Fun fact: Ty is a two-time Olympic Trials qualifier in the 800m
Lesson 1: Get the first impression rose.
“Regardless of what type of marketer you are, we're all in the memory business,” Heath says. “The brand that’s remembered is the brand that’s bought.”
Back in 2017, the website 538 analyzed 33 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and found that over half of the people who received a first impression rose made it to the final four.
It’s the availability heuristic, Heath suggests. “People tend to assign more importance to things that come to mind more easily. And it works the same way in marketing.”
But, she adds, we’ve moved away from the principles of distinctiveness and memory, and the behavioral science of how human beings make decisions.
“It’s not, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ It's, ‘If you build it, get [your customer’s] attention.’”
Lesson 2: Map your different buying situations.
This, of course, gives legacy brands a huge advantage over startups and smaller businesses. We associate coffee with Starbucks because the brand has so many category entry points, Heath says.
“You might drink Starbucks because you're walking down the street and you're on your way to work. You might drink Starbucks because you're meeting a friend in the cafe. You might have Starbucks at your house and you make it at home when you're wrapped in a blanket.”
It’s not hopeless for smaller brands vying for that first impression rose, though.
“The good news for small brands is that if you can understand the different buying situations, you can start to ask yourselves the questions, ‘What am I credibly known for? Where can I actually compete?’”
Then, she says, you can start to own more buying situations. And the more buying situations your brand becomes known for, the bigger your brand becomes.
Lesson 3: Turn the funnel on its side.
“We have a rather contrarian point of view on the standard funnel,” says Heath. “We don’t feel that it’s particularly customer- or finance-centric.”
Heath’s point of view is that the standard funnel “leads marketers to believe that it is our own advertising that pushes people through the funnel.”
But turn the funnel on its side and stretch it out over time.
“We now call it the cash flow funnel,” she explains. “The early part of the funnel represents the current buyers and the latter part represents future buyers.”
Likewise, the early part of the funnel represents your current cash flow, and the latter part your future cash flow.
“That’s a more customer- and finance-centric way to think about it.” On average with B2Bs, “in-market buyers represent 5% [of the funnel] at any given time,” meaning that out–market is 95% — “so if we, as B2B marketers, only focused on the in-market, we’re actually putting a cap on our growth.”
| Make Yourself a Master
How AI + authenticity are driving marketing
Thanks to the headwinds blasting fiercely on all of our faces (algos, AI, attention spans that rival those of goldfish), the old guard of marketing is kind of on a slow death march.
The good news: The loops work better, anyway. Read up on how career marketers continue to plan, pivot, and profit in an increasingly AI-powered world.
Over 1,800 people donated their data to this report — maybe don’t ignore them?
