201. How do you track marketing funnels (f. David Bain)
Feel like you’re spinning your wheels creating content? 🛞 This episode will help you get back on the road to success! Hosts Phil and Lauren meet with marketing expert David Bain, who’s spoken with over 1,000 marketers to fuel his expertise. David walks us through his proprietary marketing (pump and) funnel, which helps you determine the content types and volumes that can convert a user into a customer. (And, we even talk about AI near the end!)
Episode transcription
Phil
Listener before we dive right into this episode, which I know you're gonna love with my dear friend David Bain. I'll give you a little warning, this is a really good episode. It's like a little lesson. We have a diagram that David has created to illustrate what's called his six h content model. Now, if you're driving don't pull this up on your phone, keep driving, you'll learn a lot by listening to it. But if you have the opportunity to actually look at this diagram before or during this episode, I think it will help you. His six h's are human, happy, heart, hub, hero and help. Again, this diagram is in our show notes for this episode 201 that diagram is easy to find @philp.al/bth201 that's @philp.al/bth201. Now onto the episode.
Curious about how to master different forms of content?
Lauren
Looking to unlock the secrets of marketing funnels?
Phil
My good friend David dives into why the traditional marketing funnel might not be serving you and shares how to think of your funnel as both a pump and a guide.
LAUREN
In today's episode with David Bain of B2B Marketing Wizard is a must listen. You'll get a fresh perspective on rethinking your marketing funnel and mastering your content strategy.
Phil
Ready to elevate your marketing game? Let's dive right.
Listener you're in for a treat today. We are talking to one of my friends actually a longtime friends. We met 2015 at New Media Europe, in the UK, you'll know in a second that he's from there. David Bain is a marketing expert. He specializes in helping clients, mostly B2B clients, right with podcasts, video shows books. One of the things I love the most about David is how interesting his perspective is on marketing. He has spoken to, don't quote me on this, but I might submit it to the Guinness Book of World Records. He has spoken, I think to more marketing experts than anyone else on this planet. He's written books, I've been included in some of those giving my perspective on branding. Now he's here on Brand Therapy. David, we are so happy to have you here.
David
I am so happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Phil
Is it true? Do you think that's a real stat that you've spoken to more marketing experts than anyone else? Because I think it's true,
David
Yes or can I say probably?
Phil
We can say probably, yeah, just to be safe. But it's true. What’s really unique about your brand, and I would even say your personal brand, is you've done such a beautiful job over the years creating content, including books that compiles so many interesting perspectives from experts. Before we hit record on this. I had up the reviews, the Amazon listing for your book Marketing Now which you sent me and I think I'm in there somewhere. And there are so many familiar names. Andrea Vol is a great friend, Krista Nayar, I know her. Julia Bramble like, you know, everyone. Where did that journey begin this idea of incredible outreach to experts around the world to almost like pool those together into a product or into a resource?
David
Particularly a journey just was me starting off doing what I loved to do doing what I wanted to improve on, and speaking to the people that I wanted to speak to. So when I started podcasting back in 2006. So a long time ago, but I didn't get serious about it until 2014. And that's when I started the podcast, Digital Marketing Radio. And I wanted to do as well as I could with a decent microphone with a decent structure to the show when talking to having great, great conversations with the best digital marketers as I saw it on the plans at the time, and I interviewed about 200 people for that particular series. And I didn't necessarily have any end goal in mind for it. It was simply improving as a podcaster. And having great conversations with marketers that I respected and seeing where the road lead.
Phil
I love it. How many experts total. just guesstimate has it been over the years that you've spoken to?
David
Well, in total about 1000.
Lauren
Unbelievable, crazy.
phil
That's a lot of people. I mean, we're coming up to what Lauren and around 200 episodes feels like we've been saying that for a while. But yeah, can you imagine now times that by five, that's way to do the math, right? Yeah, yeah, you did not good at math. That was fast math on this really incredible.
David
Phil, can I just ask you one little question about how you started off the show because I absolutely loved your singular reference the word listener. How did you come about using listener in singular form?
Phil
I guess when we're creating content when we're creating podcasts. I love that you're interviewing me now by the way, I try to think about talking to one person. I think about this. When I make a YouTube video, I think about this, when I make a podcast, I even teach this from the stage. We're not talking to an audience of people like I would if I was standing in front of a stage. I'm really in this moment right now, only talking to one person who's listening in on our conversation. That's why I do that.
David
That's absolutely the way to do it. But I didn't learn that until I heard an interview with a famous radio DJ from the UK who's passed away now. But his name was Terry Wogan. And he used to host a breakfast show on Radio two in the UK. And he was interviewed once. And the guy interviewing him said, What about these 9 million listeners that listen to you every single morning? Does that not scare you? And his answer was simply, I don't have 9 million listeners. I've got one listener, I talk to my listener. And that's the only person that I told you.
Lauren
I love that.
phil
Actually, it's funny we're talking about this, Lauren, I think. So originally, the podcast was just me, years goes a different name, different format would have been David around the time that you and I had met. But when I stopped podcasting, because it wasn't really organized enough and consistent enough to make it worthwhile. I paused or we stopped. And then Lauren and I were on a trip in Colombia, and I said, Lauren, I think we need to do this together. And Lauren was like, what do you mean, you're the one out, forward facing? I'm not gonna do that. I'm behind the scenes. I was like, well, until now. But I think the conversations that she and I have the ideas, the discussions are so valuable to bring people in. My advice to Lauren was don't think about, like you're standing in front of an auditorium or a gymnasium giving a speech. That's not what you're doing. We're talking to one person and Lauren, didn't that advice help you?
lauren
Yeah, absolutely. It's actually a little dangerous, because you can get a little too comfortable and forget oh, yeah, there’s gonna be many people listening to what I say.
phil
Yeah, people like it, though. So even to steer this back to like content. I think I actually, this is what I think about with in every single piece of content that I create talking to one person and not every piece of content resonates right with every single person you have, but then it is just good content. Because if it's specific enough, that will resonate with someone. I don't know.
David
Exactly. Yeah. Many marketers advocates having an avature and actually building an avature. But I think if you really are passionate about something, and there's a business opportunity there, then you can speak to yourself as well, you can actually speak to what really appeals to you. And if you do that there will be other people out there that feel the same.
Lauren
Let's talk about funnels, because I know you are an expert, and Felsen have actually developed your own. So I think first things first, why should people consider having just a funnel in general?
David
Well, I think a long time ago, back about 16 years ago, I started getting involved in doing digital marketing training. And I was so passionate about tactics about this is exactly what you do. And these are the 502 steps that you have to do in order to set up an online business and run it successfully and marketers and do everything. And I came to the realization that I can't possibly incorporate everything. But also I can't come up with something that applies to every single business. So I wanted, it took me a long time to realize this, but I wanted to incorporate a model into the training sessions that I delivered. That people could easily understand that I could perhaps give them a few different channels, they can apply to that model, but then they can take that model away. And then they can apply it to their own business and add their own channels, and perhaps evolve it a little bit but make it useful over the longer term. And I think that a funnel or model is something that users can actually take away and easily understand and apply different aspects to it to enhance what the original funnel was or model was to improve their own business.
Lauren
So you've got one that's really unique and not like a traditional funnel. So I know our listener singular, cannot see can't see the funnel themselves, but if you could kind of walk us through what makes yours different. That would be awesome.
David
Sure, absolutely.
Phil
And I might add that it was a conversation with David about this funnel that made that prompt me and said, We need to get this guy in to talk about this because I just this is one of many instances that you turn something traditional upside down up on its head and really give us a more practical perspective. This is the first of that, because I just love how you do that.
David
Hopefully it appeals to your listener as much as it appeals to you. So I think a lot of marketers start off with a funnel from the form of what steps a customer takes in order to decide to buy from that business and perhaps move through to becoming an advocate for that business. So traditionally, it's along the lines of awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. And my concern with just taking that funnel was that it's not immediately applicable to a business. It's not immediately obvious what you do in terms of applying different forms of content to the funnel, and applying different marketing channels to that as well.
So I wanted to make it as practical as possible for me first, because I'm the person that I'm selling this to, I want to use something practically within my own business as well. So I thought, okay, what do users interact with at every stage of the funnel, and its content, whether it's a paid campaign online, it's paid ads, it's ad copy, it's a landing page, it's more organic content, whatever it is, it's the quality of the content, the relevance of the content, the appropriateness. If I can say that word of the content for each stage of the funnel. And I had a look online to see what content marketing models existed already, and there weren't many, but the most prominent one I found was the three h model. And that was what Google and YouTube used, which was hero help and hub content. And I tried to apply that content model to the funnel. And it seemed to work okay, but only at the early stage of the funnel. And looking into the awareness, consideration, conversion loyalty advocacy themes, I found that it was actually more effective to consider it as a pump and funnel instead of just a funnel. Now, why introduce a pump, because what customers do when they become advocates is they get pumped up from being satisfied customers to being people that actually market your business on your behalf.
Loyalty is also something that happens immediately after someone becomes a customer. So thinking about this content model, I wanted to apply the content model to the five stage funnel that I've just outlined. And I felt that the hero content very much mapped to awareness, the help content very much mapped to consideration because help contents the kind of longtail phrases phrases that people type into search engines in relation to probably a product or service or type of business. Because they're, they're more keen on exploring, perhaps doing business with that brand. But if you've got a long sales cycle, then you're unlikely to keep on engaging with a brand's sales type content for a long time.
So the hub content, I think sits outside of the funnel. And that can be a podcast, it can be a YouTube show, it can be a course or something like that. Moving further down the funnel for conversion type content, I've called that heart content. So sales type pages. And the way I define great sales pages is by thinking about how Simon Sinek approaches things. And he uses the why how, what sequence to great sales pages are included in websites by brands such as Zero, such as Wix software, so Zero accounting software, Wix website design software, got some lovely sales pages. And they all start off without why how, what sequence, this is why we actually do what we do, and then moving on to the house moving on to the work from there. So that's the heart's content, happy content. The fifth h is all about how can you take someone from just becoming a customer to being exceptionally satisfied with your brand and likely to stay for a long time? So what kind of welcome sequence can you offer and moving on to human content, which is the more one to one relationship building type stuff that will really actually encourage someone from being a happy customer to being a brand advocate.
phil
So again, the listener can't see the diagram, but we're going to make sure we put a visual for this in our podcast show notes, that's easy to find on our website for this episode, you give some really good examples. So I want to talk examples in a second. But I think you have such a great way of just painting a picture practically how to implement this. It's definitely more complex. There's layers to this, but the examples are really helpful to understand how this applies or how we can adapt it for our own business.
David
Yes, I think the most important is the sequence. You start off with the funnel, and you bend it right, you actually apply your content, your different forms of content. And you ask yourself the question, do you have those six different forms of content? And even then after that, that's when you actually consider marketing channels. Because if you consider marketing channels, such as paid ads, LinkedIn ads, partnerships, Google ads, other forms of marketing before you've got the content in place, and you understand the sequence that your customers are likely to take, and it's highly likely your ads will be inefficient and not profitable.
Lauren
Which part of the funnel do you think is most commonly difficult for people to do?
David
I think the most common things to missing too much content and actually wonder why you're missing out the content. I think perhaps even having a great sales pages is difficult. I don't know maybe if I'd classify is difficult, but certainly not very common, you have to really look hard to find a brand that has an exceptional sales page. But if you have you have that you have just one phenomenal sales page, then you can start publishing more generic help type content after that. I think marketers or brands naturally gravitate to whatever they're passionate about and what they like doing. So it's probably more common for a brand to focus on one form of content maybe the love writing articles and answering common questions that your likely target market will have and focus on your health content. Maybe people start off just having a podcast and love doing that, and just record podcast episodes and and ignore other content. So I would say rather than actually a typical form of content that's missed out or not done well, it's probably it varies depending on the type of content marketer or brand owner that you're talking to. And they'll naturally gravitate to a particular form of content.
Lauren
It's so interesting, you bring that up, because I remember when I first listened to Simon Sinek audio book Start With Why it was revelatory to me, because I think that so often, as business owners and marketers, we just think about the short term problem that our product or service solves. So it's like, you need a website, great. We can build you a website. But it's pretty rare for us to kind of take a step back and look at the bigger why. And the bigger reason like it's not we actually use a lot of what I learned in that book to our own website, because it's not just about building a personal brand. It's about actually opening doors for yourself and mastering your first impression so that you can build the life of your dreams. And I do agree with you, like sales pages are really, really tough at the heart heart is really challenging to figure out. So I guess my question for you is, do you have any exercises or recommendations for how someone can distill the heart part of their funnel?
David
I tend to lead by example isn't in other presentations that I do, I give those examples. And I think Zero and Wix are two wonderful examples. But it can take a lot to identify the whys that your business is all about, but also appeals to your target market. It's not just an individual goal, it's not a brand's goal. It's something that you can bring along other people with as well. And if you can do that, and make them feel part of the mission, then immediately they'll feel a little bit more love or relatedness towards what you're trying to do in your brand. And they'll keep on moving down your page, because there's a lot of competition out there and you've got to emphasize those feelings and within your target consumer,
Phil
I think creators and entrepreneurs that are creating content, always have a sense of gosh, I could always be doing better at this. I mean, certainly when I look at the diagram that you've created, it makes me happy in one sense to know that we're doing a lot of these things. Now it's been over a decade of building some of these things. But also, you know, and I'll give an example for our listener, blog posts, social media posts, I post twice a week on YouTube, occasionally, I'll take a month off and do one a week, that's considered like a part vacation for me, because two a week is a lot, a lot of work. But I know we do that well. But then I also in one sense, sometimes feel overwhelmed. I always like to lead by example. So we do a lot of things related to content, since this is, you know, related to the types of services that we do with our own clients.
Advice for someone that feels overwhelm, I think people that are newer in the game are more likely to feel that overwhelm even faster than me. Any advice for people that feel like, oh, gosh, where do I even begin? Or how do I spread myself so thinly across all of these different parts of the funnel that I need to be?
David
Absolutely great question, and very relevant for almost everyone out there. What I suggest is that people start off with a minimum number of each of these types of content, and focus on getting that done before they move on to anything else. So if you've already done 20 plus episodes of your podcast, maybe you can say at the end of series one, we're going to be coming on and starting again fairly soon and focus on other forms of content. What I tend to recommend is having one piece of hero content one incredible piece of content that people would love to share online, perhaps a lengthy video or maybe a big pre recorded virtual summit that people can sign up for something that people are likely to share with their their own acquaintances as well. Twelve pieces of help content. Now that's just to get started. You could find for your website that you need over 100 pieces of help content And but use tools like Answer the Public, and dare I say it perhaps even chat GPT to define what kind of questions you should be answering for your target market and pick out the most relevant ones, the 12 best ones. And answer those questions. And those your 12 pieces of help content. Have you got one great sales page that starts with the why, moves down to the how, moves into the what. Look at those examples that I told you about and, and trying to figure out how you can apply that to your business, one piece of happy content.
Now, this could be a mini series, or mini video series that you give people, once they become a customer just to explain exactly how to use your products, perhaps. Maybe you're a SaaS provider, and you can provide a great video series just to get them started. It'll make them happy. But it'll make them likely to use your product immediately and for the longer term and stick with you as a customer,. And then one human sequence. So maybe after someone's been a customer for three months or so how do you reach out to them to forge that relationship to perhaps see if you can offer them any other services or just actually start to understand them as an individual to see how you can build that relationship further, and hopefully turn them into a brand advocate. I don't think I mentioned the hub content either. So I tend to mention a minimum of 12 episodes of hub content, that could be a 12 piece course, it could be a 12 video series, 12 piece video series or a podcast series as well, perhaps even all three. But if you can get that done to begin with, I don't think it's too much to chew on. And hopefully that will avoid the overwhelm that you were talking about there. And then people can breathe, evaluate and decide how you move on from there.
Lauren
I love those ratios, because I think it really helps people systematize something that can be quite overwhelming.
Phil
Yeah. Ratios and examples, guess and examples. I think it's key, I love that you've given us two examples of great sales pages where people can go on, you know, read and pull them up. I love that you've given us examples at each of the six stages of the funnel so that we don't have to feel like okay, I love the sound of that, but I'm not exactly sure how to go and do that. I think that's really cool. Since you brought it up. I'm now curious to know your perspective on AI in marketing. Are you excited by ChatGPT? Like what feels like the rest of the internet? Are you still skeptical? What's your take on AI ChatGPT and the world of marketing.
David
I'm excited. That's the first word but I'm not skeptical. I'm scared, it's probably that's the other word to use. Things are changing very, very quickly, I think six months ago, people wouldn't believe what's possible to do now. Now obviously, it's a mistake to use ChatGPT for everything. I think that it's making it very easy for some writers to quickly come up with a draft version of a blog post and then edit it, and then add decent headings, decent images, and perhaps save 75% of their time that they did it previously. But I certainly wouldn't use it to write original pieces of content and just leave it at that. I think that you need to be concerned as a marketer, if you're not pushing yourself to create the highest quality content possible. And by content, I tend to start thinking about podcasts and video shows. And you've got to ask yourself, Who is your competition when you're creating content like that? And a lot of marketers will think, well, my competition is the same brand that does this kind of thing that I do. But I don't think that's your only type of competitor out there. I think competitors are also Netflix, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, anything that takes your target consumers time.
And then what your consumers are doing is after they consume all this content on these platforms as they're listening to your show, and if your audio quality and video quality is horrific, your production quality is horrific, then they're not going to spend too much time consuming your content, and they're gonna have a fairly negative perception of your brand. So it's about high quality. And I know the question was about AI and I'm coming to that it to certain degree because I think you should focus on that form of content to begin with, which is great high quality podcasts and video shows. And then at the same time as you're creating this now, it doesn't happen overnight, you're not going to be able to create a show that thinks of multiple things at the same time to begin with. But after you keep on going with your podcast, like so 200 episodes, that's absolutely wonderful. You know, once you get to I would say probably over 40 episodes you can start to think about, okay, as I'm recording, so I'm always gonna be thinking about help content and perhaps the questions that I ask. I'm going to be able to break down those segments from the show and create blog posts from that on my site. So at the same time, even though I'm having a great conversation with someone, if you've got guests on your podcast, you're creating health content. And that's where I think AI will come in practically, for progressive marketers like that, what you will be able to do is to take a section of your transcript, which is probably created by AI, and then add that to ChatGPT a post that and say, okay, what I would like you to do is to create a blog post from this piece of transcript in the written form in this kind of phraseology, and then you can use that to create your blog posts. So it's about augmenting what you're doing at the moment, as long as if you start to that with that high quality piece.
Phil
Yes, I love that you even gave us an example prompt, how practical.
David
Well, I've talked to top SEOs recently, and the quality of prompts that they've come up with is absolutely incredible. And you really have to hone in your prompts, that is absolutely key. If you're asking ChatGTP, just to do something for you, then you'll get a bland piece, and Google will know it's been generated by AI, and you're not gonna get any organic traction from that. But if you really drive into the tone, the number of examples that you want the voice that you wanted to use, then you're much more likely to hit the mark with your target customer
Phil
Who would have known we would arrive at this day and time where all of a sudden, the quality of writing a prompt would be so important. This is literally not something we even spoke about six months ago, and now everyone is scrambling. I'm not worried about AI taking over in the sense that I think, now creativity, and personality is more important than ever, because our BS filter, which will soon become synonymous with our AI filter, you know, our awareness of what's been written by a robot, you know, some people have high hopes for it, I think, yeah, certainly, as we learn that art of prompting, it will get better, but nothing will replace personality is I'm not worried. I'm not worried about it. Really interesting.
Lauren
Yeah. But I think that David's right, in the sense that AI is a tool, and it shouldn't be seen as a resort for focusing on quantity and volume and, you know, compromising your own commitment to quality. If you can harness AI, while also keeping or even raising your standards of your contents quality, then fantastic. But I think a lot of people are looking at as kind of like a hack or a shortcut to save time and produce 1000 blog posts. And I feel like that strategy isn't doesn't have legs to it.
David
Yes, there's, there's so much content out there that Google have to crawl. So they have to make some kind of quality driven decision as to which content to rank. And if you think about it, it's has to be content that incorporates different forms. So the written form, visual form, perhaps a video as well, but also links, it comes back to links as well. If you're just publishing content, and it's aI driven content that hasn't got any links to it as well, that's another signal to Google that it's probably not worthwhile ranking.
phil
Such good advice. Let's leave our listener singular with that piece of advice, but not before you tell us how we can get more David Bain genius in our life, where can people go to get more of you.
David
It's been an absolute pleasure to be on with you, time's flown by. I'd like to just share one little project that I've worked on for a client recently and that's SEO in 2023. Find out how to SEO in 2020 three.com. So it's a client called Majestic. And what I did was I produced 100 podcast episodes, 100 videos, and then created a book from that. So there's so much content, so much different types of content that can be created. So obviously, if you'd like to do that kind of thing, look me up at castingcreative.com. That's my little agency. I run those types of services. But it's so important to maximize the use of your time and focus on creating high quality content initially.
Phil
Beautiful. Thank you so much listener. Again, I warned you about this at the top of the show. But I told you this was going to be like a lesson. That amazing diagram representing your funnel is in our show notes on our website for this episode, which is episode 201. You got us over that 200 mark. David, thank you for that. It's been such a pleasure to have you on Brand Therapy.
David
Thank you again
Phil
Thank you so much, David. That was such an awesome episode like a little mini lesson that we all appreciate it listener if you would like to leave us some feedback on the iTunes or Apple podcasts that is so helpful for us five star, five star that helps others discover this podcast which we work very hard to create for you. And until next time, thanks for listening to Brand Therapy. We'll see you next week.
