BUSI 103 - Introduction to Business (Chapter 11)
August 4, 2026
Customers do not decide the moment they hear about you - so how do you match your message, your tools, and your spending to wherever they are on the journey from stranger to advocate?
Read time ~27 min - ~4,055 words - problems ~40 min
Why this matters. Most people picture marketing as one message - one shot at a customer that either lands or does not. Real customers take a meandering journey from first hearing about you to buying, and the marketer who sees that whole progression communicates sharper and spends smarter than the one who treats every touch as make-or-break.
What you’ll be able to do.
The big ideas.
Key terms. customer journey, inbound marketing, outbound marketing, Web 2.0, user-generated content, content marketing, marketing funnel, conversion rate, retargeting.
Think about how you ended up at the college you attend now. At some point you had never heard of it. Then it got onto your radar - a friend mentioned it, a counselor suggested it, a mailer showed up, a search result surfaced. You looked closer: the website, a campus visit, conversations with students. Somewhere along the way it stopped being one option among many and started feeling like a real fit. Something finally tipped the scales, and you committed. And now, when someone back home asks about it, you tell them your story - which makes you part of the school’s marketing, whether you meant to be or not.
That journey took years, and the college was working on you for most of it. So put yourself on the other side of the desk. If you ran the school’s recruiting - the mailers, the visit days, the emails after you were admitted - where would the next dollar go? Which parts of your own journey did the school actually influence, and which parts happened without it? Hold that question. By the end of the chapter you will have the tools to answer it, and the closing exercise has you interview a classmate about exactly this journey.
A sale is not won or lost in a single moment - customers meander from first contact to purchase, and marketers shape the whole path.
In the marketing strategy chapter (Chapter 9) we worked out the strategy - who to serve, what to promise, and why a funnel has to exist at all. This chapter finally gets into the tactics of marketing and sales: thinking about marketing as a funnel, and thinking about the customer journey.
As people think about it, marketing is just one message. It’s the one time we talk to a customer and either something happens in that moment or it doesn’t. It turns out that customers take a meandering time, stretched out over time, a journey around: finding out about us, discovering that they have a need, thinking about us, making considerations, getting interested, getting more intentional, and finally making a sale.
Marketers have a chance to influence the entire progression of what that process looks like. Judging every single touch as a success or failure - one interaction, instead of an integrated set of interactions - misses that. It also means that, based on where a customer is in their customer journey, they might need to hear specific customized messages to help them along that process. Seeing how that thing unfolds over a period of time is how sophisticated marketers do it.
A company that is incredibly valued by a smaller group of people can win without winning the mass market.
The whole thing here is companies can thrive without being the biggest player in the market. You could focus a lot on very niche markets, get real good loyalty, and have unique value propositions. When you focus on that and you’re incredibly valued to a smaller group of people, that is another way to thrive.
Patagonia is the case study here. They’re focused on sustainability and community. Not everybody cares about that, but a small group of people could care a lot about that - enough to create enough repeat business to make Patagonia a very successful company.
So the role of modern marketing is to enable a company to attract and retain customers. They have to emphasize the value they create, not just price competition, where we’re just kind of in a race to the bottom. Inbound marketing and content strategies are key tools, particularly in this age where a lot of customers are pretty sophisticated and they’re searching for what they need out there on the Internet.
Instead of interrupting people, inbound marketing makes you findable - so that when customers go looking, you are there.
Inbound marketing is about attracting customers without interrupting their lives. The alternative is blaring messages at them, interrupting them at dinner, throwing messages in front of them, stopping them from their day - which can seem kind of invasive. Instead, we focus on creating some valuable content to attract customers and pull customers in, so when they’re searching for something, you’re there. This contrasts with outbound marketing, which is also still important, but where you’re out there indiscriminately injecting a message that may or may not be something that customers care about or even welcome at the time.
The inbound methodology runs in steps. We attract and bring in the right people with content and conversations that are stuff that they’re looking for in the first place. It also helps us get established as somebody who knows something about this space. We engage them and present insights or solutions that are along with things that they happen to be looking for already. If we do something good there, we kind of earn the right to keep the relationship going and possibly think about making a sale on the product of a good or service. The methodology’s third step - delight - is support and content that keeps customers satisfied and turns them into promoters. (Steps: lesson deck, inbound methodology slide.)
Some examples of this: HubSpot sells software, and they have a blog with a lot of educational content on people who have used their service - how do they use it, how do they get success, and how does it help small businesses figure out just what this could look like for them? This is all educational content more than sales content. People offer free resources and advice on how things work - how social media management works (Buffer’s free guides) is just something that’s helpful but also establishes credibility in the space. People might give a set of tools, like diagnostic tools (Moz’s SEO tools), things that are going to provide you with information and some education. As a way that might do a couple things: you might learn that certain products would be valuable to you, and you might learn about certain providers - somebody who knows more about the space. This is a way for them to do that and showcase expertise.
Interactive media turned marketing from a display into a conversation - and every interaction leaves a trail you can read.
I think about this like harnessing Web 2.0 - the shift from static web pages to interactive, user-driven content. When that came out we were able to have a more interactive way to interact with audiences. We’re not just showing a web page, where they see it, maybe they leave. We might have things where they can interact: they can put in comments, they can ask questions, they could click on links that lead to other things. This interaction is something that leaves a trail. When we’re writing content it’s not just a display ad, where we don’t know who sees it. We can get a sense of who’s interacting with the media that we put out there and get a sense of: Is this something that’s hitting well with customers? Are they interested? Is it leading them to explore other things? Is it leading them to reach out to us? These were tools that marketers had as Web 2.0 came out.
Now customers can act, and companies actually engage with customers through their searching for information. This gives us a sense of who’s really interested in this topic and who might be really interested in dealing with us. If you think about that customer journey, it might be the person that’s just starting and isn’t really serious yet - maybe not ready for a hard sell - but somebody who’s really been visiting a lot of this stuff is primed for making a purchase. It might make sense that now is a different time to engage them with something more intentional.
User-generated content builds a kind of trust no ad can buy - customers telling the story are more credible than the company telling it.
One case study is Airbnb. They did a lot of user-generated content, so people would stay at these places and post reviews, photos, or personal experiences. This stuff helped generate some trust and authenticity, because not just the company was talking about this - people were actually sharing their experiences. This helped build credibility and trust from their own customers. They’re interested in creating more of a community between both travelers and hosts. You can find this content on Airbnb to help get an understanding of what it is, and as you get more of an understanding of what that is, your interaction is going to show whether you are more interested in actually potentially participating in a service like this.
GoPro, these cameras - they did something similar. These are cameras for people who have a more adventurous life and they want to film it, and they built these devices to help do that. The one great way to show what these things can do is to just showcase the actual products. Customers share their experience and their videos of what they can do. They became ambassadors - inadvertent ambassadors or explicit ambassadors - for the brand. There is no better way to showcase what this product can do than to show what people have made with it on platforms like YouTube or Instagram. They’re kind of helping promote that community of creators, because it helps them express themselves or just do what they want to do. It also helps the company GoPro connect with more people who are interested in this community. It’s good for finding access for like-minded people and also showing them what they can do.
Content marketing solves the customer’s problem first and lets the sale follow - and because it is digital, you can measure whether it is working.
This kind of falls in this area of content marketing. We’re creating value by creating content that’s informational, that customers want to understand. It’s not necessarily directly tied to a purchase right now, but it’s creating and distributing something valuable, relevant, and consistent that can help customers decide what they want to do and whether or not they wanna do business with you. It focuses not so much on why this product is great and why you should buy it, but on solving a problem that a customer has at the time, or helping them answer a question rather than that direct selling.
This can be done in the form of blogs, information articles, videos, or how-to videos, tutorials. When people are trying to figure out more things and get educated in the space, social media is a way to engage and just be entertaining and interesting. Anything that kind of explains and educates.
A lot of these things are measurable, particularly if they’re digital. We can see how much people like or share or view, how much time they spend looking at our content. Does this directly lead to leads? Are they clicking directly to our sale page? For all of those people who come to the page, how many of them actually become customers? These are things that we can measure. We used to measure this indirectly - we don’t know who walks by a billboard and whether or not they see it. In the digital world we do have a good way of seeing a lot of different things and how people react. Based on that learning we can optimize the kind of content that customers find valuable, because they engage in it, and valuable to us: not only do they engage, but that turns into an eventual sale down the road, and we can understand what that looks like and how it happens.
The funnel is an abstraction of the customer journey - you cannot want what you have never heard of, and you will not buy what you do not want.
We talked about this funnel, and it’s good to get a concept of what this looks like. The marketing funnel is an abstraction. It’s a conceptualization that represents a customer’s journey from just not knowing about you to being a full customer. The stages are:
If you think about this, it kind of makes intuitive sense. You can’t be interested in something if you don’t even know that it’s there. If you’re not interested in it, you probably wouldn’t start wanting it, and if you didn’t want it, you probably wouldn’t take action and make a purchase. This is kind of a pathway - customers start off not knowing anything about you. How do they get to the point where they’re actually buying something? They don’t just wake up one day and say, “I absolutely need this.” They start and they follow a more indirect path that starts with just even being aware of this problem, moving into more and more intentional behaviors.
[Exhibit omitted from this web edition pending a rights-cleared version.]
The marketing funnel: awareness, interest, desire, action.
Once they become a customer, the journey doesn’t stop - marketers add a fifth stage, advocacy. Just because they’ve become a customer doesn’t mean the job’s all done yet. There’s more that we could do to provide value to them, and more that the customer could do to provide value for the business.
At every stage of the funnel, marketing is trying to accomplish something different - and forcing the wrong job at the wrong time reads as pushy and fails.
What’s important to say is that at different stages of the funnel, marketing has a different job to do. If you are not even aware, we’re not trying to force down your throat all these different features and how we’re better than the competitors. You’re not even aware that you have a problem yet. We should be talking about that piece that is tied to your stage.
Awareness. At the awareness stage we wanna attract potential customers just to even know about us. If they’re thinking about this problem that we could solve, they should be thinking about us as well. Do people know that we exist, or that the problem exists? The key challenge is just getting onto their radar. That’s why you see a lot of marketing is just something very simple. It’s just the brand. The brand is out there. Just knowing about it is something that is valuable. People cannot figure out if they want you until they even know that you exist.
Interest. Getting them interested is like, “Hey, if it becomes clear to you that this is a problem, you’re more aware. We want to make you interested and get your attention. Provide information that might help you evaluate whether or not you wanna think about this some more - in particular, think about the company.” The key challenge is we need to help the customers get smart and learn how to evaluate who is good in this space. They have to care about it, but now they actually get smart at doing it. They have to kind of know what are the right features to think about - and particularly those features that make us look good.
Desire. Desire is like now you’re really kind of leading with why you’re better. Why you’re better than doing nothing. Why are you better than the competition? You want people to want your thing now that you already know that they’re interested in solving a problem. The key challenge here is that you have to build trust and preference, and that you are a unique fit over other alternatives right at that stage.
Action. The final thing is making the difference between just thinking about it and doing something about it. Can we get customers to actually make a commitment? You could imagine how bad it would be if we jumped right to the action stage when they weren’t even ready. It would seem pushy. It probably wouldn’t work. You’d be focusing a lot on getting a customer to do something that they’re not ready to do. How do we reduce the friction in prompting a decision? How do we make it easy for them to feel good about it and to take the action to actually make the sale? It’s good to diagnose what stage they’re in and kind of tailor your message to that particular time.
Advocacy. Finally, afterwards: once they are a customer, we want to make sure that they are recommending us. That is the best form of marketing that we could get. It’s very targeted, it’s very credible, it works wonders. What do we do there? We have to make sure that we’re delivering experience - not that this is just okay, but that it’s worth talking about with other people. We would love them to become our own advocate and convert others at low cost. What are things that we can do for them to reinforce their decision? The economics of this stage - why a referred customer is the cheapest, most credible acquisition there is - ran through the marketing-as-investment chapter (Chapter 10).
At each stage of the funnel we’re trying to achieve different things.
Translate each stage’s goal into tactics - the tool that wins awareness is not the tool that closes the sale.
At different stages we have a different goal, and then we translate that, tactically, to a different tool.
| Stage | Goal | Useful tools |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Get noticed and build recognition | Blogs, SEO, social media |
| Interest | Educate and deepen curiosity | Educational content, website content, email |
| Desire | Build preference and confidence | Demos, testimonials, offers, direct reassurance |
| Action | Encourage commitment | Promotions, retargeting, clear calls to action |
| Advocacy | Turn experience into word of mouth | Good experience, follow-up, support |
(Table: lesson deck, “Different Tools Matter at Different Stages.”)
For awareness we want to get noticed. If you have articles or blogs, make sure that when people search, we are being found. That is for people who are looking to find us - we want to make it easy to be found.
Interest is for people who are already thinking about this. We want to educate them. We want to sharpen that curiosity. We can have very targeted things around topics they’re already aware of - content on how-to or specifics. They can sign up for emails that teach us something about them, what their level of interest is, and we can deliver the kind of stuff that’s going to satisfy that need for them at that time.
Once we’re at the desire stage, this is about building preferences for us over different alternatives. Here’s where it’s time to start talking and doing demonstrations of our products versus others, getting testimonials - people are trying to figure out whether or not they should buy from you or from others - perhaps providing offers or promotions.
Then we’re really getting into getting them to make a commitment once they finally are about to make a sale, and we want to encourage this commitment. This is about very specific promotions and retargeting. That’s like if they put something into their shopping basket but they don’t go there - we can go back and remind them. Basically this is all about a very clear call to action, and action is purchasing.
Finally, how do we turn this into word of mouth with advocacy? We want to follow up with them. We want to let them know that we care. We want to make it easy for them to support us, to write comments on us, to advocate for us, to answer surveys positively about us, all of that. Follow-up is what follows.
At different stages we have different tools that marketers will use to meet customers where they’re at, at different stages of this marketing funnel.
Track the conversion rate at every stage - the funnel tells you not just that marketing is underperforming, but exactly where.
All along here it’s important to know that marketers have different analytical tools. We’re tracking conversion rates at each stage of the funnel: how many people from one stage go to the next, to identify where we might have drop-off points if things aren’t converting well. That helps us problem-solve very specifically.
For example, we can get people aware of us, but then we can’t get them to desire us. Maybe it’s because our value proposition needs work, or we’re not communicating things right. Maybe we’re focusing on benefits that customers care less about - and it helps guide our problem-solving. Perhaps we get people who always say that they really like us, but they just won’t commit. We can ask what the reason is: is it because of affordability? Is it because it’s too inconvenient to make the purchase, or there’s something that kind of spooks them?
Having a funnel allows us to really unpack what problems could be and experiment around specific solutions that are going to generate different kinds of behaviors. There are a lot of tools out there that help us understand where people are - Google Analytics and some software packages that help track where customers are in their journey - so we can understand the performance of the whole marketing machine. We can also understand, for specific customers, what kind of intervention we think is going to have the highest likelihood of working well in that particular case.
All of this helps us understand how we improve the ROI of our marketing, because we’re always asking not just “should we do something” but “what should we do in this particular case, for this particular customer, given their level of readiness of interacting with us?” You can get very, very optimized on how to deliver great marketing.
Once you know a customer’s stage, spend where it will make the most difference - promotions are wasted on people who would have bought anyway.
It helps us attract specific prospects, so we know how to build awareness. Not only do we know that they’re at that stage, but what are the tools? What are the things we’ve done in the past that have worked the best there? We can start favoring some of those things and perhaps doing less of the things that don’t convert as well.
Nurturing leads: using email marketing, or reaching out, or targeting ads to specific people who have already shown that they’re interested in relevant content.
Finally, conversions. When we have promotions or trials, these things all cost money. We would love to use them where they’re going to make the most difference. There are some people who are ready to make purchases right away. We don’t just want to throw this everywhere. We don’t want to throw this to people who we know are already going to buy things and just give them free stuff. Using specific promotions, we want to use those where they’re going to make the most difference - and it helps to know who is at the perfect stage of the marketing funnel for us to engage them.
So run your own college choice back through the funnel. Where did the school tend to win awareness - the mailer, the friend, the search result? What sources were most important in moving from awareness to serious interest? What made it feel like a real fit rather than just one option among many? What actually triggered action? And what has most shaped your advocacy since you enrolled? (Questions: lesson deck, Oberlin debrief slide.) Answer those five questions and you have answered the question from the opening: the next recruiting dollar goes to the stage where the school is losing people it should be winning - and now you know how to find that stage. One caution from the same slide, worth keeping: the funnel is useful because it helps organize the journey into stages, but real customer decisions are often messier, more iterative, and more human than the model suggests.
11-1 Choosing your college: the interview. [LO1, LO3] Interview a classmate about how they moved from first hearing about this college to choosing it - and how their view has evolved since. Work through the journey stage by stage: Awareness - When did you first hear about the school, and how? What other schools were on your radar, and what stood out (or didn’t) at that first moment? Interest - What information did you look for next, and where did you find it (friends, website, visit, counselor)? What questions were you trying to answer at that point? Desire - When did it start to feel like a real option? What moment, person, or experience made it feel like a fit? Action - What tipped the scales? Who influenced the final choice, and did schools communicate anything useful at that moment? Advocacy - What has confirmed or challenged the choice since enrolling, and how do you describe the school to others now?
11-2 Mapping the funnel to the interview. [LO3, LO4] Using your interview: Where did the school tend to win awareness? What sources were most important in moving from awareness to serious interest? What made it feel like a real fit rather than just one option among many? What actually triggered action? What has most shaped advocacy after enrollment? Close with the model check: where do you see the funnel fitting well, and where does it oversimplify reality? Finish with a recommendation - what should the school highlight to attract students like your classmate, and at what stage?
11-3 The leaking funnel. [LO4] A local fitness studio posts constantly on social media and gets strong reach - thousands of views a month. A fair number of people click through to the class schedule. Very few ever book a first class, and among those who do, most come once and never return. Almost no members bring friends. Diagnose stage by stage: name each funnel stage, identify the two worst drop-off points, propose the most likely cause of each, and design one specific experiment per drop-off that would test your diagnosis.
© 2026 Eric Lin. All rights reserved. This chapter is provided for students in BUSI 103 - please do not repost or redistribute without permission.