Embrace the nonlinearity
A reminder that the buying journey is anything but linear. We should embrace that.
I recently took it upon myself to kick-start Weld’s performance marketing efforts. After all, I’m heading up the Growth team, and I figured I should do my best to understand the ins & outs of the major ad platforms before deciding to hire someone to own this entirely. I also wanted to actually understand whether this would be a profitable acquisition channel for us at all, or if our money was better spent elsewhere.
In my research process, I stumbled upon a great webinar hosted by Clearbit (they have really good marketing content, I recommend checking them out). In it, they briefly touched on the importance of using paid media at all stages of the buying journey (and making use of remarketing) because the buying journey is all but linear.
I don’t think this is novel knowledge to anyone – especially not to seasoned marketers who’ve spent their careers digging into consumer behavior to try and understand the patterns that make people buy. But it’s something that can be lost on us when we’re under pressure from the board, the CEO or the Sales team asking for more leads. Or it can simply be pressure that we put on ourselves to deliver the goods – the tangible outcome we believe (for good and for bad) that we were hired to create instantly, now, right-this-moment. I know I fall victim to this from time to time, so I’ve kept this illustration as a screenshot on my desktop and look at it occasionally to remind myself to be patient and keep doing the work. Maybe I should print this.
Marketing is not magic fairy dust that you can just sprinkle over a group of people and magically make them love your brand, buy your products repeatedly, refer you to their friends and become lifelong advocates for your company and all that you stand for. Marketing is a grind, and it takes a long, long time – months, often years – for a person to decide that your company is the best fit to solve whatever problem they’re experiencing.
So, this is a reminder that nothing, especially not the buying journey, is linear. Decide what you want to tell your ideal customer, how you want to tell them, and iterate on the ways you’ll distribute that message – over and over again. Don’t give up and don’t get discouraged if things take time. Embrace the nonlinearity of it.