KEYNOTE: Ashley Faus

Instead of moving through a traditional linear funnel, or engaging in a looping decision journey, customers choose their own adventure, charting their own path across all channels. As marketers, we need to treat the buyer’s journey like a playground: people can enter and exit as they please, they can go in any order, and they can engage with content the “wrong” way. We need to create seamless, helpful, and impactful journeys, no matter which path the audience takes. In this session, we’ll explore how to design, execute, and measure journeys that behave more like playgrounds to deliver more value to our audience AND our business. Core concepts that I cover: Pitfalls of the traditional funnel models Content depths: conceptual, strategic, and tactical (and why they’re NOT the same as funnel stages) Intent: Trust, Learn, Help, Buy, Use (again, NOT the same as funnel stages) Time horizons and how it impacts tactical choices in your journey design Connecting your audience journey across multiple touchpoints (option not to buy, explicit CTAs, trends on social and search impacting journey choices) Measuring the playground journey (hint: you can’t rely on CTR alone, rethinking MQLs as a KPI, and matching time horizons with channel, intent, and metrics) Bio: Marketer, writer, speaker by day… singer, actor, fitness fiend by night! I’ve handled all aspects of marketing strategy and execution, from product marketing, to demand-gen, to content and events. I love telling the high-level stories that resonate with an audience and connecting the dots between types of assets and distribution channels. My writing has been published on TIME, Forbes, MarketingProfs, and The Muse, and I’ve spoken on various marketing topics for INBOUND, Harvard Business Review, and MarketingProfs. Visit http://consciouslycorporate.com/ for more about my marketing experience, observations, and philosophy on practicing marketing, as well as posts about corporate life, etiquette, and decisions.