Quick question! What do all these roles have in common:
- Sergeant in the National Guard
- Pastor at a multi-site church
- Communications Professor
- Editor in Chief at Shopify
- VP at Common Thread Collective
Answer: They were all held by Aaron Orendorff at some point in the last 25 years.
So, how does one create such a varied career path?
“By necessity,” Aaron admits. “The theme of my career trajectory is to say yes, even if you don’t know how to do it — then go figure it out as fast as you can. Ignorance and enthusiasm cover a multitude of sins.”
Aaron sees the throughline in his career as the ability to communicate to effect change. He’s deeply studied how humans use words — whether written, spoken, presented, in ads, or somewhere else — to get what’s in their heads into someone else’s consciousness, influencing a purchasing decision or even helping them change something in their lives.
Today, as VP of Growth at FERMÀT, an e-commerce SaaS company, Aaron is most interested in the former. What does drive people to purchase, and how can companies optimize that process? Every day, he happily helps companies create funnels the same way they create ads. Read on to learn exactly what that means!
The E-Commerce Funnel May Be Dead…
Aaron began with FERMÀT as a consultant. As he dove deeper into his work with the company, he began to see the funnel in a new way. During this time, he stumbled upon a LinkedIn post by Sarah Levinger discussing how marketers treat the funnel versus how it actually works.
Marketers tend to think that a person: 1) sees an ad, 2) clicks on the ad to learn more, and 3) purchases the product if they’re interested.
But think about the way you buy things. Is it as easy as 1-2-3?
For many people, the true buying process looks like this:
- See an ad in the feed
- Get distracted by your dog
- Put down the phone and walk the dog
- See an organic post a few days later
- Like the post and make a mental note to learn more
- Keep scrolling and forget about the post
- See another ad a couple of days later
- Click the ad and browse the site
- Receive a work email and close the site to focus on work
- … And so on, until the magical moment when the stars align, and you have the desire and the capacity to make a purchase!
If you want to create a map that helps you understand how the funnel works now — a functional one that you can attach business metrics to — then you must be aware of this multi-step, real-world buying journey.
There is no continuous linear progression anymore, for the most part. Things are messy, and the steps are far from clear-cut.
…But It’s Still Valuable
Recognizing this new buyer’s journey doesn’t mean that the funnel has lost all value, though. Quite the opposite!
Aaron lives his day-to-day inside of the funnel, as a VP of Growth who’s responsible for increasing the quantity and quality of sales-qualified leads, or SQLs. SQLs exist as a stage of the funnel, so understanding all the steps a person has to go through before they become an SQL is critical — even if the path meanders more than a marketer might like.
“Even though you can’t anticipate exactly what’s happening at an individual level,” Aaron explains, “that doesn’t mean there aren’t large numbers and metrics at the macro level that I look to to see how I can increase SQLs. Which one of these layers can I play with the most? Where can I improve? How can I tweak? It’s wildly helpful for me.
“Holding those two ideas in tension — the individual personal experience against the macro metrics— that’s where the funnel is still wildly useful for all businesses.”
How To Create Funnels the Way You Create Ads
Given the increasing difficulty of tracking buyer behavior across platforms and channels, FERMÀT believes the best thing marketers can do is maximize congruence between the microsteps in an e-commerce funnel — from the ad on one end to the checkout on the other.
“An ad is three things: (1) offer, (2) audience, and (3) creative. Your offer,” Aaron emphasizes, “is the product, price, and positioning. It’s also your creative. Is it an influencer? Is it product photography? And then you’ve got your audience, who you’re trying to attract. So we’ve got an offer, the creative, and your audience.
“There’s often a chasm that exists between clicking the ad — which people have poured their heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears into — and hitting the website and being greeted with a product page on the website that email, organic, social, and paid traffic all go to.”
In other words, people click on an ad because they’re interested in the influencer who’s advertising to them or the product in the ad, and then they get lost on a website full of products, where it’s unclear where they should go or what to do next.
What can marketers do to bridge the chasm?
We have to acknowledge that while it sounds straightforward to just match your ads to your site experience, it’s kind of a nightmare on the backend. It’s difficult from a design and developer POV to whip up matching post-click experiences of the landing page, the product description page (PDP), and the cart for one product.
Imagine doing that at scale!
This is why FERMÀT exists. It allows companies to create templatized drag-and-drop, fully branded, website-independent pages. That way, the offer that you’re showcasing in your ad can be explained in the headline of the landing page. You could even take the same user-generated content (UGC) that’s in the ad and put that in the landing page itself — mobile optimized, of course.
“This creates a strong continuation and congruency between what’s clicked and the experience you have next,” Aaron points out, ” to make it native and create momentum all the way through.”
“You Cannot Create Desires”
One of Aaron’s biggest career lessons has been that when you’re looking to effect change in others, you cannot successfully create a new desire for your product.
What you can do is take an existing desire within your target audience and channel it to your product. This is what all great marketing (and communication!) starts with: a curiosity about what the person you want to influence already cares about.
“What do they worry about?” Aaron asks. “What are they fearful about? What’s really driving their decisions? Is it simply someone’s desire to not get fired when they’re making this decision? Do they crave safety? Do they need a lot of social proof therefore to do that? Do they need coverage?
“It has to start there—not with what is interesting about our product, about our service, and what we like to say about it. It has to start with what your audience actually already wants on an emotional level and then finding the throughline. That’ll pay off more than anything.”
