Model Behavior

Tom Nixon (00:01.24)
Curtis, no lie. I am looking forward to this episode, maybe more than any other that we’ve recorded. We’ve been talking about doing this for a while. So I’m excited.

Curtis Hays (00:10.56)
We have, our last episode was my favorite. I don’t know, we’ll see if this one can top the last one, but last episode was my favorite. Because we had a special guest, Mark Hamill, on that episode. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (00:21.038)
Yeah, we did. Yeah. And Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford. Yeah, we’ll get back to that. I suspect this season that was our favorite metaphor. So yeah, I should have worn my Star Wars shirt too, but the reason I’m excited about

Curtis Hays (00:28.684)
Harrison Ford, yeah.

Curtis Hays (00:36.578)
You got a good shirt on though. Are you getting ready to go up there soon?

Tom Nixon (00:40.864)
I’m in an up north state of mind. starting today at four o’clock, I think I’ll be pretty much mentally checked out all next week, even though I’ll physically be in the building working. But, you know, Fourth of July holidays upon us, ladies and gentlemen. Red, white, blue. Yeah. Cool.

Curtis Hays (00:42.858)
Okay.

Curtis Hays (00:54.582)
That’s the other thing I got going on here, right? So, yep, yep. So I’m getting myself in the mood.

Tom Nixon (01:01.214)
Awesome. Well, the reason I’m excited for this one in particular, a couple reasons. One is it brings together this whole concept of bull horns meets bulls eyes. And it’s foundational to what we firmly believe and have developed almost like a synthesis of our partnership and working with clients. And it’s rooted in fundamentals that are old as time things that we’re not making up. It explains

why we focus so much on why, and it gets people thinking about the proper analytics at the proper time, which is something that we’ve been preaching the season as well.

Curtis Hays (01:42.966)
Yeah, it’s real interesting how you kind of had your methodologies that you worked from, which were more on the creative side. And I had my own frameworks that I was working from, which were more on the planning and analytical and data side. And I recall an episode we had with Josh Donnelly, where you guys were talking about story-driven, what is it?

Tom Nixon (01:49.326)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (02:06.752)
funnel driven storytelling is what he calls it. So he’s got his own framework. And I was like, man, this sounds a lot like a methodology I’ve worked from. And so we’ve kind of merged those two together a little bit in our approach, two, three, yeah, a few different methodologies that we’ve kind of merged into one cohesive thought process, I guess.

Tom Nixon (02:29.9)
Yeah, they all overlap, which is interesting. It’s because they’re all rooted in the same philosophy fundamentally. And I think I mentioned it on that episode with Josh or maybe to you offline, not or off air, I should say. But remember in high school when the teacher or grade school, should say the teacher had that projector and it had those transparencies, you know, and you could flip one. I want that for this episode because I want to show how they all sort of lie on top of each other. They’re all part of the same system. But since we don’t have that

Curtis Hays (02:53.378)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (03:00.024)
We’re going to have to do it digitally. So this is an episode that you should be watching as opposed to just listening to. So if you are listening via podcast, you may want to pause here and go over to our YouTube channel and check out the video portion of this. And of course, all of that can be found at what’s the website bullhorns bullseyes.com. Okay.

Curtis Hays (03:18.08)
Yup. Bullhornsbullsize.com. And if we could leave either, can make a PDF of these images or just share the JPEGs and we’ll embed them in the episode as well. And they can check them out inside the episode.

Tom Nixon (03:33.228)
Yep. Download them and refer back to them. So lastly, the last thing I love about the idea for this episode is I think there is for people who want to learn something. This is not only a window into our secret sauce, which I’m fine sharing, but it’s also, I think, a way for people who aren’t in marketing every day, but need to hone their marketing skills, or at least the company that they work for is marketing skills. This is

intended to be sort of show and tell. So happy to dive in and maybe we should because we have some visuals to share. So as you mentioned, we’re going to talk about three sort of models frameworks that we use in our day to day lives and people have been using for years before us and to demonstrate why we do the things we do. And we wanted to start with this, which is the traditional sales funnel.

I’m going to go over this because I’m still somewhat surprised. I just asked somebody yesterday who’s in sales and I asked if they were familiar with the traditional sales funnel and they were not. So, this is goes back to a gentleman by the name of Elias St. Elmo Lewis, who is credited with creating this framework and the intent was to demonstrate the customer journey. So you and I have been talking about customer journey, right? And a couple episodes ago,

I took issue with somebody’s contention that they said that the sale that the sales funnel is not linear. Remember that Curtis and I said that I think the sales funnel is linear because it’s a mindset, but the customer journey may not be linear. It may be difficult to follow a customer to go from awareness to the point that they that they bought a product, but they are going to go through this process almost 10 times out of 10.

Curtis Hays (05:29.746)
Yeah, so you’re 100 % correct. The journey, we can’t control, we want to control, but we can’t 100 % control what the user is going to do. But we have to plan. I think that’s the missing link a lot of times is we have to plan and by planning, we can create an experience for those users. It doesn’t mean they’re going to take it, but it gives us an idea of

Tom Nixon (05:43.15)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (05:56.972)
creating something that does the storytelling. Like last episode, we talked about the story and the journey and those types of things. how do you, once they realize they’re on that journey, how do you kind of bring them in and manage the messaging and all of these other functional pieces? And I think that’s a lot of what we’re talking about today. Like, how do you go and put this into practice?

Tom Nixon (06:19.02)
Yeah, exactly. And I also should reference and credit Emily from Martech who was on our podcast talking about customer experience, customer journey and what she’s referring to or what she referred to, to what you just referred is the predictive path to purchase. So what we’re trying to do is understand what do we think is the most likely predictive path to purchase and let’s make sure that we’re engineering everything we can in terms of the experience, both the customer experience and the marketing sales experience.

so that it’s engineered to facilitate that and lead the person to where we want to go, which is ultimately a purchase. But you’re fond of saying when you do lead gen activity as a first step, we’re skipping to the bottom of this funnel, which is on your screen because we’re tempted to just ask for the sale first in. That’s typically not the first action the customer wants to take, right? They want to like know who you are. So let’s start at the top.

Curtis Hays (07:13.004)
Right.

Tom Nixon (07:16.768)
Anyone outside of the traditional sales funnel is unaware of who you are. Some of them are unaware that they even have a problem or they might be starting to wonder, recognize that they have a problem, but they might be solution unaware. They’re just they don’t know what they don’t know. So outside of this is the entire field of the population unaware of your brand.

The first step is to make them aware, right? So I use this example all the time. Curtis, people ask me, you know, the quick lube oil change bowl. Why did Ford quick lube change? Why did I spend two million dollars sponsoring a ball game? Does that work? They asked me, does that work? Now, my question is, does it work? Well, I never heard a quick lube change before, so.

I probably wouldn’t have stopped into one if I never heard one, but that’s the thing that you’re trying to the dragon. You’re trying to slay at the top is at least get the population who you’re looking to convert into customers for unaware to aware.

Curtis Hays (08:19.232)
Yep, yep, 100%.

Tom Nixon (08:21.57)
Yep. So we’ll talk about the tactics that you do for that, the language that you should use, et cetera. But so my first takeaway is don’t present as a first action the offer to buy my product because people aren’t there yet, typically speaking.

Curtis Hays (08:26.786)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (08:39.006)
And I would add, we’ll use terminology like top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel, right? So we’re obviously starting, so we use that language. Top of funnel, when we say that is awareness. We’re creating awareness about a problem, pain, aspiration, something like that to pull somebody into the brand and create some level of recognition, at the very least a response.

Ideally here, I want a response and we’ll definitely get into that, but yep.

Tom Nixon (09:11.15)
It should also be noted, at least from my understanding, that the reason this is shaped like a funnel is because not everyone will go all the way down and you start to lose people as they go. Some of the people who become aware, what’s that? Purposely, right? Yeah. Some people may become aware, but they just, they’re not interested. They’re just not motivated to do anything yet. So the next goal as a marketer is to get those who become aware to get them interested in your product or service. So it’s different than

Curtis Hays (09:20.588)
Purposely. Purposely.

Tom Nixon (09:41.1)
necessarily blasting the, you know, buying, sponsoring a bowl game, right? It’s different because that’s not going to make anyone interested in getting an oil change quickly, right? It’s just, they’re just aware. So now of the aware population, then you need to get them interested. Again, this is not necessarily going to get them right from aware to purchase. It’s, okay. I become aware of this company. I do a Google search because I’m probably aware. And I, maybe I found a website.

And now there’s something about this website that has to interest the buyer and the user. now we are, still, we’re starting to get into the middle of the funnel, correct?

Curtis Hays (10:20.386)
Correct. They’re interested in learning more, start consuming content, they’re doing some research because this brand, this product or service has intrigued them in some way. There’s curiosity, natural curiosity that now I start a process of evaluation.

Tom Nixon (10:42.572)
Yeah, that was exactly where I was going to go is the evaluation part. So just because they found your website or product or service, doesn’t mean that that’s exclusively the only bidder in the auction. Right? So they’re, they’re doing this research that you mentioned and they’re evaluating all sorts of vendors, product solutions. Maybe they’re trying to solve their problem for free. Maybe they realize they’ve got to buy a product or service. And now they’re looking at things like, does this company or this product

solve the thing that I came here looking to solve. Does it do it in a different way than these other vendors? Better, faster, cheaper, more reliably, more innovatively. So this is where they are vetting the field. They’re vetting your brand or product or service. And the goal now is to get those who are in the vetting process, because now they’re shopping to get them to desire your product service offering, get them to desire to make a purchase ideally with you.

And so now they’re starting to enter the bottom of the funnel, right? Cause now they are getting close to taking the action that we wanted them to at the beginning, but they weren’t there yet, but now they’re getting really close. And so now we’re going to employ tactics messaging, which all of which we’ll get to, to drive from interest to desire.

Curtis Hays (12:00.288)
Yep. I will say you also remind me quite frequently that in the evaluation process, there’s also status quo. I could just keep doing what I’m doing. I could keep using the product I currently have. Yeah, there’s a better one out there, but it’s going to cost me money to buy it.

Tom Nixon (12:20.217)
We see this all the time with SaaS companies, right? Somebody’s using. Yeah, I’m using Excel. This is painful. I hate it, but I don’t feel like changing and I you know, those are the people who are going to come out of the funnel, right? They couldn’t go from interest to desire. They’re interested, but 29.99 a month. Whatever, right?

Curtis Hays (12:23.136)
I could use Excel.

Curtis Hays (12:41.154)
You could stay there for years. I I talked about that with that attribution company. was seven years, I’ve been consuming their content. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (12:48.536)
Exactly. Yeah, always interested, but there was something that triggered desire. Do you remember what it was? You shared that story.

Curtis Hays (12:56.288)
Well, it was it was the other company that came in who had something that more aligned with my clients, right there, the way that they position their platform, and they were at an easier price point for me to evaluate. So Antonio, who we’re going to have on which was what converts their the sales rep, I was evaluating one of their competitors. And then then both of them happened to reach me at the same time. Don’t know how that happened. But

Tom Nixon (13:01.997)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (13:27.912)
I could have stuck with my status quo because I solutions. I was doing what they claimed they could do, but they made some claims they could do it better. He gave me a no risk evaluation and I said, let’s do it. Proof was in the pudding. It worked.

Tom Nixon (13:46.606)
Aha. A tactic to drive someone from interest to desire, right? Messaging changed for me. Learn about us to, Hey, give us a shot for free. Right. We’ll come back to that.

Curtis Hays (13:50.602)
Yeah, yeah.

Curtis Hays (13:56.032)
Yep, risk free guaranteed.

Tom Nixon (13:59.572)
Ultimately, you took the action. This is what everyone wants. This is the quote unquote conversion, right? This is the you give me the dollars that I seek and I give you the product that I promised. All of this to say typically, this is the journey the customer is going to take. This could take 10 seconds. This could take 10 months. This could take 10 years, could take 10 minutes, could take 10 weeks, depending on what your product is. So it’s not like applicable directly and exactly to every sort of product. Like if I

Curtis Hays (14:04.577)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (14:28.974)
aware that I need a candy bar, right? I’m not going to spend three weeks figuring out which one I like. I’m going to go to the store and I’m going to pull the trigger that matches my desire. And I’m going be like, all right, it’s going to be a three musketeers. Most of the crowd goes, oh, gross. I go, yeah. All right. So that’s the traditional sales funnel. There’s versions of this, but this is at its core. This is the one I always come back to because it’s it looks like an opera. Ada, I’m a theater nut. So, okay, boom. That’s the.

first framework. say, go ahead.

Curtis Hays (14:59.468)
So.

Well, you mentioned skip the funnel when we first, so now that you’ve described the funnel, go back to what you mentioned, skip the funnel and what we see customers tendency is to do and why we want to put this in front of people to help them understand why they can’t skip the funnel and what that means.

Tom Nixon (15:23.244)
Yeah, skip the funnel is a company decides that they need more sales. So they reach out to somebody who does lead generation and says, we need more leads. We need more sales. What can you do for us? And they put the metric on conversion only and it’s a pass fail, right? It’s do you get more sales or do they would not get more sales? We try to explain to them that

There exists this thing called the customer journey and the sales funnel. And they want to skip to the ad. They want to say, okay, we’re going to put an ad on Facebook to in a market of customers, potential customers that don’t know who we are yet. And we’re going to ask them to buy us essentially. That’s right. So you went from unaware to action. Most people are hardwired to not do that. Right. There’s all sorts of, I think people typically

depending on the product or service, they are at a default position of purchase averse because it costs money and they’re parting with hard earned money. So they need to put themselves in their position that they want to buy something, whether it’s I’m hungry for a candy bar or I need to invest in software that solves this Excel problem. So we don’t think you could skip the funnel. What we do think though is that the funnel offers all of these opportunities to nurture.

someone from unaware to action. If you only apply the right metrics and the right methodologies and the right messaging, which is a good segue into your framework, because this is, mentioned the framework that you’ve operated. Explain this one.

Curtis Hays (16:52.279)
Yep.

Curtis Hays (16:56.032)
Yeah, so when I got into marketing, for me, was my journey started with watching teams deliver reports to clients that they were telling partial truths or untruths about data to make them look like they were doing the things that mattered for the business. And so I sought out training and methodology to…

Tom Nixon (17:17.88)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (17:25.142)
figure that, like, how should we report on these things? What should we be reporting on click-through rates and impressions and all of these types of things, page views? Do they really matter to what really matters for the business? And so I stumbled across Race. Race was developed by Dr. Dave Chaffee. And they have an organization called Marketing Insights. They’ve got some free content you could go check out. But they kind of offer a online.

university, let’s call it, for learning marketing. And this framework, I became a subscriber talking nine years ago, maybe, started consuming their content, watching their videos, downloading their PDFs. And that led me into kind of how I approached things from media buyer.

an SEO person designing websites and figuring out user experiences from that perspective. We didn’t ever deal with messaging until you came along Tom. Kaleidoscope was executing channel driven sort of campaigns, bring them into the website and managing the website experience and then making sure the leads and the sales went to a third party platform like a HubSpot, a Salesforce or whatever. So we sat in between there to make sure that that…

Tom Nixon (18:31.971)
You

Curtis Hays (18:49.164)
journey in that flow, we can measure it and that the experience worked. So this is what we used. So it starts with reach. So at the top of the funnel, and there’s a reason why this is set up this way, reaches at the top because reach is awareness, right? And you have lots of different channels you could utilize to reach your target audience. We’d say first, figure out who your target audience is, your ideal customer profile. And then you’re going to use things like

You know, SEO, search engine optimization, people might find you in a search engine. You’re going to do advertising that could be Facebook or meta, TikTok, LinkedIn. You figure out where is your target audience? Where can you reach them? And, you know, go to those channels, go to those places where your target audience is, and you can put out content, you can put out advertising that could be organic. Certainly there’s.

PR and other methods. There’s offline methods as well. I’m speaking mostly online, but there are offline methods to reach your target audience. That is definitely, what do you got there, Tom?

Tom Nixon (20:00.398)
I’m reaching for my bullhorn. So this what you mentioned is the bullhorn part of our podcast, right? So you’re trying to get people from unaware to aware. So this, by the way, interesting. I’m just sort of tilted my hand a little bit, but that maps perfectly over to the left side of the screen, which is awareness. So you’re trying to achieve reach. You’re not at the top of the funnel trying to achieve purchase incidents. You’re trying to just get people into the funnel, right?

Curtis Hays (20:05.781)
Yep.

Curtis Hays (20:19.649)
Right.

Curtis Hays (20:28.576)
Yep, 100%. So, what happens currently, what we just said about skip the funnel is people want to do reach. All these companies are doing reach, but they just go right from reach to convert. So, they say, go reach people on Meta, but your call to action should be shop now or buy now or sign up.

or get a demo like all of these types and sign up for a webinar and they don’t know who you are yet.

Tom Nixon (21:00.92)
We’re looking to achieve reach, but the metric is conversions. That doesn’t make any sense. Right? Yeah.

Curtis Hays (21:04.406)
Yeah, right. So alongside of the race model are the metrics you should be measuring at each spot. don’t have the slide would get busy and I don’t want to duplicate what race already does in their own training. You could go, they have some free PDFs. You can find all that online. Just search them up. But they put the metrics that you would be measuring. How do you measure success at reach? Right. So

From an SEO perspective, it might be traffic, impressions, your position ranking. From an organic perspective, it might be new follows, people liking and following to your pages. It might be new audience engagement within your advertising. We just built for a phishing brand a new set of ads that are following this methodology. And in our top of funnel ad,

we tried to, position, position an emotional aspiration, a fishing rod that’s bent way down. They’ve hopped. The angler obviously has something big in the water that they’ve got on the line. Right. And it was essentially like, when was the last time you had a rod bend like this? You know, right, right. Exactly. And.

Tom Nixon (22:26.611)
That’s the, that’s the Holy grail moment for a Fisher, right? It’s like, yeah.

Curtis Hays (22:31.446)
Tell us in the comments below. Share a story. Right? So all we were trying to do was reach a target audience and get them to engage. Get them to participate.

Tom Nixon (22:41.736)
engage. sounds like a segue to the A.

Curtis Hays (22:46.178)
It is a segue to A, right? So don’t mistake E all the way at the bottom, but act is encouraging them to take a next step, to explore, right? So at that stage, we didn’t want them to… We don’t know these people yet and they don’t know us. So to ask them for something like giving us money to buy our product doesn’t make sense. And it’s not likely anyone’s going to do that.

And the people who do probably already are aware.

Tom Nixon (23:14.936)
For those who are super motivated. Yeah, I was just going to say for those who are super motivated, they know how to find a website. They know how to take out a credit card, fill a shopping cart. Those purchases will happen. But if we, I think the best, the message here is if you’re orienting everything, both your messaging, your methodology and your metrics on conversion. When people, your customers are still at the awareness to interest level, then you’re skipping steps. Okay. So act. So the.

Curtis Hays (23:21.282)
Yeah.

Yup.

Curtis Hays (23:41.632)
Yep. Yep. So what are we going to ask them to do at this stage? Now, this is a great place in ACT, I think, for your content marketing, because we’ve been talking about content marketing and we’re developing long form blog posts and we’re telling clients to create educational videos and all those types of things. At this stage, we’re, because we have on the list, we’re building trust now. We’ve captured attention. We’ve got their eye. How can we educate them?

How can we show how we’re unique? How can we show in the example, the fishing example I just gave that, you know what, if you have a big fish on the line, the line’s not gonna break, the rod’s not gonna break, it’s not gonna fall apart in your hands and you’re not gonna lose that trophy catch of the lifetime, right? And for any of us who have been fishing, you know what it’s like to lose the fish you’ve been trying to get. Walter.

Tom Nixon (24:28.418)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (24:35.406)
They even keep up with a phrase called the one that got away.

Curtis Hays (24:39.51)
The one that got away, right? So you’re appealing to that aspiration, but also the pain of that loss. And now they’re interested, and now they want to get into the nitty gritty. Well, what makes your product so much better than the one I got, or the other one that’s at Pass Pro Shop, or the one that I can get over here at West Marine, or the one that my father-in-law gave me? There’s lots of options to go fish with.

But why is this the right one for me?

Tom Nixon (25:11.779)
Including the rod and really already have back to your earlier point, right? So mapping cross over to the idea or the Ada model. So now you’re getting people from interested to desire. That’s the goal when you’re at the A. now metrics change here, right? Metrics aren’t just reach and impressions. It’s engagement numbers, even though, like you said, at the bottom of this is another engaged.

Curtis Hays (25:13.952)
Right. Exactly.

Curtis Hays (25:32.33)
Yeah, and so it could be as people are learning, it could be they’re signing up for your newsletter. We might call that a conversion, but that is a conversion higher up in the funnel. Amy would differentiate those learners and handraisers. So they’re learners, those who take action want to learn. And so they’re consuming your content until they are actually in market to buy your product or service. So those learners, we have to continue to put out content. And this is something I’m really learning.

this isn’t a one time thing. Like

Tom Nixon (26:06.626)
Yeah, right. Going back to the customer journey being a linear, right?

Curtis Hays (26:09.982)
Right. mean, you just, have to be relentless with content and, you know, there’s, and there’s no like, well, what’s the right type of content?

Because it’s not linear, there might be four or five different types of content that somebody needs to consume in video, in written, in your newsletter before they’re ready to purchase. This to me in the middle of the funnel is a relentless pursuit. What we just talked about in our last episode, to provide customer service for free to your target audience. Earn their trust in this stage of the funnel.

Tom Nixon (26:43.224)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Tom Nixon (26:48.33)
Yeah, and you can educate, you can entertain, you can do all of these things. Once you have people in the funnel, maybe they follow the brand on Facebook or Instagram. They’ve signed up for the newsletters. Even by virtue of going to the website, taking an action like that allows us to do what could be labeled as either capital R retargeting or small R just retargeting, right? It’s just like we’re going to remarket to these people. They’ve already expressed some level of interest.

Curtis Hays (27:12.738)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (27:15.022)
They can always turn us off. They could unsubscribe or whatever. We’re not going to overdo it. But the way that you engage with them is to not follow up and say, okay, now that I got you here, put your credit card in and buy the product. You could try to do that, but I think you’ll be disappointed because they’re still interest. There’s not yet desire.

Curtis Hays (27:31.65)
And both sales and marketing need to realize this, this, hey, we got a contact. We got somebody in our email list. Now let’s hard sell them because we got numbers to hit. And that’s a great way to turn off buyers, right?

Tom Nixon (27:40.462)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (27:45.774)
Do you remember when phone tracking or whatever you might call it on a website was first invented and you might fill out a form on a website and you get a phone call within 30 seconds. Hey, Tom, this is Joe Blow from Salesforce. I see you filled out our form. How off putting was that? But that’s sort of the extreme. Nobody does that anymore, but that’s extreme because we could we did and that’s not we’re advising. We want to talk about what you should do, not what you could do. So you get down to a so now you’ve recon your

Curtis Hays (27:55.755)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (28:15.616)
As you mentioned, you’re changing your methodologies. You’re changed your metrics, right? So we’re measuring totally different things down in the middle of the funnel. And then we’re getting to this ultimate end result that we want, which you can see is not the end result. It’s a result, but it’s convert, right? So what happens down here? And now we’re nearing that middle of the sales funnel again. Or the bottom, should say.

Curtis Hays (28:33.504)
Yep, yep. And like you mentioned earlier, you might start with an audience size of 10,000. We get 3,000 down here. And then maybe we get 200 that take this step here, which is they fill out a requested demo form, they sign up for a webinar, they check out, they pick up the phone, and they call.

is what we’re measuring at the bottom of the funnel for me, that’s getting somebody into your CRM as what we might call a sales qualified lead or a purchase. So they’re either a customer through a purchase or they are a sales qualified lead that now sales takes over for that, that individual. Now I do have downloads here. Downloads could theoretically fit, you know, above act, they could be sort of in the middle, there are

times where downloads, you know, it is a good reason based off of a download to follow up. But yeah, more than anything, this is really when sales is reaching out in the lead gen perspective, or they’ve completed a cart, now you have a customer.

Tom Nixon (29:52.568)
Can you talk for a minute just about going back to I’m going to turn the skipping the funnel thing back on you when a prospective client of yours comes into the potential engagement with you with this mindset that hey, I want to drive leads. I want to get sales and here’s my budget. Can you talk about how it’s so much more expensive to optimize campaigns for conversion, especially when people haven’t heard you yet? I mean, you’re really you’re really rifling through your budget really quickly, aren’t you? And all you’re doing is bottom of the funnel activities. Those are expensive.

Curtis Hays (30:21.058)
Right. what’s going to happen is because of those people are unaware and you haven’t educated them yet of your unique value proposition and those types of things that you’re throwing away a lot of money. You have to do the steps above, right? Through the natural user process, decision making, the tendency of how consumers make decisions that you’re trying to skip that process, but in turn, you can’t.

And I mean, there’ll be the rare case where you get a couple people who might actually purchase, but in all likelihood, you’re throwing away most of your money. We’ve seen brands can do this if they’ve already done the previous work. I mean, if you’re 100-year-old brand, and you’ve been doing PR, and you’ve had commercials, and people know who you are, you’re a household name or a business, people know you within the business industry,

You could put out a webinar, you could put out a request, a demo, because you got some new feature or something like that, throw it into a single campaign and see conversions. Because all those steps were done for the last 100 years. But if you’re a startup and nobody knows you from Adam, and you’re competing against 20 other people in your industry, it’s just not going to happen. You’re throwing money away.

Tom Nixon (31:32.642)
Yeah, right.

Tom Nixon (31:45.294)
I would suggest you could even be a mature brand, but people don’t know you well enough, right? So you have a client that in business for 40 years. They’re just starting this process and they know they need to build brand awareness, right? There’s bigger brands out there that do what they do and they benefit from the hundred year. know, nobody gets fired for buying or for nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, that sort of thing. That’s, who you’re competing against sometimes. So you need to do a better job of creating awareness, but it’s also it’s more

Curtis Hays (31:49.122)
that can happen, yep.

Tom Nixon (32:12.822)
efficient to buy things like impressions than it is to try to optimize say a LinkedIn campaign for conversion.

Curtis Hays (32:19.21)
Right. So what I should have mentioned and isn’t in here, this whole thing is a planning model, but planning actually in the race model for marketing insights sits above race. So there’s a plan that’s written first. This whole thing is building a plan. So if a client comes to me with say $10,000 a month, then I say, where are you currently at in your marketing? So we have get an understanding of how well have you

done the awareness steps, have you been producing and getting those audiences to consume content? That’s gonna form us where we put our budget. Can we put eight of the $10,000 at the bottom of the funnel? Or should we be putting eight of the 10,000 at the top of the funnel? And then as we bring people through these stages, we can move money along with the people, right? So we put more at the top.

As they get to the next stage, we can shift budget into that next stage. And then as they get down here, we can shift money down here. We just have to let it run and you have to give it time. And that’s the process of planning and building a proper media plan.

Tom Nixon (33:30.476)
Yeah. And when you’re spending money, then when you’re actually changing the metric and the model to optimize for conversion, when you do this way, look at where these people already are now. They’ve already gone from unaware to interest to desire, and they’re ready potentially to take an action. And now you’re just saying to those few people, you should be buying us because I’ve explained to you already why we’re different than everybody else. You’ve done the research. You know you have the pain. You know we’re a fit. You’re at the desire stage. Now let’s serve them.

Methodologies, messaging, and let’s align our metrics and then our budget to converting the easier to convert. And it’s more cost effective as a result. It’s not the rack model. It’s the race model. So what happens after you actually get the conversion? You can’t just stop there. At least we don’t advise it.

Curtis Hays (34:08.876)
Yep, yep, 100%.

Curtis Hays (34:16.724)
No, so I think you build in an e-commerce world, loyalty. So it costs so much to acquire that customer. How do you turn them into repeat buyers? How do you turn those customers into ambassadors for your brand? How do you get them to leave reviews so you got positive sentiment across the internet? How do you get them to share content on social media? How do you get them to refer?

you know, to friends and family to buy your product or service. So these are all tactics that you want to implement to get the most out of what the cost of acquisition for that single customer, the lifetime value. Lifetime value isn’t just what that customer pays you monetarily. The lifetime value is the possibility that that customer could also get you 10 more customers.

because now they become an ambassador. But you have to ask. We’ve had episodes where we’ve talked about referral marketing and different things like that, email marketing, like great strategies to put at the bottom of the funnel to turn your best customers, your loyal ambassadors. And you had a great name for it actually recently. You’re doing some work with a market research company. What was that? You guys are calling these people now.

Tom Nixon (35:38.882)
Well, in the research world, they do an apostle analysis to find out who amongst your most loyal are not only just loyal but potentially apostles, right? That will go out and spread the word for you. Joseph Jaffe is the author of a book called Flip the Funnel, not Skip the Funnel and what that suggests is that you have a funnel. You’ve got everyone down here at the red who did make the conversion and what you’re suggesting is now let’s flip it and now these people go out and they start doing the

Curtis Hays (35:41.856)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (36:07.018)
advertising for you and they’re going to create tell you how wonderful this product is. I had the time of my life at this restaurant. They’re trying to then immediately give desire and interest to their audience who live out here, right? So you flip the funnel and that’s why you need to constantly engage with these folks because they will create extraordinary lifetime value if you do it well.

Curtis Hays (36:33.174)
So I see it, like you said, flip, but what race will do is they’ll draw a line back to the top. So exactly that.

Tom Nixon (36:39.106)
Yep. Well, because those exactly you’re building more reach. Yep, but it brings those people in more quickly because it has the benefit of an you know, a third party endorsement. This is why you know why social media became such a big place for brands to live because people would say I’m looking for anyone got a good restaurant heading up to heading up to Higgins Lake this weekend. Anyone got a good restaurant, right? And you want to be the brand that somebody without you even knowing about it will say

Curtis Hays (37:03.97)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (37:09.09)
You gotta go to the cut. I’m gonna give them a free plug. Got to go to the cuts. Awesome. Live music, great food, farm to table. Boom. All right. So that’s the race framework. All of this then maybe could explain why I am so insistent on leading with why it’s so this is not again, my methodology, my aha moment came when I saw a

Curtis Hays (37:21.281)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (37:36.622)
TED Talk by the man named by the man of man by the name of Simon Sinek called the Golden Circle and it’s become something of a cliche in the marketing world. I think because it’s potentially I don’t know overused or over shares got millions and millions of views of the Golden Circle is you know, three concentric circles at the center of the circle is why and so you might I think this is actually called the power of why if you’re looking for the TED Talk, right? The power of why?

And what Simon Sinek contends is that the best motivation for doing anything, taking an action, making a purchase, following a leader is all cemented in the person’s sense of why. Why are they out there looking for solution? Why should they be? Usually it’s, know, Sandler sales system would tell you it’s pain. I can’t live like this anymore. I need to go. Can somebody solve this problem? But it might also be an aspiration. It might be the person looking for a candy bar or wanting to buy an expensive sports

car, right? Some of those things are pleasure now. Pain now is a good motivator. Pain tomorrow is a motivator. Pleasure tomorrow. You have to figure out for your specific product or service, what do you solve? Do you deliver pain or promise? But at the heart of this is this person’s why, right? So typically what happens, again, skipping the funnel is when companies

well-meaning companies, you know, think about putting a website together. They think about what should the copy say? Well, let’s tell people what the product does, how awesome we are. Right. Let’s tell people about the features. Let’s tell people about the ergonomic handle. Right. Let’s tell people about the three levels of loudness. Let’s you know, and that’s what they lead with. But typically going back to this model on the left, this

People aren’t even at a point where they care about the features because they have no desire to buy your product. They’re out there just trying to figure out is there a product is sometimes is there a category, right? So they’re problem aware, but they might not be brand aware. They might not even be category aware. And so if that person comes to my website, they’re in a point where they can’t live like this anymore.

Tom Nixon (39:52.458)
I want to be the one and only brand that connects with that potential customer on that emotional level that says, I understand you. I get your pain. I know I can articulate it back to you, right? I can say there’s no reason we need to be living in Excel when a better world is out there. Going back to that example, right? It’s not like here’s the 10 things our software does for you or here’s what the outcomes are. It’s that we know why you’re here. You heard.

We understand why you’re hurt. In fact, let me show you how we alleviate the pain. So once that emotional connection is there, the theory behind my messaging methodology is you reel them in there as many people as possible. And then to get them down to interest, you’re going to show them not only do you understand why, but now you’re going to start to communicate how not what yet, but how you alleviate the pain.

Going back to, now, so people are in the sales funnel. They have interest. But remember, we said they’re interested not in you necessarily. They’re interested in solving their problem. They might be interested in five other competitors, too, right? They might be interested in just the status quo. We don’t know. We want them to be interested in us because we want to get them into desire. How messaging? So why is that emotionally? Why? It’s not your why. It’s not your mission statement. It’s not why you exist. It’s the potential customers why.

Curtis Hays (41:14.242)
Can I pause you there, Tom? Because this was the mistake I made. I watched the TED Talk when it went viral, 12 years ago or whenever it was, maybe even longer than that. I understood what Simon Sinek was talking about, but I understood it from a standpoint of figuring out your company’s purpose so that you could figure out, you could create vision values and you could align with

Tom Nixon (41:15.286)
Yeah, please do.

Hmm.

Tom Nixon (41:27.214)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (41:43.191)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (41:43.358)
employees, get the right employees. It’s kind of the whole good to great thing. Get the right people in the right seats on the bus because you’re all aligned towards a common vision, your whole purpose. I’m a big Viktor Frankl fan. I believe in purpose. We’ve got to have a purpose. I was looking at it from the viewpoint of, okay, if I define my purpose,

or if this brand here defines their purpose, then naturally consumers who align with that purpose will come in. And it’s really the opposite. It’s, yes, the brand has a purpose, but then beyond that purpose, you have to then figure out your customer’s purpose and then how does your service product, whatever, fit into their purpose.

Not the other way around. And I think that’s where like, if you build vision, mission, blah, blah, and then you, you go and talk about all those things on your website and then nobody engages with that content. You’re wondering like, you just think human nature. Do you like to be around somebody who like just talks about themselves constantly?

Tom Nixon (42:58.456)
Exactly right. It’s off putting to or if you’re in a sales meeting and the salesperson won’t shut up. You’re like, you didn’t even ask me a single question, right? You didn’t ask me where it hurts, right? Like what doctor would come into an office or a doctor’s office and greet the patient and say, well, here’s what we’re going to do. All right. Wait a minute. You haven’t diagnosed me yet. I didn’t even tell you what hurts. No, no, no. I got you. Here’s what I do. You’re in my doctor’s office. So this is what I do. This must be what you want, right?

So yeah, it’s a common mistake. The cynics, no pun intended. The cynics of Simon Sinek will say garbage. Nobody cares why you do things. They care what you do and how you do it. Totally agree. That’s not what we’re suggesting with why it’s lead with the customers. Why the audience is why is probably a better word to use there as we talked about recently. Then then how language right then? How is the?

And you might need to do this through testimonials. You might need to do this through actual storytelling videos. So not only does the messaging change, but the methodology changes here. And you want to demonstrate clearly why you’re the right person for product, service, whatever, to capture someone’s interest and convert that to desire. Cause they’re going to vet you. They’re not most cases in the world that we live in B2B world. Not only are they going to some cases they have to, because there has to be a bid list. So you can, you can eliminate much of the competitive field.

Initially, by showing that you connect with them at the Y level, but then certainly at the how level you can even do, which we do research into what is everyone else saying about how they do it? Well, we can find our stake in the ground and make our claim that is authentic to us and nobody else can do it. And we’ve done the research. Nobody else is doing it. So this is the how methodology so that somebody says, hmm, everybody else said great customer service, 100 years in business. But this brand said something I

don’t I think I’ve ever heard and wow, it maps perfectly to my why I’m intrigued. So not only am I have interest now I have desire. What is of course people care what you do, right? But nine times out of 10, your what’s look exactly like the competitor fields. What’s it might have it’s they’re not different. They’re distinguished only by the how right? So a what so for example, if somebody went to 10 digital marketing agencies, how many variants do you think of the what’s would you find?

Tom Nixon (45:20.27)
There’s a lot of different ways to do it, right? Somebody specialize in SEO, somebody specialize in lead gen, but if you had two exact agencies that someone was vetting for a particular piece of business, they probably do pretty much the exact same thing. So why favorite one of them?

Curtis Hays (45:34.816)
Right, all you’re doing is price matching at that point. The what’s come down to how much do you cost? mean, like, that’s it. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (45:38.772)
Exactly right. The what’s so ultimately yes, they’re going to put what’s in the shopping cart or they’re going to want to see a demo of the what and all that stuff, but the way that you’ve converted them is by demonstrating it differentiating how they don’t care about your how until you demonstrate that you understand their why. So this is our methodology. I didn’t we didn’t invent any of this right Simon Sinek came up with the power of why we already mentioned who came up with the sales funnel and the race methodology, but

To us, when this all comes together, this is, think, the magic sauce, the mystery ingredient that people, think, can take away from this podcast, hopefully, in the PDF that we’ll share in the show notes and online. This, to me, I don’t see how you could do it any other way.

Curtis Hays (46:25.024)
Yeah, I think it helps people understand the thought process behind how we approach things for sure. Like I mentioned, when we talk top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, there’s reasoning behind those types of things. They’re not just tactics. This is different than lead magnets and landing pages and different things like that, which are all just…

Tom Nixon (46:34.99)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (46:53.004)
tactics and tricks. There’s no tricks in this. This is a planning methodology and framework with psychology tied to it of how customers buy. And so you take that psychology piece, you take the tools that we have access to and you combine that together. then now you have the opportunity when a client comes and says, hey, we’d like to…

buy services from you, we’ve got X budget, we want to accomplish X things, this is what we’re going to lean into to figure out how to spend that money and then how to measure how that money is being spent to see if you’re getting the results that you’d like to see in your business.

Tom Nixon (47:43.426)
Yeah, exactly. And it all perfectly aligns, you know, this is why we’re like we can, once you implement this, then you can speak shorthand, right? we’re going to advertise at top of funnel. Can we already understand that we’re trying to achieve awareness? We understand that the metrics going to be reached and we understand the messaging needs to be wide messaging, right? And the methodologies need to be, well, how do we get the best reach for the, the ideal customer client at the most affordable rates, right?

ensuring that we’re the most effective. And then we say, okay, well now we’ve got a middle of the funnel campaign that we’re going to use. We’re to retarget to the anyone that engaged at the top of the funnel. We’re to use the middle of the funnel messaging and they’re going to receive this sort of media, this message. Now we’re going to demonstrate how, cetera. So it becomes a shorthand in it again, then the most important thing to realize is that it’s the most, it’s the wisest application of any budget. If you align the activities, the budget,

in the methodologies, in the messaging, get them all locked into this model. And you’re going to be making the most efficient use of your marketing budget.

So, final thoughts, takeaways?

Curtis Hays (48:53.706)
Listen to us? I don’t know.

Tom Nixon (48:54.99)
No, don’t listen to us. Listen to those who came before us who established these methodologies, right?

Curtis Hays (49:01.196)
That’s true. actually, my brother used to have a toast to all those who came before us for sure. mean, you these are, there are smart people who paved the way for us to, came up with these, did the research behind these types of things, tried, tested and true. And like you said, we’re just combining those into a framework that allows us to execute for you to get to know your business, to get to know your customers, to help you.

plan out and spend your money in an appropriate way instead of lighting it on fire or throwing it into a slot machine and hoping something comes back out on the other end. And I more than ever know I need somebody like you who can help the right messaging into the right places that connect with the right people. And I think in turn you would say, hey, I need somebody like you, Curtis, who knows.

how to pull the levers within the platforms, to set the right bids and the right budgets within the various places and to be able to measure all the things that happen across those different stages. This is something that is sophisticated and definitely takes a team of people with different disciplines to plan out, to execute on and deliver on. frankly, it just, takes patience. There is no…

Tom Nixon (50:04.362)
Absolutely.

Curtis Hays (50:21.122)
one thing you’re going to do in 2025 that’s going to magically make leads come in. This is work to put this together and it does take time and take money, but when done correctly, can definitely grow a business and as an effective way to do marketing.

Tom Nixon (50:39.788)
Yep. I have two final thoughts. One is I’m borrowing from you. So you’ll like it. Start with a mindset. Do you think of marketing as an expense or an investment? And if you think of it as an expense, don’t waste it. Don’t spend it right. If you think of it as an investment, then invest wisely like you would in the stock market, right? It don’t chase daily returns, chase long term gains. So that’s one. And then this is I just made this up on

the spot. So, I’m going to leave people with this little quip and then we’ll see everyone next time at the next Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes but that thought is you can’t skip the funnel but you can equip the funnel and then you should flip the funnel. See you next time.