MFG #08: The Marketing Flywheel, Customer Onboarding, Comparison Pages, and more.
How to reduce marketing labour with flywheels, why you're thinking about customer onboarding wrong, and how to beat competitors with comparison pages.
Hi there.
Welcome to the 15 new subscribers that joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Every other week, I share 1 interesting thing from my week, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.
This week, I talk about marketing attribution, customer onboarding, and comparison pages. I also have a great guest insight from Koyejo Olatoye, who writes one of my favourite newsletters, Krave.
Also, remember in the first issue of this year, I set a goal to build a community around MFG, especially for marketers who reside in Ibadan (but open to marketers everywhere). I’ve started with a small WhatsApp group — please reply to this email with your phone number or drop a comment if you’d like to join. I won’t be sharing the link publicly for now, because I want to begin with high-intent members.
Fair warning; this week’s issue is a tad long, but it might be one of my favourites so far.
Let's dive in!
🔑1 Interesting Thing
This weekend, I was working on an anniversary gift for my partner, so I downloaded an app, Starmaker, to help me with a section of it. Starmaker is an audio social app best used for karaoke covers — I ended up not using the app for the gift because as it turns out, I’m a terrible singer, but that’s not the focus here.
I first found out about Starmaker through video ads on Candy Crush, but I ignored them because I didn’t have a use for the app at the time. When I did need Starmaker this weekend, I couldn’t remember the app’s name, so I searched “music recording studio” on Google Play Store and saw an ad for it. I clicked this ad and downloaded the app.
Now, the marketer monitoring channel data for Starmaker might assume that I downloaded Starmaker because of their app store ad, but it was really their Facebook ad (placed on Candy Crush) that did most of the work — the app store ad just made it easier for me to find what I was looking for.
Here’s another example: in the past few months, my partner and I have bought the fruit drink, Sosa, a few times. We first tried Sosa at a Shoprite branch where they were giving out free mini-samples. We tasted it in-store that day but didn’t buy a bottle immediately. In fact, it took over a month for us to buy our first bottle of Sosa. But the decision-clinker was really that first free sample over three months ago.
This brings me to one of the biggest problems marketers face — attribution. How do you know which channels are really the most successful? Is it the first ad that a customer sees or is it the most recent one? It’s one of the reasons why data can never fully answer all questions, no matter how much performance marketing promises that it will. There are a few theories, like the Rule of 7 (which I discussed in the second issue of MFG) that also help make sense of this.
The big question, though, is how to solve this. I wish I had one big-swoop answer for this, but the truth is there isn’t one — it’s why there are so many arguments about the best attribution model to use. There are a few things you can do once you recognise the problem, though:
Map your user journey. Think about the journey your customer takes before they decide to buy your product and meet them at each point. For example, Starmaker had Meta ads to meet me at the awareness stage and app store ads to meet me at the decision stage.
Choose an attribution model that works for your campaign goal. If you’re trying to drive awareness about your product, a first-interaction model is great. If your focus is on conversion, then you can maybe try the last-interaction model and the last non-direct model. I’m trying to keep this short, so you can read more about attribution models if you’re new to them.
Rather than doing guesswork, just ask customers. You can include a “where did you hear about us?” question in your sign-up flow to see which channel your customers attribute their conversion to.
The truth is that data can never really answer all questions — it can only try. But if you have a good mix of data, the right attribution model, a great understanding of context, and real answers from customers, you already have enough to make informed decisions.
TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): Data can’t really tell you what marketing channel is most successful for getting you customers. However, you can ask customers, map your user journey, and choose an attribution model that works best for your business and goal.
💭3 Insights
#1. Flywheels reduce marketing labour and are better than funnels.
Insight from Adekoyejo Olatoye, who writes the Krave newsletter and works as a Product Marketing Manager at Unified Payments (the PSP that powers most fintech giants, including Flutterwave, Paystack, OPay, and all banks in Nigeria). This insight (Insight #1) is written from Koyejo’s POV. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. He’s also starting a YouTube channel, where he’ll speak about marketing, sales, and growth in tech.
Most marketers are already familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel. The problem with the funnel is that the customer’s journey ends once the funnel closes, after the customer has been sold to.
However, with the flywheel, you have an unending cycle where your customers become brand ambassadors and promoters.
Image credit: aira.net
The customers that you have sold to also bring in new customers to the top of the funnel. So, instead of working to bring more individual customers, you get a ripple effect where you can grow on autopilot. This means your growth is cheaper because you aren’t spending as much on marketing. The flywheel is also important if you’re trying to achieve product-led growth.
This strategy is what Unified Payments has leveraged for over 20 years and it has been going so well, to the point where we have clients we’ve retained for over a decade. We have B2B clients that leave their companies, start at new places, and still introduce us at their new place and keep us on. The flywheel can look different for B2B and B2C audiences though, which is why I’m working on some changes for one of our B2C products, PayAttitude.
TL;DR: The Flywheel model helps turn customers to promoters and takes a load off your marketing team.
#2. Customer onboarding does not start when they sign up to use your product.
Customer onboarding is one of my favourite things to optimise in products. If you Googled “customer onboarding,” the first definition you would get is one that calls onboarding “the process that new users go through to get set up and start using your product…from initial sign-up to product activation and first use.” This is a widespread understanding of customer onboarding.
However, customer onboarding does not just start when a person signs up on your product. It starts from their very first interaction with your product. I first realised this when I started doing product teardowns. I’d begin teardowns by Googling companies or clicking on ads, visiting their websites or app store pages, and then actually signing up. While doing this, I realised that many products had a heavy disconnect between the content across these different touchpoints and this drastically affected my experience in the actual product.
For example, I tore down a product that promised that I could begin doing x action in the app in three easy steps. They used this messaging on ad messaging and on their website. Imagine my surprise on entering the product and finding no such easy three steps. No amount of in-app onboarding could ease the experience for me.
This means that we need to have a more holistic view of onboarding. Too many onboarding specialists are disconnected from experiences that happen outside the app, so they end up building in-app experiences for people without considering the expectations that have been set for them outside the app. Onboarding needs to consider the messaging customers receive outside the app and ensure there is a seamless transition between the messaging and expectations that a potential user has outside a product and the ones that they see inside the product.
TL;DR: Customer onboarding cannot simply begin when a person signs up as a new user. Onboarding specialists need to ensure there is cohesion between the messaging users receive outside the app and the messaging they receive in-app during the onboarding process.
#3. Comparison pages are great for helping move customers along the funnel quicker.
Every product, even the most innovative ones, has competitors. There is no problem your product solves that people are not already solving with an alternative product. The idea is for your product to solve the problem in a better, cheaper, easier, or faster way.
This means that your customers are already aware of the ways they could get their problems solved. The onus is on you to prove that your product solves this problem better. This is especially important if you play in a competitive market. It needs to be easy for potential customers to see what makes your product better than others.
This is where comparison pages come in. Comparison pages make it easier for customers to decide between you and your competitors. Even better, they allow you to tell your story yourself and shine a light on all the places where you win. For example, your product might cost more than competitors but provide access to a wider range of features. If you leave customers to do their own research, they might make decisions based on price alone. With comparison pages, you can show customers the value they get for that cost, compared to the lower value they’d get with competitors.
The bonus is that it’s great for SEO, especially if your customers are already searching for alternatives to competitors. Your comparison page can target high-intent keywords about competitor alternatives, e.g. “Figma alternative” “Figma vs Photoshop” etc. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that more products don’t have dedicated comparison pages.
TL;DR: Comparison pages let you shine a light on the best aspects of your product and make it easy for customers to choose you over competitors.
⚡5 Pieces of Marketing
In keeping with insight #3, I’ll focus on comparison pages this week.
#1. Buymeacoffee’s Patreon Comparison page👍🏽
Everything about this page *chefs kiss*.
#2. Buymeacoffee’s Ko-Fi Comparison page👍🏽
Including Buymeacoffee’s second comparison page, because it’s even more excellent. I recommend viewing the full website. Notice how the comparison table they use for Ko-fi is different from that of Patreon.
#3. Wotnot’s Drift Comparison Page👍🏽
Love the puns. More than that though, they clearly have a deep understanding of the failures of their competitor (Drift).
#4. Savvycal’s Calendly Comparison Page👍🏽
Again, a clear understanding of who their biggest competitor is and what its failures are.
#5. Air’s Dropbox Comparison Page👍🏽
Who doesn’t love a good pun? P.S. I’m showing an older version of Air’s comparison page because I think it’s a lot better than what they have right now.
A little about you
I’m on a quest to know more about my subscribers, so every month, I’ll have a random question here to help me know a little about you.
One of my favourite newsletter writers asked an interesting question this week and I thought it was interesting so I’ll ask you as well:
If you could only keep your subscription to one marketing newsletter, which would it be?
My answer? Jared Hermann’s 5-Bit Fridays (a subset of How They Grow) because he collates from other sources, which means it’s like getting multiple newsletters in one. What’s yours? You can reply to this email or leave a comment to let me know.
What I’m Reading
How To Engineer Word of Mouth — Includes 5 real tactics to help you implement the flywheel in your product.
Creating Products That Stick (and how to do it) — Short to-the-point post with real-life examples about how to build products (single-player vs multi-player framework).
Matching Price to Value—3 Lessons in Monetization — Interesting article about how to set the right price for your product.
You Are Doing Email Personalization Wrong. Here's Why — Great article about how to do email personalisation beyond first name.
Surveys — How you can use surveys to personalise customer experience.
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I enjoyed reading this. However, I'm of the opinion that the flywheel is only a sugarcoated word for Loyalty (the last stage in the marketing funnel). I mean, that's why it's called loyalty, right? And there are loyalty programs that even further solidifies this.
Great work Lade. 👏