Your smartest marketing strategy for 2025

I was working with a client who was feeling some overwhelm (and maybe a little quease) around the idea of creating marketing funnels.

“Funnels” go back a long way. You throw a bunch of traffic in at the top (this was back when buying traffic was cheap) and the funnel spits out paying customers at the bottom.

Funnels aren’t bad or wrong. But the metaphor and model are a little outdated.

Throughout my career as a content marketer, particularly in recent years, I've found it more useful to talk about?paths to purchase. Here’s what that looks like:

A path to purchase is how someone finds you and decides to buy

For example:

• They hear you on a podcast
• They sign up for a free manifesto
• You send a few well-written automated emails about the topic
• You send an offer to take the topic further with a product or service
• They sign up and enjoy your work

Or it could be:

• They see your content on LinkedIn
• They go to a YouTube live you mention on the platform
• They’re fired up and fill out an application to work with you
• They get a follow-up sequence that includes useful information
• You get on a call and they sign up

Your business might have one path that’s been refined to work really well. Or you may have different paths for different kinds of customers, or for different products.

Focusing on building one path at a time keeps you from the “throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks” school of marketing.

You get to have as many or as few paths as you want to build and maintain. And those paths can branch, interlink, and lead to just about any goal you may have for your project.

Is this just another way to say the “Buyer’s Journey”?

The Buyer’s Journey (or Customer Journey) was a trendy way to frame this for awhile, but it has a few downsides.

The first is that too many people thought they needed to replicate Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” model step-for-step in their marketing.

I've seen marketers try to figure out the difference between "crossing the threshold" and "approaching the inmost cave." Or trying to shoehorn a "resurrection" and an "ordeal" into their latest case study.

There is absolutely no earthly reason to do that

You don’t have to cram every step of the "journey" in your screenplay or novel — and you definitely don’t need to do it in your marketing.

The journey model has a few insights any business can use — like understanding that your business isn't the "hero" of your marketing, your buyer is. (Rather, you're the "mentor" — think Yoda, not Luke or Rey.)

The other potential downside is that the buyer’s journey got turned into a collection of rigid copywriting formulas.

Like every formula, it got familiar and boring. It looks and smells like marketing. Which made it easy to ignore.

But the whole point of the buyer’s journey — whether you call it a path to purchase or even an old-school funnel — is that the path is determined by the person buying.

It’s about their needs, concerns, wants, fears, and timeline.

Not yours or mine. Or any “universal selling formula” set out by self-identified marketing experts.

When we say “content marketing,” this is what we mean

It doesn’t matter whether you call it a marketing funnel, a path to purchase, a content pachinko machine, or just your sales process:

Content marketing is the interesting stuff you build for potential buyers when a purchasing decision is more complex than “I need a box of pencils and Amazon has them for cheap.”

You then arrange that interesting stuff along strategic pathways, to build the case for your offer.

Some will pick your offers up right away, because the time is right for them. Others will spend more time on the paths you build — as you literally teach them how to be your perfect customer.

You can lay your paths out in an almost infinite number of ways.

• You can decide on the medium you prefer to create (as long as your buyer likes to consume it)
• You can experiment with where to put the messages
• You can infuse the path with your values

And coolest of all, if you make the path meaningful and enjoyable for your audience, you keep the conversation going until they’re ready to move forward.

Why the path to purchase is so powerful right now

This is a painfully divided cultural moment. Trust is low, stress is high, and inflation has its hands in everyone's pockets.

In difficult times, a well-designed path provides reassurance.

The path to purchase — or, more accurately, a network of paths — makes room for an uncomfortable business truth:

People buy when they're ready, not when you want to make the sale.

Paths to purchase are the natural foundation of an evergreen strategy, without feeling robotic or impersonal. They also make for lower-stress, higher-converting launches that don't feel like cash grabs.

Finally, organizing your content around paths to purchase frees your content marketing from the most dangerous pitfall in the game: Cranking out content week after week until you're exhausted — or you've burned through your content creation budget.

Could you use some help with that?

Building and teaching relationship-first conversion paths was my bread and butter in my 10+ years with Copyblogger — as well as my corporate experience selling tens of millions of dollars’ worth of services and products.

Earlier this year, I launched a new program called the Path to Purchase. It's a focused, done-with-you program that distills the most important lessons from my career as a content creator and marketer.

We come together in a small group to master a few core concepts, polish a few of your own unique ideas, then turn them into audience-forward conversion paths.

I'm running a quiet end-of-year promotion to pick up a few students who want to start 2025 on this better path.

A path to better conversion, a warmer relationship with the audience, and fewer hours spent creating content, because you'll be deploying it more effectively.

If that sounds like the right fit for you or someone on your team, watch my feed on this app in the coming week. I'll be letting you know how you can join in with the best deal.

Path to Purchase will relaunch next year on a glossier platform, with a more designed sales page — and a higher price tag to accommodate those extras.

But if you want the best pricing and the most access to me as we walk through the program, send me a message here on LinkedIn, or leave a comment below saying "PATH."

(Because you probably want to keep your December free, and so do I, we'll be starting our sessions in January.)

We'll talk more in the coming week ...

Sonia

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash