The Simple Marketing Funnel Every Founder Needs (Without the Overwhelm)

If you’ve ever felt like your social media isn’t working—no matter how much you post—this episode is going to shift everything.

We’re breaking down funnels in a way that actually makes sense for real businesses (not bro marketing playbooks). Because the truth is: yes, you do need a funnel… but not the complicated, tech-heavy version you’ve been sold.

In this episode, Ruthie walks you through a simple, sustainable approach to your customer journey—so your marketing doesn’t rely on social media alone.

You’ll learn:

• Why social media is just the container, not the strategy
• The 3 essential stages every customer journey needs
• How to reduce content burnout by giving each platform a clear job
• What to focus on instead of “posting more”

If you’re tired of feeling like you’re doing everything and nothing is working, this episode will help you build a marketing system that actually supports your capacity—and your growth.

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:06.1)

Welcome back to another episode of the consistency corner. I'm Ruthie, marketing strategist and founder of the consistency corner, where our goal is to help you lighten the mental load of marketing. Today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about funnels. And I don't want you to like turn this off and be like, ugh, I don't want to talk about funnels. Ruthie, don't be a bro marketer and talk about that with me. But we're not talking about funnels the way the Internet usually talks about funnels. OK.

We're going to talk about them in a way that I think is going to shift how you think about your social media and maybe take some pressure off of you in the process. So here's my question for you today. Does every brand need a funnel for social media marketing to work? Short answer, yes. But probably not the funnel that you're picturing. I say this all the time on this podcast. If you've listened before, you've heard me say it more than once. Social media is the cup.

It's not the coffee. It's the container. It's not the thing itself. And today, I wanna talk about what the coffee actually is. What are we putting inside that cup? Because if all we've got is the cup, we've got a problem. When most people hear the word funnel, they immediately picture this complicated tech setup with landing pages and email sequences, maybe tripwires and upsells.

some $2,000 a month software stack with automations running in the background. And if that's what you're picturing, I get why you're like, my God, this is overwhelming. I don't even know how to think about this. I get why when you hear you need a funnel, you want to close the laptop and go make a snack. But here's the thing, a funnel at its simplest is just the path someone takes from finding you, finding out you exist, to buying from you. That's it.

It's the customer journey. It's the journey your customer goes on, the path they take. And honestly, I think the word funnel scares people more than it needs to. So if it helps, think of it as your customer journey. Same concept, less intimidating. Now, I say that with a caveat of it has to be a customer journey that works because typically,

Ruthie Sterrett (02:26.284)

Find your post on social media, go buy, go give you money is like not a journey that people actually go on. So we gotta think about journeys, customer journeys that people will actually travel. Okay, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. At the most basic level, there are three stages of the journey. Someone finds out you exist, they had no idea who you were yesterday, and now they do, okay? That's top of funnel. Middle of funnel, they're getting to know you. They're learning more about you.

They're figuring out if you can help them, if you're their person. And then bottom of funnel is they're ready to make a decision. They're ready to buy, book a call, sign up. And we can have multiple bottom of funnel steps or like steps in the journey, like opting in and giving you an email address, maybe booking a demo, maybe then booking a call. You know, and obviously all of this is gonna be dependent upon your individual business model.

But what I want you to think about at each of these stages, if I really am gonna break it down for you, is at each step in the journey, what do you want that person to do next? Where do you want them to go? What's the next step in the journey? Because when you start mapping that out, you start to realize that every platform you're on, every piece of content you're creating has a job.

And that job is to move someone to the next step. This is why mapping the customer journey matters so much. Not because it's some fancy marketing exercise, but because without it, you don't know what you're asking your content to do. And you don't know.

where you want people to go, then you can't figure out if the content is actually working. So then you're just posting to post and hoping for the best. So here's my real question. At each of those stages, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, do you have somewhere that people can go that isn't social media? Because if social media is the only thing

Ruthie Sterrett (04:40.407)

doing top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel work in your business, you need a massive amount of content to cover all of those jobs. And that's where the volume problem comes in. That's where the burnout comes from. That's where the feeling of I'm doing everything and nothing is working comes from. I mean, I hear marketers kind of say this all the time of like, you don't need more content, you just need a better strategy.

Okay, yes, but like that's not getting into the nuance enough of it. If your strategy is social media is the only place that I'm communicating with my audience, well, then you do need more content. Like, sorry, I hate to say it, but you do. So that's why we look at social media as a piece of the puzzle, not the entire thing. And we need to make sure that we have other platforms, other channels doing jobs at the top of the funnel, at the middle of the funnel.

at the bottom of the funnel so we know how hard social media needs to work or how hard it does it. When social is doing everything and you're not posting enough volume, you might be asking every post to try to do everything. You're asking each post to try to attract new people, to nurture your existing audience, to convert and sell, to retain your existing customers, to drive loyalty, to drive advocacy.

And that's a lot of jobs for one channel for one piece of content. And it's literally impossible. It would be like asking your. I got to think of a good analogy here. This would be something that I tell my husband who's in construction if I was trying to explain this to him. But that would be like asking your plumber to also do electric, to also do HVAC, to also do fire sprinkler, to also do drywall. Like that's too many jobs for that one person.

So what ends up happening when you are trying to do too many jobs with one piece of content or one platform.

Ruthie Sterrett (06:46.067)

you either burn out because of the volume required to do all those jobs on social alone. It's not sustainable without a team. And even with a team, it is a lot. Or you end up posting content that doesn't really do anything because you're asking it to do too much at once that it can't do. And so it doesn't feel like your social content is getting people anywhere. And it's not because like social media doesn't work.

but you're asking social media to do a job that it was never designed to do by itself. And here's the thing that a lot of founders miss, and I think this is a big one. A lot of people create content and then just wait. They post and pray that the algorithm is gonna deliver their content to the right people. And listen, that can happen. The algorithm can work for you in your favor, but it's sort of like playing the lottery. You can't win if you don't play.

But just because you play doesn't guarantee that you're gonna win. If you build it, they will come is this big fat lie. Like it's from the field of dreams guys, it's from a movie. It's not even from like a real marketing scenario, but we believe it. And honestly, you can have the most beautiful Instagram grid, the most thoughtful captions, the most strategic content calendar. But if you don't have clarity on what is driving traffic to that content,

you're leaving discovery up to chance. So what is driving people to your content? Is it networking? Is it referrals? Is it SEO? Is it paid ads? Is it podcast appearances or collaboration? What is the thing that puts you on someone's radar in the first place? That's not just social media. Because if you want it to be social media, there's an entirely different content strategy.

around just attraction and discovery and that usually takes a lot of volume.

Ruthie Sterrett (08:46.163)

So asking this question really matters because a lot of founders skip right over it and go straight to, okay, but what should we post? Without thinking about who is going to see the content and how they're going to get there and then where you want them to go next. So let's talk about what a simple funnel or customer journey looks like for a founder. And I want to emphasize the word simple because we can over complicate this, right?

So top of funnel, again, discovery. How are people finding out you exist? If it's social media, it could be reels because those often get shown to audiences that don't already follow you. It could be carousels that are highly shareable because when people share things, it gets in front of new eyes. Or collaborative content that you post with other people, which is what social is good at.

using those types of content, those strategies to get eyes on you and create awareness. But social media doesn't have to be your primary discovery channel. Maybe people can be finding you through referrals. Maybe they're meeting you at events. Maybe they see you in an ad. Maybe they hear you on a podcast. And then they go look up your Instagram or your LinkedIn. And in that case, social isn't doing the top of funnel job.

It's doing the validation job. People already know you exist and they're going to social media to check you out and see if you're legit. And that's a completely different role for your content. And it changes what you should be posting. So step one is figuring out how in real life are people actually discovering you. And if they're not discovering you, where are we gonna focus to help them discover us?

and what role does social media play in that. So then when we get a little bit deeper and we're talking middle of funnel, people have found you, they know you exist, maybe they're already following you.

Ruthie Sterrett (10:49.621)

And we need to now build trust and help them get to know us beyond the quick scroll. This is your email list. This is a podcast. This is a blog. This is a community. This is lead magnets or a free resource. This is the deeper substance. If social media is the coffee cup, then nurture content is honestly the food that goes along with the coffee, like the breakfast, right? That might be a stretch on that analogy, but stay with me here.

This is where lot of founders have a gap. They're great at showing up on social, but there's no next step. There's nowhere for someone to go to keep the relationship going outside of the feed. And the feed is noisy. If the only way someone can stay connected to you is by hoping your next post shows up in the algorithm, that's a fragile relationship. And honestly, it's one that you probably have to give even more to because you've got to spend time engaging and being social.

on social media to make that work. So an email list is a direct line to your audience, but we've got to think about then, how are people getting on my email list and just, hey, join my email list is not it. Okay. But when you do have that direct line to your audience through the email list, you're not at the mercy of an algorithm. You decide when to show up in their inbox. And that's a completely different dynamic.

It doesn't have to be complicated. can be a simple weekly newsletter, or it can be a short email series that goes out when someone downloads a freebie, but it does need to exist. And then a simplified look at the bottom of Funnel is this is the clear path to your offer. And I mean clear, not DM me and then hope for the best. It's a workshop with a sign up link.

It's a sales page that explains exactly what you do and who it's for. It's a call booking link or an application. Something concrete that lets someone who is ready to buy actually take that step without guessing how. I cannot tell you how many times I have thought about working with somebody. They had shared a link somewhere and then I made the decision to go back and maybe buy from them and I couldn't find that link. It wasn't in their bio.

Ruthie Sterrett (13:12.621)

It was in a story that had already expired and it's like, hmm, I was gonna give you money and you made it hard for me, so now I'm not. So that's something that we have to constantly be thinking about, a bottom of the funnel is how do we eliminate the friction of someone buying from you? And how do we make it easy? MiniChat is a great example of making it easy. It's that keyword strategy, it's an automation.

where someone says, yes, I want this thing. I'm going to give you this keyword and you send them a DM with the link to buy the thing.

Or, again on social media, if it is, have a link in my bio, making sure that that bio link is accurate. It's up to date. It works. And that when the person gets to the landing page, it's what you promised them they would get to. So when you put all three of these together, discovery, nurture, conversion, that's your funnel. That's your customer journey. And it's not linear.

as much as I wish it was. It's multifaceted. It's multi-layered. But notice how social media is only one piece of it, not all of it. Having a funnel in place and having your customer journey defined helps take pressure off of social media because it gives social a specific contained job instead of asking it to be your entire marketing strategy.

what social media's job in your business might look different than what job it is in my business or my other client's business or your business bestie's business. But for all of us, social media works best when it has something behind it. When there's a place for people to go after they find you. When there's a nurture system, whether that's email, a podcast, a community, DMs, whatever fits your business.

Ruthie Sterrett (15:14.909)

doing the relationship building work so your social content can focus on what it's best at. And on the other side, social media works best when there's something driving people to it, when you're not relying on the algorithm alone to put your content in front of the right people. Well, you have to have networking, referrals, collaborations, ads, SEO, something that

is creating awareness that feeds people into your online presence. Without those things on both sides, you're trying to build the relationship, make the sale, get new followers, retain existing customers, and create brand advocates all in the same very noisy feed. That is too much pressure on one channel. And it's why so many founders feel like social media isn't working.

It's not because social media has broken. It's that they're asking social to do a bigger job than it was ever designed to do alone. So what do want you to take away from this? No, you don't need a complicated funnel with 17 steps. You need a clear one. You need to know how people find you, where they go to learn more about you, and how they buy from you. If we've got that down to three steps, great.

If that's multi-layered and there's multiple channels and places that they can do all of those things, that's great too. But let's think about very clearly where we want them to go from each step and making sure that the content that goes in those containers is being asked to do that job. If that feels really overwhelming, just start with the customer journey. Forget the word funnel for a second and ask yourself, if someone discovers my business today,

What's the path that they take to becoming a client? Write it out. Even if it's messy, even if there are gaps, getting it on paper is the first step. Because once you see the path, you can see where the holes might be. And then you can start filling in from there and prioritizing the work that you do to fill in those holes and to make that customer journey smoother. The last thing I want to say about this is this, your customer journey is not a one-time project.

Ruthie Sterrett (17:38.474)

It's not something that you map out once, then it's done forever. As the market shifts, and right now it honestly feels like it's shifting faster than ever, consumer expectations change, platforms adjust, algorithms change, your business evolves. Your funnel needs to evolve with it. It needs to be revisited, refined, and optimized over time. So give your permission to start simple and build from there, and also give yourself permission to

pivot and evolve as it needs to. If you're sitting here thinking, okay, I get it, but I don't actually know what my funnel should look like. That's the work that we do with our clients inside the cornerstone strategy. We map it out together. We figure out your customer journey so your social media has a clear job and your business has a clear path from discovery and to sale.

And you're not doing it alone. We're literally doing it with you, doing it for you. And then inside the corner office, we're executing that plan for you, that funnel that we've mapped together. The funnel process is a really important phase of the cornerstone strategy because like I said, it's foundational in making sure that social media can do what you're asking it to do, right? So if you're ready to figure this out with support or you're ready to hand it off entirely,

There's links in the show notes to learn more about working with us, but I want you to know that either way I'm cheering you on. I love talking about this stuff. You can always send me a DM in Instagram and we can just voice note back and forth about your customer journey, your funnel, what questions you have, and maybe I can point you in the right direction. Or like I said, if you're ready for long-term support, a true marketing director and marketing department in your corner, that's what we're here for.

I will talk to you again soon and like I said, thank you so much for being here.