My Entire Marketing Strategy For 2026

        You have probably heard of something called a marketing funnel. And it's where you apply pressure for people to move from awareness into consideration into decision. And you want that to happen as fast as possible. But here's the problem. No one likes to be funneled. No one wants to be pushed and cajolled and squeezed. And you would hate that to happen to your grandma. Why would you want to funnel somebody that you love? And why would you want to funnel someone who you want to spend time with as a customer? So here's what's happened. The traditional marketing funnel has broken down. And Google has even confirmed this with their research. Now, when your parents or grandparents were starting a business, 2 to four touch points was enough to get somebody to buy something because people didn't have an entire universe of options available to them. But today, people don't buy until they've had 8 to 12 touch points. We need to change the way that we think about the marketing funnel because people do not like to be squeezed. They don't like the pressure. What they do like is positive experiences. So, we're going to talk about how to apply this to your marketing in the year ahead. In this video, I'm going to show you how to massively improve your marketing through something called a marketing playground. This is where you give people positive experiences that allow them to unlock the value that your business has to offer. Imagine there's your business and people don't even know that it exists. And what we do is we set up a series of fun experiences that lead people to understand who you are, what you do, and how you can add value. What I'm doing in the year ahead is focusing my marketing on three key phases that customers go through before they buy. The three phases is understanding their problem and me being able to empathize with the problem, showing people a process as to how they can solve the problem and then introducing them to the prize if they buy the solution. Now, if you try and introduce people to the prize too soon, they completely reject it. Even if you try and give people the solution through a process too early, they find that that becomes a bit pushy. It has to start back here with people who are problem aware. And I'll explain what that means. The way to make this work is to truly understand what makes your customers tick and to understand in their mind what is the buying journey that they go on. And it's a predictable journey. It starts out with something called being problem aware. People who are problem aware, they are aware that something is less than perfect in their life. They know that they've got some sort of a problem. Maybe their business isn't growing. Maybe their relationship's not going the way they want it to. Maybe their health and fitness is not where they think it should be. So they are aware of a problem, but at the moment they're not sure how to solve that problem. So the problem awareness is high but the solution awareness is low. As they start to research solutions and become more aware of solutions, they start to become educated about what they could do to solve their problem. And in the middle here, this is where the problems and the solutions start to meet. This is where they have an awareness of how their problem could potentially be solved in [music] the marketplace. Then customers start to have a preferred solution that they're looking at and they start to research that solution. They then want to confirm that buying this particular product or service would be a genuine solution to the problem that they've got. So they end up over here where they're trying to make this decision. So there are three distinct zones that people move through. The first zone is what we would call the zone of understanding the problem. The second zone is understanding what is the process and the final zone is accessing the prize. So if you want to have incredibly powerful marketing, you need to have experiences that people can have along their journey where they connect with their problem and they can empathize and understand their problem. They can then connect with a process or an understanding of best practices as to how they're going to solve this and then they can check to see if they are actually going to get the prize that they want if they buy your product or service. So here's what this could look like. Imagine for a moment that you create a miniourse helping people to understand the particular problem. Now imagine this. Imagine the headline is a problem aware headline. So it could say something like, "Are you frustrated that you're not losing weight despite the fact that you work out in the gym three times a week or more?" So that would be like, "Ah, you can empathize with me. That's incredible." What we're looking to do here when we create these types of assets is to have radical empathy. What does it feel like to have this problem and to feel misunderstood or out of alignment with the world? One experience could be a mini course. Another one could be a little quiz that helps you to diagnose the problem. Right? So, a problem diagnosis quiz. Are you struggling to get 7 hours worth of sleep each night? If so, answer these 15 questions to find out why. So, that would be a problem diagnosis quiz. Third option could be a discussion group. Now you could host this on Facebook or on WhatsApp and it could be a discussion group for people who are struggling with a particular problem. Do you have a difficult teenager? Join our WhatsApp group for parents who are struggling with dealing with a difficult teenager. So that would be a discussion group for people who can relate to a particular problem. Now all of these are experiences that people can have positive experiences where they actually get to connect and be reminded about the validity of their problem. Now there is a particular framework for creating any content that is problemaware content and it's called the clinical method. The clinical method is actually from the world of doctors and hospitals and clinics. The clinical method has four bases that we want to hit. There is the symptoms, the causes, the treatments and the prognosis. The symptoms are things that are going wrong that we notice. These are the things that are painful or frustrating or annoying that we see dayto-day. That's the things that people notice. The next thing is telling people what's causing that. So, if you're noticing these symptoms, here's why it's happening. Here's the cause of those symptoms. The treatment is what do you do about it? If you have these causes, how do you treat these causes? And the prognosis is how long does it take to fix? How long does it take to get a breakthrough? So, when you're creating problemaware content, I want you to focus on discussing symptoms, causes, treatments, and prognosis because that's the most valuable information for people who are here at this phase here called the problem aware phase. Once people understand their problem, they then want to naturally move to this middle zone, which is where they want to understand the process. Think about this as discovering best practices, discovering what works, figuring out all the things that you could be doing in order to get a breakthrough. Now, around this process, people love to read a book and they want to read a book about the process. They might want to listen to a podcast episode. And the podcast episode could be all about the process of going from point A to point B. They might want to see case studies so that they can understand what happened when someone went through that process. They might want to do a live workshop to be introduced to a process or a set of best practices that could help them with their problem. Or if the process is about a set of pillars or principles, they may want to take an assessment that benchmarks them as to where they're strong and where they're weak so that they can identify where to put their attention. So this is all about understanding the process that would solve the problem and unlock the prize. Now when people understand the process, this is where they really want to understand if they're buying the right thing that will give them the maximum benefit and the biggest prize possible. Now this is often where people want to have a one-to-one sales meeting or a one-to-one discussion. This might be where they want to have a free trial. This is where they get to have an experience and try on what it feels like to solve the problem. They may want to have an experience. So they could attend a particular event with your existing customers and clients and hear firsthand people describing what it feels like to be on the other side of this. They might also want to take a final assessment that tells them or calculates their upside. Maybe it's a calculator. And if they put their information into the calculator, it actually tells them what kind of return on investment they'll get. This also might be where someone actually wants to have an explainer video where it specifically talks through exactly what it's like to buy the product and what to expect when you do buy it. So, for example, with a physical product, you've seen those unboxing videos where it actually literally takes a physical product and unboxes it and shows the customer what it would be like to unbox the product. So, this is very much a product or solution focused part of the buying cycle. Now what your business wants to do is to create multiple experiences that help people to get clear about the problem, their symptoms, the causes, the treatment, the prognosis that introduces them to your process, your way of solving things, your principles, your process, your best practices, and then ultimately introduces them to the prize, the thing that solves the problem and actually gives them what they want. So if you take score for example, how have we scaled up rapidly to over 10,000 customers? Well, we have mini courses that explain the problem of lead generation and why it's so important and how most businesses struggle with that. We have a blueprint that explains to people how our methodology actually solves that problem. And we have free trials where people can start app with a free trial and actually test out our software and see if it works. Those are just some examples of what we've got. But we've also got scorecards. We've also got a book that people can read. We've got online courses. all sorts of stuff that people can experience that walk them through the problem, the process, and the prize so that it feels natural to buy. Now, here's the other good news. If you have a look in the score app template library, you'll actually discover that some of our scorecards are now organized by these three bases. We actually have scorecards that are deliberately designed to connect with people's problem and to empathize with people and help them to understand their problem. We have scorecards that are deliberately designed to educate people about your process. And we have scorecards deliberately designed to introduce people to your prize. And we've already organized that. If you want to put this in place, squareup.com is a really great place to orchestrate these campaigns. The key idea is that in the next 12 months, if you want to have marketing that works on autopilot if you just want happy, warm customers coming through the door, you can't just have one marketing funnel and you can't apply pressure and squeeze people towards becoming a client. You've got to give people positive experience that lead them to their own conclusion that you would be the best person to buy from. Now, if you get this right, your business will scale to the moon. You will have the most unbelievable marketing and sales results. Marketing and sales will go from something that frustrates you to something that delights you. You'll go from dealing with customers that have resistance to dealing with customers that are beating down the door and can't wait to buy. Okay, so here's what I want you to do. I would love for you to tell me which one of these marketing experiences are you going to put in place next. Leave me a comment below. Are you going to create a problem, process, or prize campaign? I'd love to see in the comments below which one you're going to implement first. If you haven't done so already, check out squapp.com to implement these campaigns. Give this channel a like, give it a subscribe.