In this round‑table, host Eric Siu and a group of marketing leaders share five concrete funnel tactics. Siu argues that creators should abandon the “publish everything” mindset and instead produce a single, best‑in‑class piece of content and pour all promotion effort into it. Another speaker stresses building lead magnets by working backwards from the desired purchase, tailoring the offer to the prospect’s fears and motivations. Melanie Perkins explains how Canva grew by solving a high‑frequency, high‑impact problem for social‑media marketers, turning those early users into a word‑of‑mouth engine. A sales‑focused participant describes the importance of uncovering each buyer’s unique motivation—whether time‑saving, status, or ego—and framing the solution accordingly. Finally, a Facebook advertising expert outlines a “recipe” system that mixes ad copy, product targeting, and demographic attributes, then rapidly tests and iterates at massive scale to optimize creative for specific audience segments. Across the discussion, the panel emphasizes deep audience understanding, minimal but high‑quality assets, and data‑driven, iterative promotion as keys to funnel success.
Chapters
Hey, my name is Eric Siu and I got 6 marketing funnel tips for you that will blow your mind away forever. Most people have a new website with no links, with no traffic, with no audience, with nothing. And if that's the case, that's why I say you need to not create that much content. Instead, you need to create very little content and focus on getting that content into the hands of more people. Now, that means if you write an article about customer acquisition, let's say, and then 1,000 people read that article, chances are there's another million people in the world that can read that same article. Now, most people, when they look at traffic acquisition from a blogging standpoint, they think, well, let me put out as much content as possible and hope something hits, right? But instead, I say people should spend most of their time creating the best article on customer acquisition possible. Like the number one default resource on customer acquisition, and then focus on getting that one resource into the hands of as many people as possible. So it's not about creating, it's about promoting your content.
It's not just— I don't go do advertising just to get people that might want the lead magnet. I only want to get people to opt in for the lead magnet that want to buy my product. So I want to position my lead magnet in a way that it's actually going to lead to the desired result of the product. Otherwise, I'm just spending money to get leads that have no interest in what it is that I'm selling. So for a simple So when you're building a funnel, assuming like a product or a service or something like that, what I would do is I would work backwards from where am I trying to get them, what are the things that I know about the person that's going to want to buy that product or service, and it might even be just opting in to talk with me about, you know, a bigger service. That could be the end result where I'm trying to get somebody, but what do I know about that person, what do they want, what are they afraid of, and then I want to create a lead magnet that is extremely enticing to them, and I want to deliver it in a way that will highlight all the benefits of what they can get by continuing on with me and also diminish the fears that they have, I want to make sure I talk to those.
I think the most important thing for any company is to solve an important problem. And so if you solve a problem that affects a lot of people, it really helps— well, firstly, you have an audience when you launch your product because they actually care about the thing. And then secondly, they'll tell other people because they care about that problem too. And so for social media marketers and bloggers, they had a really significant problem that they had to create a lot of visual content without having had any design experience typically. And so what we were able to do with Canva was really tap into their needs, solve their problem very specifically, and then not only did they use our product, but they then helped to spread it. And so in our early days, we spent a lot of time working with social media marketers and bloggers to help spread the word about Canva and to get them on board and excited and to engage them as part of our community. And so I think that that was a really important thing. Also to think about the frequency of needs. So social media marketers and bloggers have a very frequent They had a frequent need for visual designs, and so they were a perfect network to tap into in our early days. And then from there, we really had— and even today, most of our traffic is still coming from word of mouth.
You know, the thing we try to do upfront in sales or even our customer success team is like we ask, you know, at the end of this trial or at the end of this subscription, like what's gonna make it a no-brainer for you to subscribe or buy CB Insights? And so like if we can— so that tells us a lot about what they care about. You know, sometimes they'll say, well, our company cares about this, but like oftentimes they'll say like, you know, hey, like I spend a lot of time gathering financing data by reading 40 different blogs. So for that person, like we're going to show them like how we're going to save them a ton of time while somebody else who's like, oh, I present at senior meetings and I'm at conferences all the time. I need, I need cool stuff that I can share. Like then we're going to show them a whole different set of capabilities. So that's the thing I think I learned at Amex was that like how everybody's got Different motivations. It's not about revenue or cost, or, you know, sometimes it's more, it's more ego-driven things. You gotta find what those are and, and like figure out how your solution— you gotta get sort of in the skin of a customer and then figure— show them how your solution helps them solve that issue or solve that challenge or that need that they have.
Well, Facebook has a wealth of data on everyone that uses Facebook. They know literally everything about You, right? So we've been able to take what we call recipes. So we take different ingredients, and these ingredients could be ad copy, could be product targeting, and it could be different demographic attributes as well. And we rapidly test these throughout our channel. And the beautiful thing about this is that if we have a certain demographic profile that we are targeting on Facebook, all 4 to 5 of those products that we're targeting to that demographic, we know have a certain appeal, right? So for males, We know that brown, black, and blue tend to be the top-selling colors for males, so they would see only those colors, whereas females might see a baby pink, a baby blue, and a purple. And that level of targeting is really unprecedented, and the scale at which Facebook will allow you to do that sort of testing is unprecedented. So once we figure out what attracts a certain customer, then we'll continually reiterate on that testing to drive further results.
This move to kind of product or free products as an acquisition source. And so we all know, like if you come from the marketing world, you went from the old model of cold calling people, right? That was the old school model and that was mostly enterprise sales model. And then you went to a model in the last whatever, 7, 8 years where you created content. So kind of inbound approach, you created content, you gave away ebooks, you gave away webinars, you gave away something of value in order to get contact information. And then you would follow up to try to convert someone. And then you've seen this new wave of companies who are using either their core product or side projects or side products to give away something of value. Instead of giving away an ebook, the new ebook is giving away a product that people love and use every day. And then as they use that product, there's a natural kind of synergy with your product and a natural path for them to kind of upgrade or to move into your bigger product.
