What Fibonacci Said

It’s one of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers: people make linear decisions. It’s simpler to draw straight lines about their behaviour, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes. But does that really reflect people’s actions and how they find information? Of course not. We all know it doesn’t really happen that way. But by rejecting this common fallacy, we face some more challenging questions: If we rigidly enforce our own processes, how many people do we leave behind? Can we trigger behaviour and if so what and how? How is the fragmenting media landscape changing the processes by which customers research and make purchases?

Traditional marketing approaches fall short in the new customer landscape

The answers are clear: marketing has fundamentally changed and many in the profession are struggling to catch up. The framework by which they understand marketing is not set up for a non-campaign world where they don’t control timelines, only experiences. The so-called sales funnel, if that was ever an accurate metaphor, no longer looks even remotely like a funnel.

Companies are used to viewing the sales and marketing process as a systematic approach of between seven and nine steps that begin with initial contact and push the potential customer through sales lead, need identification, prospect qualification and so on through to closing the sale and then maintaining the customer relationship.

But that is how sales and marketing teams structure the selling process. The buying process, from the customer’s perspective, is nothing like that. This how buying more accurately works now in the era of social media and online communities:

It is a complex process with multiple stops and starts and options, and each potential customer will move through in unique ways (although in aggregate, demonstrating certain patterns of behaviour). It is linear in that any two sales will end in the same result, but no two routes to that sale are the same. The same is true for any type of engagement decision (i.e. join an email list, follow on Twitter)

The best marketers can hope to do in this environment is manage the process so that, while all roads may not lead to Rome, eventually all roads lead through digital “toll booths” of content and information exchange.

Why don’t most marketing organizations view that process as a coherent customer narrative? There are three reasons:

1. Marketing is structured around campaigns, not customers
2. Marketers don’t measure a linked sequence of customer actions across all touchpoints yet—they still think in terms of pre-sale post-sale, not a relationship that can last a lifetime
3. Marketers have been determined to control the narrative, rather than create digital touchpoints of content and experience, and then measuring how people interact with those touch points

How the new customer narrative works

There are many ways a future customer can first engage with a potential purchase, whether it’s a new pair of shoes or a new VPN. It could be a billboard with a URL that they type into their smart phone’s mobile browser, or by clicking a Facebook wall post from a friend’s feed, or searching on Google. These are all examples of entry points to a research experience that could initiate a longer relationship with the brand: a relationship that begins with the brand getting permission to communicate more and progresses toward one sale and possibly many.

What happens between those start and end points is where it gets complicated, and are almost never connected, especially when activity begins through a discussion in social media or an online community.

Consider an online relationship with a customer where she makes two appliance purchases over 4 years, and twice shares content.

Today, those start and end points are not connected. By setting up measurement beacons that customers interact with, we can understand what each digital customer narrative looks like. And by shaping these experiences with content and the addition of community engagement, the context and experience of research and customer care is measurable from the first interaction and throughout the relationship. In this context, the true measure of influence is how many people take up your shared content.

If you have unlimited marketing budgets and don’t care how they’re spent, then maybe this approach won’t matter to you. But if you’re a results-driven marketer with limited resources who wants to really understand how each part of the marketing mix contributes to progression via either relationship and/or sales conversions, parallel but intersecting tracks that must both be viewed and measured in order to understand customer buyer and audience dynamics.

This ties directly into small movement marketing: by measuring how people progress and move through digital properties we can quickly see which marketing investments are performing and which are not.

In my next post re-examining the sacred cows of marketing, I’ll take a look at the role of content in measuring small movement marketing, and why it’s not the message or—gasp!—even the copy that matters most anymore, but utility. In our final installment, I’ll examine how you manage brand in a completely fragmented media world of vastly shifting customer expectations.

This article first appeared on Marketing Profs.