Tactics Don't Have a Funnel Stage. Campaigns Do.

Ask most people where a letterbox drop sits in the marketing funnel and they'll say the top. Awareness. You put a flyer in a few thousand letterboxes, a small percentage of people glance at it, and maybe your name feels a bit more familiar next time they need you. That's the job, and it's a modest one.

I'd argue that says more about how most letterbox drops get made than about letterbox drops.

How a generic campaign gets built

It usually starts with the tactic. Someone decides they need more local work, so they get flyers printed. The flyer lists the services and the phone number, maybe a discount. It goes out, a few calls come in or they don't, and the flyer is in the recycling by Tuesday.

Nothing went wrong there, exactly. The flyer did the one job it was designed for. It was only ever designed for one job, because it was built to suit anyone in the postcode, and in practice that means it suits no one in particular.

Start with the objective, and make it specific

"More customers" is a wish. An objective has a reason behind it, and the reason changes everything downstream.

Say the owner of a trade business has just moved to a new suburb and wants more of their work close to home, with shorter drives and a reputation in the street they actually live on. That's an objective. It tells you who to talk to and what you have to prove, which is mostly that you're from here and not one more van passing through.

A generic flyer can't prove that. A campaign built around that objective can.

Tailoring usually means splitting

A specific objective also tends to show you that one business has more than one buyer, and they don't decide the same way.

A plumber, for instance, might sell to homeowners and to strata managers. A homeowner is choosing someone to let into their house, often in a hurry. A strata manager is choosing someone they can rely on across dozens of buildings and defend to a committee. One message aimed at both ends up too vague for either. They need separate campaigns, each measured on its own terms.

What lets one tactic do several jobs

Once the objective and the audience are narrow enough, a single tactic can carry far more than awareness. Two things make most of the difference.

The first is what the tactic is attached to. A flyer from a faceless business is asking to be trusted from scratch. A flyer with the owner's face and name on it, introducing themselves as a new local and tied to other local businesses people already like, is borrowing trust that already exists in the street. It's doing credibility work in the same moment it's doing awareness work.

The second is what it leaves behind. Most trades are what marketers call distress purchases. Nobody needs a plumber on the day the flyer arrives. They need one at 9pm on a Sunday when something's leaking, and by then the flyer is long gone. What matters is whether you're still within reach weeks later, when something actually goes wrong. Paper rarely lasts that long. Something useful that lives in a kitchen drawer often does.

Get both of those right and the same drop starts pulling people further along, onto a website and occasionally all the way to a booking. At that point, calling it top of funnel undersells what it's doing.

Where the funnel label comes from

Funnel stages are useful for planning. They're less useful as a description of what a tactic can do, because they describe the average version of that tactic, and the average version is generic. Tailoring is what moves a tactic off the average.

Next time

I'm running a campaign like this right now for a local trade business, built on the exact objective above: a new local who wants his work closer to home. It started as a letterbox drop, and it's already reached further down the funnel than a letterbox drop is supposed to. Once it wraps up in late November, I'll walk through how it was put together and what came back.