards the bottom of the funnel.
But what does this mean to your business? Should your main objective be to become the Amazon of your sector? We're all for lofty ambitions but if you play in a commodity based market like Amazon; you have a mountain to climb.
To entice customers through the door and have them return again you have to challenge the Amazons or Ubers or OpenTables on more than price. You have to know your customers better than they do and seek a depth of insight that you can deliver against on a smaller, more personalised and more profitable scale.
Knowing who, what, where and how is part and parcel of what you should already be tracking. But understanding how customers feel; how they respond to content; and how you can teach them something along the way are all elements which could help you to build a stronger connection with them, reversing the funnel at the same time.
These are the types of thing which Amazon doesn’t have the time or interest in providing to customers. Where it goes for breadth, you can go for depth, targeting content and campaigns that create a brand experience that keeps customers coming back to you.
Who’s doing it well? Look at deep verticals such as Farlows in outdoor pursuits and Rapha in cycling to discover how marketing has been taken a step beyond just directing traffic to a sales promotion and into creating content that connects on an emotional level.
So next time you’re thinking about customer insight, why not ask them how they feel, what they like to discover and find out where they share content from. Feed this into your content strategy and you could be reversing your funnel before you can say omni-channel versus multi-channel.
By Matt Cross, Deputy MD of Hotwire.
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