Marketing Backwards — Or How to Flip The Funnel Even When You Don’t Have Customers

There is a growing movement — a growing theme in marketing (mostly in B2B marketing) called Flip My Funnel (it is based on a book by Joseph Jaffe — completely worth the read — or on a Seth Godin blog post — also worth the read!). Fundamentally, you focus on the qualities of your existing customer and what makes them happy or unhappy, and work backwards from a satisfied customer and slowly broaden the audience so that you are continually applying the metrics of “happiness” to your clients and prospects regardless of where they are in your sales funnel. This will help clients start to advocate on your behalf. That is the flip — your customers become the gravity in your funnel and pull other clients in, rather than you having to push prospects through.

That is all awesome if you have a set of clients to model against and to get to advocate for you. But what if you are just starting out? How do you create efficient acquisition and customer satisfaction? Just exactly how do you FLIP THE FUNNEL?

MARKET BACKWARDS

The traditional marketing funnel is pretty simple — starting with and audience, your marketing actions drive the most interested into the next stage of engagement. This is true for B2B & B2C selling — the same idea works in mom & pop e-commerce as it does in enterprise level marketing. The funnel looks like this (you’ve seen this a million times):

But for the startup, the “I have no customers yet” company, the concept of “audience” and the steps to “qualified” and “client” are murky at best. So, you can’t really use the traditional funnel concept, because targeting a broad audience to get to client is very expensive. When you are starting out, you need to flip the funnel so it looks like this:

Let’s walk through this flip the funnel process with some examples that we use here and with clients:

1. Ideal Customer: This, if you are just starting out, is a major challenge. You are excited about your service or product. But you need to answer one truly basic question: You do WHAT for WHOM? A women’s fashion brand might answer “We sell quality apparel for women.” This blog might answer that same question with “We provide marketing & business development education for businesses.” But that doesn’t describe, truly, your exact “ideal customer”. (And you may actually have more than one kind of ideal customer, but for this exercise, we will only consider one.) In order for you to market backwards, you need to really understand who that ideal customer IS, so you need to be more explicit. The fashion brand might go refine this sentence into “We sell high-quality, ethically sourced knitwear to women between the ages of 30 and 50.” This blog might say that We provide educational content around digital marketing tactics and related sales processes to startups and fast growing businesses and entrepreneurs.”That is better, but can you see that customer clearly? Let’s try one more time. Fashion retailer: We sell ethically-sourced, high-quality, casual knit tops and sweaters that evoke a “sunny autumn afternoon” to American women in the top income quartile, who have families, live in or near a major city and prefer to spend their free time outside, engaged in active leisure. This blog: We provide digital marketing and advanced selling tips and techniques to growing e-commerce, solopreneurs, & startup businesses with fewer than 50 employees focused on new client acquisition that wish to increase the efficiency, efficacy of their digital marketing and its impact on online and offline conversion. Both of those are a mouthful, BUT they give you a very clear picture of what you do and for whom you do it.
2. Make Your Messaging & Media Choices Reflect Your Target Customer: Let’s hang with our sweater seller for a moment. They sell tops to higher-income, urban and suburban women that are socially conscious. Building content and marketing about “sweaters” isn’t going to cut it. We need to get deeper, more targeted. We need to get surgical targeting in order to activate that ideal customer. Lots of traffic with our audience inside of isn’t the right approach, we need to carefully select the audience to drive the right traffic. So instead of building content around sweaters, maybe we need to create content around “wool sweaters from humanely treated sheep” or “fair trade organic cotton sweaters”. And when we engage in search or social marketing, we want to restrict our advertising to the wealthiest urban and suburban areas. (Think zip codes in Manhattan, or Greenwich, CT or Beverly Hills). This way we are messaging directly to our ideal customer. We are creating a brand presence EXACTLY where we want it to be felt.
3. Track The Results: Understanding how those target customers respond to your efforts will tell you if your concept of the ideal customer matches the customer themselves. If you are the fashion retailer, are your customers buying the “fair trade organic cotton sweaters” or something else? Are your customers engaging with you from your target areas? Are the shipping addresses a match to your targets? If the answer to these is yes, then you have a clear and real target audience. If there isn’t a match, then your successful engagements will show you where the real target is. The result of a few successful engagements is that it shows you who your ideal client IS NOT. If you think your target is Beverly Hills, and all of your engagements are from Cleveland, you just learned that your target ISN’T Beverly Hills. When you hit the right market, your audience responds. Keeping track of your failures narrows the world, bringing your target marketing into stark relief. Your ideal client definition starts as your understanding of the market, and it evolves into the market’s response to your product or offering. Tracking the results, continually sharpens your focus and will accelerate your growth — even as you exclude targets from your market.
4. Where Do They Gather Their Information and Create Their Consumer Desire? This is the tricky part, because it requires discipline and patience. Once you’ve sharpened your ideal customer definition, you have to learn the behaviors of that audience. Ideal targets typically share behaviors — meaning that they have similar media habits. The may use Google to find products, but make most of their consumer purchases from Amazon. They probably hang out in the same Facebook groups, or have similar interests on Facebook. The patience and discipline part comes in the form of trying to imagine what it is like in your ideal target’s world and market to where you think they live and consume information. The process is similar to who your customer is not — test and track. If you think your client is active in social causes, or outdoor activities, you can target those audiences on Facebook or through display advertising. And as you grow, you can use exciting developments like Facebook Custom Audiences or Google’s Similar Audiences to help expand your customer base. (We will address these opportunities in an upcoming post.)

So, what do you do after you are through with the 5 steps to marketing backwards? Simple — after this exercise, you should have found a receptive market. You need to jump in and engage that market through search, social engagement, display, and keep at it. You need to add the fuel of exposure to start to activate this audience enough for it to become self-sustaining. And to the extent that your time and resources allow, start this exercise AGAIN on some iteration of your first ideal target. And when you get through the flipped funnel a second time, you will have two, tightly targeted audience that you can optimize for engagement, revenue and profit. Using your successful results, you can continue to iterate on these smaller audiences, or you can identify a try a broader audience to discover the micro-audiences that will be highly-engaged within that targeted audience. At that point, you’ve flipped the funnel to its traditional position so you are marketing to an audience that self-identifies, and spending dollars to exclude a non-responsive audience. We think the right approach is to continue the #flippedfunnel targeted audience approach until you run out of audiences that you can activate at a profit. Your engaged audience should provide good enough results to fund your expansion into other audiences until you have a profitable, highly efficient engaged base at which point you can experiment in broad audience with an eye towards scale.

This was originally published on as Marketing Backwards on SellingtotheC.com — a great place to discover sales and marketing strategies and tips to help you build your business faster.