Marketing is never a linear funnel. It's a flywheel
The elephant in the living room
I got into the online business world in an emerging e-commerce platform start-up. It's exhilarating to watch the money flow in, traffic surge, orders pile up, and the dopamine rush from seeing the numbers rise second by second. While doing this, I was in a very comfortable position seeing how the complex structure works together behind the scenes to make an order delivered..
It was a too-good-to-be-true workplace until the bubble burst. “A bankruptcy occurred due to cash flow shortage”, that is what they said in the media. A short but sweet work trial helped me learn the basics of the e-commerce world and I knew its ongoing pressure for change was the nuance I had been looking for. But the idea that sales are driven by only hot deals & outside money-bump, bugged me.?
Then, working for big corp brands’ agencies taught me how big guys ran peak season campaigns with different big platforms side by side. They were crazy about the target and generously invested a huge budget on promotion and traffic-to-store. To create hype after hype and keep the hype as high as possible, a variety of deal scenarios were strategically planned out with the slogan “the biggest promotion ever", repeated every time, just in different forms.?
For a long time, brands only followed the same template for success. Tons of money is wasted doing repeated stuff that is so robotic & forceful. It didn’t bugged me anymore but it bored me off.
From the old company going bankrupt, from the brands running on loss and the businesses can’t keep up their ROI in the long run, I gradually noticed the pattern:
They spend their tremendous effort on optimizing only one part of the funnel and hope to uplift the whole system accordingly?
In reality, Marketing, Business, or everything else in the world operates in a more complex way. If a part of this complex system is separated to 'dissect', analyze, or optimize, it will lose its continuity, an essential part of what makes up the A SYSTEM THAT WORKS
A business is like a living body with every organ working in harmony. This kind of SYSTEM is not just the sum of the individual parts. It's the EMERGENCE of their INTERACTIONS.?Optimizing one part definitely cannot uplift the whole system. The entire brand's online performance can’t be determined by big promotions, forcing marketing messages, and rush campaigns
A business is not a sum of Awareness, Engagement & Conversion. Only when these three sub-systems coordinate and work together closely and harmoniously, do their interactions create a complete Business.
The flawed assumptions that last for too long
When deeply immersed in marketing, a subsystem within a larger structure, I had the opportunity to challenge and confront some flawed growth models that had persisted for far too long. My understanding of the underlying dynamics of effective marketing strategies has become significantly clearer through System thinking
Let's get familiar with the SYSTEM concept first. To take in & understand you need to align on these ideas below:
IDEA #1: A shift in mindset is required away from linear to circular thinking. The fundamental principle of this shift is that EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED.
Again, no single ‘Node’ operates in isolation, without affecting the whole. All parts are interconnected and interact with each other.
IDEA #2: Messing around with the parts of your “funnel” (system!) won't necessarily improve your results (and may make them worse).
This linear thinking is usually brought up by some Online Marketing quacks, saying nonsense like ‘If you increase 10% inbound rate - 10% view uplift - 10% click to PDP uplift - 10% ATC uplift - 10% conversion rate uplift —> you get 100x uplift in sales’.
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IDEA #3: Stacking “hacks” and “best practices” together doesn't work. There is a fundamental system dynamic at play BETWEEN the non-linear parts of any funnel.
The entire Marketing process from approaching customers, grabbing attention, interacting with potential customers, and engaging them with ads, affiliate content, and educational content... is interconnected, and impossible to separate each apart
Blindly stacking hacks & optimized tricks into one system is like implanting a new organ into a body and then expecting it to run together perfectly.
From what I observe, Marketing conventional wisdom is STILL based on two flawed assumptions from Linear thinking
Not every customer shares the same journey to their Buying moment. It’s never the case that moving from A>>D, step by step will eventually take them to the checkout page.?
?Instead, the funnel looks more like this…
The Marketing Funnel changed, or we need to accept the fact that the customer journey has never been linear
It's more like a Flywheel
We were very lucky…
Three years ago, TikTok opened us space where we freely practice creative and authentic ways of building a brand, selling products, and talking to customers. During the gold rush, many new brands like us took the opportunity to confront the old way of doing e-commerce and successfully leverage the algorithm to shift focus to what matters.
From Forcing Marketing to Empathy-Driven Marketing. Less about promotion, creating false urgency, and pushing upwards and more about understanding customers, helping them solve problems.
(*) Disclaimer: All pictures & diagrams I used in this post are from The modern marketing system