Forget Funnels - Carney
The Daily Carnage

Forget Funnels

Free the flywheel.

How the Flywheel Killed HubSpot’s Funnel

“The marketing funnel is soooo yesterday.” – HubSpot (probably).

You’re familiar with the marketing funnel, right? Well, what if we told you that it’s actually not the best way to visualize your marketing efforts? That’s the argument that HubSpot is making, at least.

According to the marketing pros at HubSpot, you should actually think of your marketing like a flywheel. Why? Well, funnels end. That end means a loss of momentum. You spent all that energy into converting a lead into a customer, now you’re just going to let them drop out of the funnel?

Nah, fam. That ain’t right.

A flywheel, on the other hand, uses that energy to create more energy. This approach will help you get more customers from your current customers.

Ready to make this happen? Truthfully, it ain’t easy. Here’s where ya gotta start…

Understand the status quo of your flywheel

Think of your customer journey in three stages:

  • Attract – How does your company attract prospects?
  • Engage – What do you do with prospects once they’re familiar with you?
  • Delight – What happens when someone switches from prospect to customer?

Here’s how this plays out in HubSpot’s world:

  • Attract – HubSpot invests heavily in blogs, webinars, social campaigns, and other content.
  • Engage – Next, they offer all sorts of free versions of their software to engage with prospects.
  • Delight – Once a prospect becomes a lead, that person has access to guided and self-service education, a customer-success rep, and more content.

This approach helps to improve the customer experience at every level of their journey. And you know what they say…happy customer = happy life. Okay, that’s not quite right, but you see what we’re getting at.

The flywheel is a very different way of thinking, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of it. There’s still a TON to learn here. We didn’t even cover how you can measure success, how you should maximize delight, and how you can reduce friction.

7 Facebook Retargeting Tactics You Must Try

We know what you’re thinking…”Wait, another FB ads article?” You’re dang right. We can’t get enough. Especially when we stumble across an article talking about the latest and greatest Facebook retargeting tactics.

For real, these tactics from Wordstream are killer. You gotta try them for yourselves. Okay, enough intro. Let’s dive in…

1) Retarget people who want to learn more!

The person who opted to dive further into your company by choosing to learn more is a prime converter. These pages could be your about pages, featured products, or even promotion pages.

Do this by creating a custom audience –

  • Choose “People who visit specific web pages”
  • Fill in the number of days (ex. 30 days)
  • Use the “contains” rule and trigger words. For example, we would use “work” to reference the carney.co/work page.

2) Retarget visitors who almost gave you their email

Have you ever done this? You come across a blog and a sign-up notification pops up so you think, “sure, why not?” But, suddenly you get distracted from the sweet smell of tacos. Naturally, you abandon your laptop for that spicy, citrusy, tortilla wrapped goodness (seriously, just try to resist a taco).

  • For this one, you are going to create an audience in the same way as above. Specify your sign up page but make sure you exclude anyone who reached the thank you page.

3) Exclude irrelevant users

It’s one of those obvious tricks that no one really thinks about at first. Not everyone who visits your website is going to become a customer. Kick out anyone who has a low chance of converting. This includes anyone who visits your career page or those who only spend a few seconds on your site.

Kick those low time-on-site users to the curb by:

  • Selecting “visitors by time spent” and “top 5%”
  • Choose your number of days
  • And that’s it!

That ain’t all, fam. Read on for 4 more tricks ↓

Chase the Exerhighs

Question for all you workout junkies out there…

Is runner’s high a real thing? It’s just the excuse someone uses to convince themselves that running is fun, right?

(Truthfully, we know there’s all sorts of research out there that says it’s a real thing. Pls don’t send us hate mail.)

Anyway, sportswear brand, Bjorn Borg, decided to make a few pre-roll ads that visualize runner’s high, or ‘exerhigh’ as they call it. The results are kinda terrifying. If you need another excuse to skip the gym, Bjorn Borg is giving you four of them. They’ve got a woman with noodle arms, a guy whose eyes are mouths, and a bunch of other very strange scenes.

Truthfully, we don’t know what the point of these ads is, other than being exceptionally weird…which seems to be the marketing/advertising trend lately.

What we do know is, if exerhigh looks anything like what Bjorn Borg thinks it looks like, we don’t want anything to do with it.

“It’s crazy important to actually be in the platforms that you are using, and integrating yourself into the communities that you are marketing to.”
Anna Sullivan

Ads from the Past

Royal came out with this ad in 1957 and we kinda love it. Especially the fact that this ad focuses on the benefits of using a Royal typewriter over the features of it. There’s a lesson there for marketers in 2018…

Carnage

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