You’re Not Bad at Digital Marketing, You’re Skipping a Step
Second in the series, Listen First, Optimize Second: Digital Marketing in the Age of AI, focused on marketing funnels and why finding customers is only half the job of keeping them.
Interview by Rachel Stewart, Co-Founder & Content Director
You post. You wait. Nothing happens. Sound familiar? Shannon Littke says the problem probably isn’t your content, it’s that you’re talking to the wrong audience.
In Part One of this series, Shannon Littke, founder of Keep Your Money Local, walked us through SEO as a form of listening at scale: learning what your customers are already telling you before you spend your marketing budget trying to reach them. But visibility is only the first step. Once someone finds you, what happens next matters even more.
This time, we’re starting to unpack that “what’s next,” beginning with the marketing funnel: how a business moves people from total strangers to customers who are actually ready to buy, and why the same “listen first” instinct that powers SEO shows up again here, this time as data. Sales funnels get their own deep dive in Part Three.
Picking Up Where We Left Off
Rachel: Last time, you laid out why the order of this series matters: SEO first, then marketing funnels, then sales funnels, then retention. Each one scaffolds onto the last. Before we dive into funnels specifically, can you remind readers why this is the natural next step after SEO?
Shannon: SEO gets you found. It’s the foundation to free searchable traffic – connecting with the people who are looking for exactly what you have with questions like.. “Google, where is the best ice cream in Sylvan Lake?”. If you’re ice cream stand comes up first, you are more likely to get the customer. It’s the process of answering your customers questions. You then take those questions and most importantly, your business solutions and start to spread that message far and wide. This is marketing done well.
Marketing gets people to trust you. Sales funnels turn that trust into customers through a simple process that removes extra decisions and distractions. Once someone enters your store (or your website), you don’t want to lose them to confusion, or decision fatigue (we all get this, especially during late night scrolling or busy days).
A properly done sales funnels helps you actively sort through the hot, warm, cold audience by connecting with your exact customer avatar by speaking directly to them. To hone this in, and find the perfect messaging though, that’s where your marketing comes in. You don’t want skip straight to selling to all 3 of these groups right away. You have to earn your customers’ attention first and build that relationship with them by showing up consistently. That’s what a marketing funnel is for.
What’s a Marketing Funnel?
Rachel: I think people hear “funnel” constantly, but I don’t think many people could tell you what one actually is. How do you explain it?
Shannon: Everyone understands the shape of a funnel where it’s wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. You’re taking something broad and pouring it into a smaller, more specific space. That’s exactly what happens with your marketing.
You start with a large-scale campaign where you’re talking to everybody. From that, you get to listen to what people respond to and what they ignore, and you start narrowing in on real interest. Say you’re selling ice cream in Sylvan Lake. You start by marketing to the whole city. Then you learn parents with kids respond more on hot days. Then you narrow further to a parent, at the beach, on a hot day, with kids in tow.
A fun way to look at this is where people are sitting in your funnel: ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu. The top of the funnel (ToFu) is your awareness campaign; big and broad, letting people know what you solve, problem wise. The middle of the funnel (MoFu) is where you dig into details of the problem you solve, and start sharing about how you actually solve it. Here, people are problem-aware and looking for the best solution. Moving people to the bottom of the funnel (BoFu) is all about positioning your businesses as the best solution, the exact solution to their problem.
As a business you are actively trying to attract the right people through your marketing efforts. You actually want to repel people who are not a good fit by telling the world what your product/solution IS NOT! This is possibly the most resisted aspect of marketing for owners because we all love our products and just can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t love it as well. But it truly is about attracting, not convincing.
Hot and Cold: Knowing the Temperature of Your Audience
It’s also useful to think of it as temperature. Cold audiences don’t know who you are yet and immediately respond to you with yeses and nos. Warm audiences have noticed you, maybe followed you, checked out your website. Hot audiences know what you sell, know they need it, and are ready to purchase. You have to talk to each group differently, and you can’t skip straight to hot.
You really want the no’s as much as the yes’s. If you’re trying to convince someone lactose intolerant that your ice cream is amazing, you’re wasting your time and your budget. That’s not failure, that’s the funnel working.
Tip: Do your own market research first. I love this step. Most solutions are not new and if you look hard enough, you can find other businesses who are doing exactly what you do. Don’t worry through, in my world we call this “funnel hacking” and it’s looking at whats already working in the market, collecting that information, and picking and choosing what parts you like best. Start there. Don’t copy, but become inspired and use this in your brainstorming steps.
Then back to listening and learning. Get into conversations with people who are talking about your solutions already, and the problems you solve. They are giving you the exact messages you want to hone in on. If you remember the last article, we talked about searching these conversations out on platforms like reddit, facebook, instagram, looking into communities and groups on these platforms and following those conversations to other funnels. You will find gold in this process.
Rachel: So where does the sales funnel come in?
Shannon: So marketing brings people into your world and builds trust. A sales funnel is what happens once you walk someone through an actual customer journey. They’ve found you, they know what you offer, they see you can solve their problem, and here is where you’re looking to convert the sale, and start truly serving these people with what you have to offer. And it doesn’t stop at the first product. This is where the real magic starts to happen.
Think back to selling ice cream on the beach. You’ve done the work to find the best day, the best spot, the right people. Now someone’s actually buying the ice cream. Your job as the business owner is to think one step ahead: what do they need next? Napkins. A drink. Sunscreen. Maybe they’re still hungry after and a hamburger stand two steps away is exactly what they need. A sales funnel pairs your first offer with the next logical need. It’s not just “buy this,” it’s understanding the whole moment your customer is standing in.
But I’ll go into more detail about sales funnels next time. They deserve their own deep dive. It’s pretty special when businesses understand this process. Sneak peak – it’s about turning a $5 sale into $150 and being able to serve at the highest level.
Data, Data, Data: Listening First and Listening Again
Rachel: This is really clarifying. So the marketing funnel does the work of finding your warm and hot people, and the sales funnel picks up from there to anticipate and deliver on your promised service and their anticipated needs.
Shannon: Exactly. And this is usually where businesses lose people (another leak point). They’ll build beautiful awareness campaigns, get people warm, even hot, and then hand them off to a sales page that isn’t designed for them. We will really dive into this more in the next part of this series.
Rachel: So where does listening come in?
Shannon: Listening looks like data and this isn’t a new concept for small businesses. Before you push anything into the world, you need to validate your idea by doing focus groups, market research, looking at what similar businesses are doing… This is the same theory but applied to your website. Once something’s validated, that’s when you start watching the data closely. Your web pages, your sales numbers, your key performance indicators, watching them is all listening. And this is where people typically go wrong; they either don’t look at their data or don’t make a system to review it regularly.
Rachel: Do they need to invest in new tools to track it?
Shannon: No, you can do this with a piece of paper and a pen. And honestly, that’s one of the best ways to start, because you’re not learning new software on top of everything else. For marketing specifically, track two things: what are you actually putting out to which audience temperature and what are you getting back. Give yourself fifteen minutes a day to review who responded and what they said. That alone will shape your next day and your next week.
Harvesting Your Efforts
Rachel: What really resonates with me is that you’re really asking people to build a reflective practice. You’re asking them to learn from their own experience because a business isn’t some abstract thing that exists out in the world on its own. It’s a product of someone’s work, time, attention, and resources. You’re asking them to take an interest in themselves.
And I’ll admit, with ROSE, it’s funny… by day, I do project management and program evaluation, so this kind of data-informed reflective work is my bread and butter and I am always telling leaders and teams to prioritize it. But with ROSE, where I’m the one creating and writing, I have to remind myself to carve out time for it. It’s a different headspace when the thing you’re assessing is your own, but I’m coming to appreciate that whatever gets people to actually prioritize that reflection, that’s worth it.
Shannon: Yes, and that’s honestly the biggest piece people miss. Even just getting started can sound scary if you haven’t done much marketing before. But it really starts with a small brainstorming session: draft out thirty ideas for your socials, schedule them out, and follow up on them. Even just that first month of doing the research is valuable on its own. Some of it, nobody will comment on and that’s fine. Some of it, people will. And when you go back and review that data, you’ll start to see patterns. Patterns in when people engage with you. Patterns in what they engage with. Patterns you never would have seen if you’d never looked.
Tip: It’s incredible how many tools are available now and it’s easy to get lost in “finding the best new platform”. Even more so, people are starting to build out their own tools with AI. But this can also lead to serious confusion, and delay for you if you’re just getting started. Most of our best social platforms and crm systems already have built in tracking and analytics that if used consistently, can provide immense value.
My tip for those new to marketing – start with one platform, build the content, use the built in analytics and remember the purpose of what you’re looking for in the data. You’re listening to what people are saying they need, what problems they have, and checking to see if you’re connecting with them with your solution.
If starting from scratch today, I’d start with Meta and Linked-In for professionals. You don’t have to set-up business suite accounts at first. You can actually schedule and track on most professional and business profiles. Spend some time at this level first, then when you start to garner some insights and sales, you can start optimizing your sales funnels. This is my favorite part of the process. The actual conversions, the real sales, the real results, and lasting relationships. Catch it all in the last part of this series where it’s all about sales conversions, life time value of customers, and continuing to serve your people through the next logical steps for them.
BIO
Shannon Littke is the founder of Keep Your Money Local, and a Funnel Builder helping local businesses generate more leads and sales through high-converting marketing funnels, SEO, and paid advertising strategies.