2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the sales funnel. Will this monolith of marketing, advertising, and sales continue to guide content marketing strategies in the coming century? It’s complicated.
How the 1924 sales funnel influences 2024 content marketing
The sales funnel originated with an idea from William W. Townsend’s book, Bond Salesmanship. Townsend visualized the sales process as “the forcing by compression of a broad and general concept of facts through a funnel which produces the specific and favorable consideration of one fact (p.109).”
The theory behind the sales funnel goes back even further, though. Townsend bases his thinking on the AIDA framework developed by St. Elmo Lewis in 1898. AIDA includes four stages—awareness or attention, interest, desire, and action—salespeople can follow to close a deal with a potential customer (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Basic sales funnel based on the AIDA model.
Marketers can use the sales funnel to create strategic content. During the awareness stage, consumers learn about the brand. This is where the “top of funnel” content lives—blogs, eBooks, and white papers designed to attract consumers.
Awareness builds interest and then desire. “Mid-funnel” content for these two stages often includes webinars and downloadable white papers, where interested consumers find answers to their questions about a specific product or service.
During the final stage, action, consumers choose to purchase, becoming customers. “Bottom of funnel” pieces that drive consumers to this choice are often product-focused and include call to actions for scheduling a demo or speaking with a salesperson.
Although the sales funnel helps explain how to make customers out of consumers, the model leaves one of the most important parts of the journey—what to do with customers once they’ve made a purchase.
4 modern alternatives to the sales funnel
Over recent years, many marketing agencies and advertising companies have created updated versions of the 1924 sales funnel. These better capture the decision-making journey, which helps content marketers know where to direct their content-creation efforts.
#1 Sales hourglass continues the journey
MarketingProf’s “content continuum,” the sales hourglass, takes up where the sales funnel stops. The sales hourglass also describes each stage according to how content inspires the customer. Instead of stopping at the purchase point, however, the model shows the customer’s ascent from continued investment in the brand to becoming a brand advocate (Figure 2).
Figure 2. MarketingProf’s content continuum.
The sales hourglass places equal emphasis on the consumer–customer journey and customer–advocate journey. Companies that create content to fit this model will end up with a wide variety of pieces—from engaging how-to articles for a more general audience to pieces that solve a specific pain point for existing customers. Implementing the sales hourglass takes work but results in a richer portfolio of content than the sales funnel.
#2 Sales flywheel centers on growth
While the sales hourglass can help guide more complete content creation, it doesn’t capture the momentum targeted content marketing initiates. This is where Hubspot’s flywheel model, which we’ll call the sales flywheel, comes in.
The sales flywheel illustrates how content drives business growth by attracting, engaging or delighting consumers and customers. Around the three types of content, the flywheel shows four customer stages: strangers, prospects, customers, and promoters. Content type and customer stages align for a tidy visual (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Hubspot’s flywheel model.
Like the sales hourglass, the sales flywheel helps companies create content that spans the spectrum of customers’ needs in different stages. You won’t end up with a hundred introductory pieces following this model. It also captures the potential of content marketing to be a major sales driver, illustrating the value of content marketing for dubious executives.
#3 Sales cinnamon roll shows decision-making points
The sales hourglass and flywheel don’t capture how existing customers make decisions differently than consumers who haven’t purchased from a company before. McKinsey’s “consumer decision journey,” which we’ll call the sales cinnamon roll, highlights this difference. Existing customers bypass the information gathering stage but still need targeted content to continue to make purchases (Figure 4).
Figure 4. McKinsey’s consumer decision journey.
While the sales cinnamon roll isn’t developed specifically for content marketers, it provides helpful information. For example, consider creating more content for customers in the shopping and ongoing exposure stages, with several strong pieces to kickstart consideration and cinch the moment of purchase. Creating high-quality content for the loyalty loop (tasty cinnamon sugar swirl), where customers move from ongoing brand exposure to another purchase, is also essential.
Although the sales cinnamon roll better captures the customer journey than the previous three models, it’s more complicated and, therefore, harder to use. The model includes multiple shapes and phrases to describe each level, not single words and streamlined diagrams. “Post-purchase experience content” won’t become a common phrase like “mid-funnel content” has. The potential to catch on is just not there.
#4 Sales hexagon captures the complexity of content marketing
21st-century consumers are more connected than ever, which opens up more opportunities for content marketers to guide purchasing decisions. Marketing Week recently published an article with a new model named after its author: the “Hankins Hexagon.”
The Hankins Hexagon, which we’ll call the sales hexagon, captures the complexity of how consumers become customers, with no single path between information gathering, option evaluation, and purchasing (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Marketing Week’s Hankins Hexagon.
This model is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it gets at the reality of modern content marketing —it’s not simple because we’re dealing with humans, who will likely need more than one type of prompt before making a decision. Creating content that nurtures each potential touchpoint, such as a blog directly comparing your product to a competitor’s product or an engaging social media post that keeps the brand top-of-mind, drives sales.
Why choose a model at all?
Although the sales funnel has been around for a hundred years, it hasn’t always been well known. According to a recent article in Marketing Week, the metaphor became common in the 2000s, when advertising technology companies needed a way to describe the digital consumer–customer journey.
This sidenote is key to understanding the whole fuss around models in the first place. We need a way to organize our heads around content marketing and discuss what to do with colleagues. The sales funnel, hourglass, flywheel, cinnamon roll, or hexagon help us do that. Models are clear ways to visualize what needs to be done and organize content accordingly.
The original question for this blog—whether the sales funnel is still relevant—is yes, with a caveat. The funnel must be adapted to modern consumers and marketing channels in mind. In another hundred years, models will look different than they do today, but using models to guide content strategy will remain relevant.
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Livingston Communication, Inc. provides life sciences and manufacturing clients with copywriting, technical writing, and medical writing services. Subscribe to our blog for more insights on modern marketing and communication.