149 - Marketing funnels don’t exist!

Discussion - Marketing funnels don’t exist!

Introduction:
This discussion is about marketing, and it has a very click-bait title! It’s probably safe to say that we are not experts in marketing and certainly not marketing funnels.

Nevertheless we thought we would chat about this and why we might need to get better a digital marketing for ourselves and clients and where WordPress could help with that.

What's different about this discussion is that really is an introduction to a series of discussions we will have based on a book called Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas.

Shout out to Andrew Gould for mentioning this in the WP Build Facebook group. This book is really practical guide to understand where we (or our clients) could be losing business.

Bryony calls these “leaks” and each leak needs a discussion in its own right.

But before that…

Let's chat about what marketing we do...

Nathan:
I use word of mouth a lot, that is to say that the majority of my work comes via referrals from people who I've already worked with.

I've used paid ads a few times and tried to use pixels and funnels. My problems comes with the analysis of the data. I really don't like to do this and so it's fun to set all this still up and implement it, but it's not really my forte to make sense of the data.

David:
Lots of theory over the years. Not that much experience. My first experiments were with our own e-com shop. Some success with a mailing list. I used Blogger and Pinterest. Fails were Facebook and not using the blog well.

I thought it was very exciting but without a conceptual framework I got lost on the minutia. Literally everybody had a “you must be doing this” argument with a different approach and with a different platform.

I suppose being on this podcast and doing YouTube videos is marketing, but is not really focused on a particular result. This has been my year for taking out time to think about the marketing, and packaging up different offerings for different people.

Chat about whether we need to offer digital marketing

We think we do. The perceived value of websites has gone down in a general sense. Offering other graphics and print services was an additional option, but these are also probably less in demand with free stock libraries and easy editing tools which enable clients to do much of this themselves (Canva and Stencil etc.)

Hosting and site care is good ways to keep the wolf from the doors… but to keep clients on them you need to keep offering value and most client needs more digital marketing (even if we don’t know it)!

Chat about whether clients will even understand a marketing offering

David:
Generally I have failed to get client to see the possibilities of digital marketing. I think they know they should be investing, but I don’t have philosophy right. Basically they think it is taking the interruption marketing approach of the age of mass media and applying that to digital platforms.

What I like about the Watertight Marketing book is I think it is a way to explain digital marketing without first having to give a lecture on how they need to think differently.

I have encountered people with niches that are perfect for the web. Gold mines with high and trending search potential. They just needed to make some content, but I have failed to explain how this might be done.

The last one I remember decided to skip the net all together and use print (really expensive brochures - I think).

Listen to this episode and find out more about how we are going to try to shore up our leaky marketing...

Mentioned in this episode:

Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas.