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For too long, marketers have clung to the marketing funnel, blissfully unaware (or, in some cases, willfully ignorant) of the reality that today’s consumers follow a buying journey that doesn’t follow a funnel.

The days of casting wide nets with channel-first tactics are over. I believe that chief marketing officers who want their brands to be industry leaders must let go of the archaic strategies that once dominated their playbooks and instead focus their efforts on converting only the best of the best: their superfans.

The Downfall Of Traditional Marketing

Once celebrated for its simplicity, the marketing funnel model now falls short in mapping the intricate, non-linear journey of the modern consumer. It naively views the consumer journey as a straight shot from awareness to purchase, a concept laughably out of sync with the multifaceted, unpredictable nature of today’s consumer.

Despite the growing body of evidence pointing to the funnel’s obsolescence, the marketing world clings to it like a crutch. This reluctance to evolve is an ingrained mindset and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the game has changed. But the digital transformation doesn’t care about our comfort zones. Today’s consumers, armed with information and options, don’t just passively drift down a funnel. They’re active players, often sidestepping our best-laid marketing strategies.

In the third quarter of 2023, retail e-commerce sales saw the highest quarterly revenue in United States history—roughly $284 billion. As consumers increasingly turn to digital platforms, it becomes more important to adopt a more nuanced, consumer-centric marketing approach. Those who recognize this shift and move to strategies that engage with the evolving dynamics of consumer interaction can be the ones to capitalize on this historic surge in e-commerce activity.

Modern Marketing Challenges

Paid social media has aggressively expanded its influence past the top of the funnel, dramatically impacting a hallmark marketing metric: the cost per acquisition (CPA). The reliance on CPAs from these platforms has become a double-edged sword. Marketers putting all their eggs in the easy-to-measure paid social CPA basket have watched as costs skyrocket, leading to financial losses.

As we say goodbye to third-party cookies, marketers face a profound shift in data collection. Technology democratization has leveled the playing field, but this seismic shift comes with new challenges. Major digital platforms are increasingly pushing modeled data, which subtly encourages a dependency that could skew marketing decisions by driving reliance on convenient but inaccurate data. Thus, the real challenge for marketers is discerning the truth in a sea of approximations. The key lies in using this data judiciously, complementing it with other organic insights to ensure a grounded approach to understanding consumer behavior.

With a media inflation rate soaring past 5% (registration required), corporations demand efficiency. This can lead to significant compromises, not just in campaign quality but also in consumer engagement. Marketers must innovate and find ways to optimize budgets without sacrificing the long-term vision and engagement that fuel brand growth.

The Superfan Marketing Revolution

Superfan marketing is a strategic shift that prioritizes deep understanding and engagement with the real VIPs of the brand: superfans. In the post-cookie landscape, marketers are being called back to the basics: truly and profoundly understanding their consumers, brand positioning and product-market fit.

Gone are the days when marketers could lean on broad data to attribute impressions across the conversion funnel. Now, the game demands marketing that doesn’t just reach people but persuades them. While this approach demands more focus and effort, I believe it’s the only way a brand can win in this new era of marketing.

Creating A Supercycle

These superfans, the most engaged and loyal customers, are at the heart of this approach. Putting prospective superfans at the forefront of marketing strategies is about investing resources to delve into the depths of what makes them tick. This means understanding their specific needs, preferences and behaviors and then tailoring your messaging and strategies to resonate with their unique consumer DNA. Here’s how:

1. Leverage data to identify and engage potential superfans.

Re-imagine the traditional marketing funnel. Instead of looking at the funnel horizontally by stages, slice the funnel vertically by audience segment and focus only on the superfans. This is not about creating generic customer experiences for anyone who might buy; it’s about crafting personalized journeys that speak directly to the needs and preferences of your superfan segment. The goal here is to create a high-spend, high-value experience to nurture these prospects with such precision and care that they evolve into loyal, high-value customers.

2. Break down the silos between data, media and technology.

Data, media, and technology need to collaborate within your organization to ensure that the data insights inform media planning and technology deployment. But it doesn’t stop there. You must also optimize continuously. Analyze the effectiveness of your strategies and tactics in real time, using data and feedback to refine and adjust your approach.

3. Focus on strategic effectiveness.

Traditional marketing lives by the mantra “every prospect has value,” but this couldn’t be further from the truth. I believe distractors need to be cut from your attention completely. The core middle—the 80% of your customers who provide a decent amount of revenue but are not loyal to your brand—is not worth the resources required to figure them out. To make a real, material difference, focus your marketing only on your superfans.

Now is the moment to evaluate your marketing strategies. By stepping away from the outdated marketing funnel and embracing superfan marketing, savvy CMOs can write the playbook for the future.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Anton Lipkanou.

Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Anton Lipkanou is President / Partner at Delve Partners. Read Anton Lipkanou’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

By Rachel Done Cubillas

What is permission marketing, and how can it help you face marketing challenges in today’s privacy-focused world?

Seth Godin’s book, “Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers” has revolutionized the way marketers perceive their customers, allowing them to “get in front of the digital revolution.”

As Godin defined it, permission marketing refers to a form of marketing where consumers are given the choice of opting in to receive promotional messages. You have probably seen it multiple times already, with companies offering incentives for following them on social media or subscribing to an email list for coupons. It’s highly entrenched in our society.

What sets permission marketing apart from other strategies for reaching consumers is that it’s characterized as already having an engaged audience. Users wouldn’t choose to subscribe to your business’s newsletters, emails or social media unless they had a prior interest in your goods. It also has the benefit of being a low-cost way to create personal and relevant relationships due to it usually being done via digital communication tools.

Essentially, it’s the opposite of direct marketing, aka blind marketing, where sometimes the only thing consumers have in common is a zip code.

While Godin’s book is an essential item for every marketer’s toolkit, there’s no denying it was released quite a while ago — 23 years, to be exact.

During that time, a technological explosion — unimaginable in the era of Y2K — rocked our world. While marketers have generally kept abreast of these rapid changes, the landscape around them, including social media and data privacy laws, is going to change even more.

Still, the idea of allowing consumers to consent to be subjected to marketing, aka permission marketing, is more relevant than ever in this age. By enacting and adapting permission marketing to today’s challenges, brands can stay on top of these constant changes while catering to their number one priority: the customer.

Below we’ll take a look at some of the predicted challenges ahead for the industry, along with some best practices on how to tackle them with permission marketing.

Social Data Collection and the Privacy Uprising

Every marketer will say that the more details they have on potential customers, the more likely they will be successful in sales. For the last decade, a great deal of marketers have gotten the specifics on customers via data on social media.

Brands primarily used this data to create a synergistic relationship between their marketing efforts and their customers. People used social media, and companies could see what customers liked and disliked, which allowed those companies to fine-tune their ads.

Meta — arguably the largest social media company due to its ownership of WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram — suffered a huge data leak in 2019, prompting a mass exodus of users and new concerns about data privacy.

To further complicate things, Apple saw two ways to gain from Meta’s loss. First, they launched a new marketing campaign with one major selling point — privacy. Users gained more control over how their data was tracked and used, a change that made a major impact on other companies and slashed ad return on investment by 38%, according to Forbes.

The second gain for Apple was to partner with other companies, like Singular, to tap into ways to model and analyse this newly missing data — something that sequestered other brands from the advertising game.

Keeping an Eye out for New Tools

Not every company can afford to use these now necessary data collection technologies. As such, when seeking out new tools for permission marketing, Annie Wissner, CMO at Avenue 10 and VP of marketing at High Level Marketing, said “the best…tactics are those that help your audience go faster, reduce costs, solve business problems or gain a competitive advantage. Any form of content, from a blog post to a podcast to a webinar to a newsletter, is good as long as it offers value, is fun to consume and is highly relevant to your audience.”

If any of your company’s current strategies don’t fulfil those metrics, it might be time to change where you’re spending your time and money.

One tried and true application for permission marketing is email subscriptions. Email marketers have to seriously compete for the attention of younger generations. On average, Millennials receive 6–50 emails per day, and Gen Z sees anywhere from one to 20. And the chances of getting them to open an email are low.

But that doesn’t mean these groups don’t like getting email, and companies shouldn’t abandon the communication medium. According to MediaPost, more than 66% of Millennials and 53% of Gen Zers want to receive email marketing at least once per week.

Wissner said email is a nice tool because it offers the ability to organize and search through content — something that’s necessary with the growing need to keep content structured across multiple communication channels.

She claimed that while email has its advantages, other channels might be a little more attractive for younger audiences, such as Slack and social media, as it offers the ability to get an immediate response to a question, concern or comment.

For instance, some companies use Facebook Messenger to send ads directly to consumers and keep it as a place where customers can reach out if they need help with an order. Slack, on the other hand, has recently been used at digital conferences as a way to communicate the logistics of the event and award prizes based on participation in the chat channels.

Be Mindful of Where Your Customers Are

Permission marketing is often the way companies can start and recircle clients into their sales funnels. But in the age where digital and physical are starting to blur, omnichannel marketing efforts will help consumers complete the sales funnel.

Wissner had another bit of advice for marketers on this subject: use an omnichannel strategy with your permission marketing. In many ways, permission marketing is the base concept of omnichannel — meeting the customer where they’re at.