Episode 788: Why the Funnel Is Dead (And What Actually Drives Growth Now)

March 31, 2026

Is your digital strategy outdated? Let our experts audit it and give you the blueprint you need to scale.

Book your spot: https://www.tiereleven.com/audit (only 3 spots available).

Are you still optimizing channels in isolation, thinking Meta is broken while Google “works”? That mindset is exactly what’s killing your growth. If you’re chasing last-click ROAS or shifting spend based on siloed performance, you’re missing the bigger picture, and it’s costing you more than you think.

In this episode, we challenge the entire concept of the traditional funnel. We look at why spending more doesn’t always mean scaling, and how improving conversion rates, content, and product pages can outperform increased ad spend. We share real examples, from Amazon ad spend cuts with zero revenue loss to brands hurting themselves by turning off Meta.

We also unpack media efficiency ratio, the halo effect across platforms, and why content is now inseparable from paid media.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Why the traditional marketing funnel is dead
Media efficiency ratio (MER) vs ROAS explained
The right Meta ads strategy for full-funnel growth
Why conversion rate optimization beats increasing ad spend
Amazon vs Shopify strategy for e-commerce brands
The halo effect across Meta, Google, and Amazon
Creative diversification and content marketing strategies
Why turning off Facebook Ads hurts long-term growth
Multi-channel attribution vs last-click attribution
Amazon pricing strategy and arbitrage risks

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic?

Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Why the Funnel Is Dead (And What Actually Drives Growth Now)

00;00;00;05 – 00;00;07;08
Lauren Petrullo
Spending more isn’t going to result in better sales. What I would rather you do is like maintain current spend, or even if you have to take a little bit of spend, invest in.

00;00;07;11 – 00;00;18;03
Ralph Burns
If you are selling on Amazon and your Amazon looks extraordinarily great. It might not be because your Amazon agency is so brilliant. It might be because.

00;00;18;09 – 00;00;32;27
Lauren Petrullo
We had a client that wanted to turn off all their Facebook ads, but it’s not working well. And we said, hey, like, just be mindful you’re going to have a media merger now, but it’s going to hurt you long term. And within three months we saw.

00;00;32;29 – 00;00;58;21
Ralph Burns
Hey, before we get into this show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because he wanted to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. So we are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free in this audit. And this isn’t one of those audits that you get from some AI generated bot.

00;00;58;21 – 00;01;18;26
Ralph Burns
This actually takes us two plus weeks, 7 or 8 of our team members, and it is incredibly in-depth and will give you insights into your media buying, your creative, your actual business metrics, and find out exactly where the gaps are and where your growth is stalled and what we can do about it, or what you can do about it.

00;01;18;29 – 00;01;34;00
Ralph Burns
When you get the audit. Now here’s the catch. We only have three spots, so head on over to tier 11.com/audit right now. Fill out the form and let’s see how we can scale your business in the coming year.

00;01;34;02 – 00;01;53;21
Ralph Burns
Hello and welcome to the Virtual Traffic Podcast. This is your host Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of tier 11. Obviously not in my regular office, where I usually am. I’m on this, Florida tour here for a couple of weeks, seeing some clients and not seeing some of our employees at tier 11, as well as, doing a couple of podcasts with Lauren.

00;01;53;21 – 00;02;17;19
Ralph Burns
This is part two of one of those, and just so much fun to do these when you’re actually in person, as opposed to doing it through Zoom or Riverside. Is this the software that we use here? You can really get deep into exactly how she looks at things, how I look at things, and I think there’s a happy medium between the two of our opinions.

00;02;17;19 – 00;02;49;10
Ralph Burns
And we don’t necessarily agree on this one here today, because we really look at meta and the Creative Diversification Andromeda gem update as just a transformative update for a lot of businesses. And a lot of businesses are looking at the wrong metrics, and they’re not looking at the right types of metrics, because the classic funnel. And we can blame Amazon, we can blame Russell Brunson from Clickfunnels for this is dead.

00;02;49;10 – 00;03;12;08
Ralph Burns
And most brands are still running their marketing like it’s 2019 trying to chop up individual channels, figure out which channel is the one that’s getting the most conversions and or engagement. All of that. And we break that down here today and we don’t necessarily agree on this. We don’t see eye to eye usually. We see eye to eye on a lot of our shows here.

00;03;12;11 – 00;03;33;04
Ralph Burns
But on this show we did not. So the goal here is to learn and get better at this stuff because it’s constantly changing and constantly, fluctuating in the marketplace right now. So that’s probably why you’re listening to this show here. So, today’s show part two, the funnel is dead. Here’s what the full funnel actually means to you now.

00;03;33;07 – 00;03;42;14
Ralph Burns
Part two. Take it away, guys. Really, your branded spend is really is the only spend that you should be spending on. Is your the keywords for your brand.

00;03;42;16 – 00;03;53;00
Lauren Petrullo
I’m going to challenge your 8020 flip. I’m going to say pull out 30% and invest in content marketing. And that’s producing the content that tells the story. That’s creating the blogs or videos.

00;03;53;02 – 00;03;53;08
Ralph Burns
About.

00;03;53;13 – 00;04;02;25
Lauren Petrullo
Media. Yeah, but I like if someone’s like, oh, I’m going to flip it. I’m like, it actually takes 20 to 30% of the media spend, pull it out and make better content that you’re sending your paid media traffic to.

00;04;02;27 – 00;04;13;14
Ralph Burns
Okay. Fair enough. Like in this particular case, these guys are doing a fair amount of content. Okay, okay, okay. And as they look at that as that’s content market, we’re talking about like pure spend. But yes, to your point absolutely.

00;04;13;14 – 00;04;34;05
Lauren Petrullo
We’ve like we did this huge test. Like we have a client that’s like hey, I want to grow our sales 10% month over month and like the listing and the product display page. So selling across multiple channels in multiple marketplaces, we’re like, here’s our current conversion rates. We can increase spend and we’ll increase volume marginally. But our profit is going to start deteriorating.

00;04;34;07 – 00;04;51;12
Lauren Petrullo
Spending more isn’t going to result in better sales result spending more as a result, and more sales. What I would rather do is like maintain current spend, or even if you have to take a little bit of our spend, invest in improving your listing, improving your product display page, improving our conversion rates there. And then that’s where you’re like turning on the money and turning on the faucet.

00;04;51;15 – 00;05;10;12
Lauren Petrullo
And we did this like again for the Amazon because in the past it just takes longer for Shopify stuff. So that’s why I’m like on the Amazon, it’s way easier. We did an Amazon experiment and we saw an immediate conversion month. And we also use like a pixel tool. So pixel we’re allowed to like when we look at listing or A-plus content that we’re changing out, we can do and pay for consumer insights.

00;05;10;14 – 00;05;31;09
Lauren Petrullo
And have predictability forecasting. Will this perform better or not guessing? I mean, you never know until you actually launch it. But those small changes led to significant rise. Like we finally hit, a Roas that surpassed our tacos and Amazon. And then for, like, the prior display pages on on Shopify stores, like one of our clients that we worked with, they’re in a consumable space.

00;05;31;09 – 00;05;48;14
Lauren Petrullo
They’re in a beverage additive situation when the product display changes and that conversion rate uplifted, they didn’t have to spend any more money on it to the point where we had a capacity issue and we had 16 products that were out of stock because we were able to have a play page that told them, where does this work?

00;05;48;14 – 00;06;07;17
Lauren Petrullo
How do I want to use this, other things that this fits through. So that’s that’s the piece of, sometimes spending more to get more sales volume doesn’t make sense. But if you look at again the other pieces, the funnel, what what are the paid ads interacting with? That’s all. Like I would just I would consider if you’re looking at investing more in social, you need to have content.

00;06;07;17 – 00;06;18;16
Lauren Petrullo
You’re sending the social stuff to where you need to have content that you’re producing that will be socialize, will not just do a full shift of budget, which I’m sure like you’re saying, like they already have that content stuff.

00;06;18;16 – 00;06;32;15
Ralph Burns
Talking about media spend just in general. But that’s no, I, I hear what you said. I don’t disagree. I think that a lot of that content and that content marketing can be turned into advertising within the Meta Andromeda platform.

00;06;32;16 – 00;06;49;17
Lauren Petrullo
Yeah. I mean, I love doing that, like I told you, like my Horseman strategy. I’m bringing all the horsemen of the apocalypse. You got everything inside of your Avengers play. But so you’re sending a lot to products like pages or in this use case, the home page. I love sending traffic to existing content that’s already proven itself. If you look in Search Console, what are the words are ranking?

00;06;49;17 – 00;07;04;03
Lauren Petrullo
If you’re looking at Alex, what are the pages that have an an exceedingly above average page time? That content has proven itself organically, and I want to amplify the out of it in a paid social play.

00;07;04;05 – 00;07;16;19
Ralph Burns
I backed by earlier point like you used to think of content marketing and your socials. I think we can lump content marketing in on that. And yeah, a separate thing from your advertising, when in fact it’s actually it’s all the same.

00;07;16;19 – 00;07;18;07
Lauren Petrullo
It fits under the umbrella.

00;07;18;08 – 00;07;29;09
Ralph Burns
The entire umbrella. Absolutely. I would say this on your Amazon example. And we get to this question a lot is you don’t control your customer over at Amazon. So you get.

00;07;29;09 – 00;07;45;08
Lauren Petrullo
Nothing. You get you get a product answer. And maybe like 1% of the people are going to scan the QR code. If you have a good reason, you have a product warranty. Do you have like an additional product you’re giving to it? Yeah, you you just you get Amazon everything you like lose up to 30% of your cost of sale.

00;07;45;08 – 00;07;46;14
Lauren Petrullo
Like it sucks.

00;07;46;16 – 00;07;49;29
Ralph Burns
Yeah, I mean, it’s anywhere between 15 and 18% oftentimes. I mean, yeah.

00;07;50;00 – 00;07;52;24
Lauren Petrullo
And if you’re also paying for storage fulfillment like, oh my.

00;07;52;24 – 00;08;08;23
Ralph Burns
Gosh, I mean, if you can flip that script like that, there’s another example of this. There’s probably going to be another case study that we’ll do is you’re in professional traffic is where we decrease the Amazon ad spend by 97%, 97% for a client. We’re spending 50, $60,000 a month.

00;08;08;29 – 00;08;10;04
Lauren Petrullo
Okay. Do you remember there I.

00;08;10;06 – 00;08;13;09
Ralph Burns
Their there Amazon sales did not change at all.

00;08;13;09 – 00;08;19;19
Lauren Petrullo
Okay. So all their PPC efforts was is taking. Then they were just doing brand initiatives. There’s no way that they were doing there okay.

00;08;19;24 – 00;08;26;29
Ralph Burns
But anyway like they’re better now the point is is where like why are you selling anything on Amazon I like yes you need to be on Amazon of course.

00;08;26;29 – 00;08;27;24
Lauren Petrullo
So they’re not on.

00;08;27;26 – 00;08;31;28
Ralph Burns
However, you should incentivize those buyers to buy on set.

00;08;32;05 – 00;08;51;12
Lauren Petrullo
You I mean yes you want to incentivize them okay. So on this I like take a little bit. You’re going to have people that are only ever going to buy an Amazon and they’re a halo lift. Just like Facebook and Google ads have to work together. A different example. We had a client so completely different. They did an info product, they did a masterclass, an online event and not event.

00;08;51;19 – 00;09;08;00
Lauren Petrullo
They only looked at the Shopify sales and I was like, wait a second. We had a huge uptick the same day we like I can’t say, oh, look how much better our stuff did. No, look at this. If we look at a 30 day lapse and we laughing at tacos like that went down, and you can look at the daily average.

00;09;08;00 – 00;09;25;23
Lauren Petrullo
And when you did this live event, it had an impact on your Amazon sales. So you can’t isolate to the efforts that you’re making it. Only look at it to that because they they work cohesively together. So it’s called the halo effect. And for the Amazon, for people that are not Amazon, look you’re missing on a virus. There are people that are only ever going to buy on Amazon and they’re loyalists.

00;09;26;00 – 00;09;27;01
Ralph Burns
We all do it.

00;09;27;03 – 00;09;28;00
Lauren Petrullo
Yeah, we all do it.

00;09;28;01 – 00;09;37;06
Ralph Burns
And discover brand over on Instagram or Meta or Facebook or wherever on dramatic, you name it. And then the first thing you do is like, geez, I wonder if I can get that for, you know, one day shipping and there’s.

00;09;37;08 – 00;09;39;09
Lauren Petrullo
There’s marketing. So I think it is.

00;09;39;10 – 00;09;40;23
Ralph Burns
I do it, you do it, everyone does.

00;09;40;23 – 00;09;56;18
Lauren Petrullo
It. If I want to do it faster and then then I give it back. I feel like merch merchant, all that stuff. It’s like. But at the same time you can do price arbitrage and you might have a strategy where like, I want more people on my dotcom, so I’m going to have a higher price on Amazon, or you’ll have website exclusives.

00;09;56;19 – 00;10;20;13
Lauren Petrullo
Be careful though, I yeah, oh, I mean I’ve done it in both ways. I’ve got key stories in both examples. Well that’s assuming like especially like we have clients that are reselling. So like not it’s just a seller account. But I’m pushing all the stuff like I’ve seen it in both ways, where we have better pricing on Amazon, but we have exclusive inventory on RT.com we have better pricing on A.com, but then we have a higher price on Amazon because we want to own that customer.

00;10;20;19 – 00;10;41;08
Lauren Petrullo
But I think you should. Well, I mean, I have my opinion. We’ve seen it working both ways. I don’t have an opinion straightforward to say one is better than the other. It’s just those are considerations you have to take in because you don’t own your customer on Amazon. But you’ll get some. You get the subscribe and save on Amazon is worth its weight in gold, and people have a hard time doing that on their e-commerce.

00;10;41;08 – 00;10;49;11
Lauren Petrullo
And I hate when someone says me like, I’m going to sacrifice it on Amazon. I’m like, you have to subscribe and save on Amazon. And that’s predictable cash flow.

00;10;49;13 – 00;10;56;16
Ralph Burns
You need to understand what your metrics are. Yeah, I mean, you need to know what your profitability is like. This does go back to NPIs market performance.

00;10;56;19 – 00;10;56;22
Lauren Petrullo
But.

00;10;56;22 – 00;11;05;21
Ralph Burns
Always understanding your metrics like you need to know your metrics. You know your subscribe and save on Amazon might be insanely profitable for you.

00;11;05;23 – 00;11;23;03
Lauren Petrullo
Or you might have aces that don’t have like your cost of sale. You’re like, it doesn’t make sense. So again, we had, there’s one that we had taken over and we looked at all, I mean, yeah, branded keywords. That’s a notorious one. But what we saw was, spend was being put on a product where we knew the cost of goods and the like.

00;11;23;03 – 00;11;38;18
Lauren Petrullo
We were losing $0.70 on the dollar on this one product. Well, we weren’t, they were. And so we shut that entire product off. And that’s why we’re like, hey, we have to understand, is this a good product? And you’ve to look at all the marketplace, how many competitors are what is the seasonality of your keyword terms? Like all that stuff comes into play.

00;11;38;23 – 00;11;56;21
Ralph Burns
You need it. You need an Amazon strategy is specific to Amazon. If you’re an e-commerce brand and you’re putting you’re just putting all your products on there without any consideration. And we see this all the time. Different prices, different, bottles, you know, out sizes like, oh, oh.

00;11;56;21 – 00;11;59;05
Lauren Petrullo
And there’s like, parentage listings, unmarried.

00;11;59;06 – 00;12;18;03
Ralph Burns
Like just chaos. And people are going in there. And then can we price shopping against your website like, wow, I can get the eight ounce bottle for $3 cheaper over on Amazon than I can on the on your website. Like, wait a second here. Like that. That is the reverse. You got to be able that. You have to have a very specific Amazon strategy.

00;12;18;03 – 00;12;27;01
Ralph Burns
If you have a lots of SKUs now, you don’t necessarily have to put all your SKUs on Amazon. You don’t don’t you can have a very, very strategic way of approaching it.

00;12;27;01 – 00;12;30;15
Lauren Petrullo
Well, site exclusive website brands. But the flavors.

00;12;30;17 – 00;12;55;15
Ralph Burns
You know, they’re going to see your ad, they’re going to click over on Google, they’re going to look on Amazon. They’re going to find out, like, where can I get this thing for the best price, the quickest and fastest shipping? I get that I understand that not a problem. There’s also another way that you can do this is that you can actually you got to be careful about map pricing when it comes to Amazon, because if you undercut Amazon on your site for your advertised price versus what you sell for on Amazon, you could get banned.

00;12;55;16 – 00;13;03;05
Lauren Petrullo
Well, let’s get real. There’s there’s a lot of stuff that Amazon does that’s shady and feisty. I’m like, I’m feeling like PTSD right now.

00;13;03;07 – 00;13;05;27
Ralph Burns
I do check they do check again.

00;13;06;03 – 00;13;07;01
Lauren Petrullo
They’re shut down.

00;13;07;01 – 00;13;21;13
Ralph Burns
Like we’ve had brands who have had unequal, and that pricing is basically the price that you anyway in their terms of service for Amazon. If you don’t know it, you need to have the same price on your website as you advertise on Amazon.

00;13;21;16 – 00;13;40;10
Lauren Petrullo
That I’ll have. I mean, like you to be right, I like I don’t recall that. I know that there’s issues especially like I’m I’m mSRP like the minimum price that you have to do if you are if you’re a reseller and stuff. But we have done different pricing across the both. I mean maybe like I I’ll have to check what this is.

00;13;40;10 – 00;13;50;16
Ralph Burns
If you’re high volume, you got to be very, very careful where the supplement customer who has very high volume and the way that we get around that is we actually have this.

00;13;50;19 – 00;13;54;02
Lauren Petrullo
Coupons that you can apply. That’s one to the okay. Sorry.

00;13;54;05 – 00;14;09;15
Ralph Burns
It’s a good way. But also you can actually say you can you’re going to have the price on Amazon is it’s $69, $59, whatever it is, $59 on Amazon. You don’t have the same pricing over on your website $59. But exit out and say 20% off sale.

00;14;09;16 – 00;14;15;18
Lauren Petrullo
Yeah. Okay. When you’re saying I was like, I was like, I know I’ve client examples where we have different pricing, right?

00;14;15;18 – 00;14;17;20
Ralph Burns
You can get it for whatever it is.

00;14;17;20 – 00;14;21;25
Lauren Petrullo
Shoot. For a second I was like panicking and being like, oh my gosh, my violating terms of service got to be careful.

00;14;21;25 – 00;14;22;16
Ralph Burns
I mean, I’m done.

00;14;22;16 – 00;14;25;16
Lauren Petrullo
Double check of course. But like we’ve done this for years. Yeah.

00;14;25;16 – 00;14;30;00
Ralph Burns
All I’m saying is that if you’re higher volume, you’re on their radar for that because they want to make sure.

00;14;30;00 – 00;14;33;17
Lauren Petrullo
Because they want to buy you out and replace them with their own basics. Let’s be real.

00;14;33;19 – 00;14;56;05
Ralph Burns
We’re talking like this is a client that spends hundreds of thousands a day. Yeah. So very, very like and pushes a lot of volume through Amazon. It’s just an eventuality. They list on Amazon of course, but we want to get them over on our, our continuity program over on the website itself. Yeah. So that’s how we deal with that issue because Amazon has been an issue in the past.

00;14;56;07 – 00;15;11;18
Ralph Burns
The point is this is like you want to be sure you got to sell on Amazon. But what can you do potentially to incentivize people to buy on your site. Maybe it is a better discount after it, like the continuity program, or you.

00;15;11;18 – 00;15;14;11
Lauren Petrullo
Have a gift purchase or you have.

00;15;14;13 – 00;15;15;07
Ralph Burns
What other bonus.

00;15;15;08 – 00;15;20;01
Lauren Petrullo
Sounds better unboxing experience because Amazon is going to do their fulfillment in their own place. That’s right.

00;15;20;01 – 00;15;20;18
Ralph Burns
It’s going to say.

00;15;20;21 – 00;15;39;07
Lauren Petrullo
You have to be careful of Amazon arbitrage and that same capacity, because someone could then say so this has happened. They did a huge bulk sale. So they were trying to clear out inventory that had an expiration date. And so they had done like a buy three get five free moment. And then there were some Amazon arbitrage tours I bought like 200 units.

00;15;39;10 – 00;15;55;20
Lauren Petrullo
Put them all on Amazon, listed at a little bit lower than their current, sold all the inventory and they made money on your products. It showed up as a great sale within matter. Like holy smokes! Well, was that really high? And then we went into asking the client like, oh yeah, we have this huge like wholesale or they had 200 orders.

00;15;55;20 – 00;16;13;00
Lauren Petrullo
It’s like, what? What? I was like, I didn’t know we didn’t put limitations on that. And they’re like, look, we’re just happy to get that inventory. It’s going to expire in nine months and we don’t want to sit on it. And then two weeks later we saw the listing and I was like, cool. We’ve now been undercut on the price thing, not by a little by a lot because they were giving away anyways.

00;16;13;05 – 00;16;14;09
Lauren Petrullo
Yeah, don’t do that.

00;16;14;09 – 00;16;43;03
Ralph Burns
Don’t do that, don’t do that. So that’s one aspect of the funnel here. That’s the sort of we talked about the halo effect here a bit. Obviously, you know, when it comes to Amazon, if you are selling on Amazon and your Amazon looks extraordinarily great, it might not be because your Amazon agency is so brilliant. It might be because your media agency or your programmatic agency is creating all the awareness that’s being.

00;16;43;04 – 00;16;43;22
Lauren Petrullo
Spare.

00;16;43;23 – 00;17;12;28
Ralph Burns
Over at Amazon. Wait, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because we want to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free. We’re going to look at your creative, your media, buying your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled.

00;17;13;00 – 00;17;24;15
Ralph Burns
This is two weeks of our best work, but we only have three spots. So go to tier 11.com/audit right now. Fill out the form and let’s see how we can scale your business.

00;17;24;23 – 00;17;46;01
Lauren Petrullo
We had a client that wanted to like turn off all their Facebook ads fan because it had a lower Roas an avenue I guess it’s not working well. And we said hey, like just be just be mindful. You’re going to have immediate media now, but it’s going to hurt you long term. And within three months we saw their Amazon sales organic went down.

00;17;46;01 – 00;18;02;29
Lauren Petrullo
Organic sales went down as I talk was one up. And then we had also seen that our Google ads were not performing as well. And so that’s like like, hey, there’s a consideration of the person who’s learning about it. Like, these all have to work together. And I know it’s really easy to say, well, Google’s bringing me the best leads, so I’m only going to put all my money into getting phone calls from Google.

00;18;02;29 – 00;18;24;04
Lauren Petrullo
But it’s bringing awareness. And if you are remiss to think that awareness on these other channels means that this user is like, I only look at Google Armada, you’re ignoring that your funnel is beyond the marketplace that they’re seeing and interacting. Your ads are this concern. Dark souls this counts for a referral marketing. All of that stuff makes sense.

00;18;24;05 – 00;18;49;09
Ralph Burns
You’re making fun of it. But it’s such a epidemic of misinformation. Exactly what you’re talking about. Because see it like in this example for this other client, not the Hammett client. But I do have another example on here. A client unrelated to this is everyone looks at the last click. Everyone looks at everything being siloed like, oh, I want you to improve my meta.

00;18;49;11 – 00;19;06;14
Ralph Burns
You Google’s doing great and Amazon’s doing great. But meta is the problem. Or if you cut. So here’s the easiest thing to do. See how well Google and Amazon do and your organic. If you completely cut all your spend on meta like just do it, do it for a week and see what the effect is on your business.

00;19;06;14 – 00;19;10;01
Lauren Petrullo
I give you at least two weeks because you’ll have those, because you’ll have people that do.

00;19;10;01 – 00;19;13;24
Ralph Burns
Better with the life selling products. But like, if you really do believe.

00;19;13;27 – 00;19;16;15
Lauren Petrullo
But don’t do it, don’t do it. Please don’t do it. You’re going to like it at all.

00;19;16;17 – 00;19;17;15
Ralph Burns
The best way to do it.

00;19;17;15 – 00;19;28;02
Lauren Petrullo
I mean, it’s like putting me inside of like, do it, do it. I want to show you, like, prove me right, but I don’t need to be proven right. I’ve I’ve seen it proven right multiple times. I don’t recommend doing it. You can scale.

00;19;28;02 – 00;20;03;12
Ralph Burns
Back the best case scenario for when I look at our best performing clients. But like whether it’s in the personal injury law niche or whether it’s in e-commerce or whether it’s in digital products, is if you’re spending ad spend, if you’re spending the majority of your ad spend on interruption based platforms, we’ll just use meta, okay? No. Programmatic is also a big play, and a lot of our clients now and all you’re really doing is spending just a little bit on your branded search on Google and maybe a little bit on some of your higher intent keywords on Google.

00;20;03;17 – 00;20;12;01
Ralph Burns
That’s the best scenario because you are creating all that, all those conversions happening bottom of funnel, and people get.

00;20;12;02 – 00;20;13;00
Lauren Petrullo
The demand elsewhere.

00;20;13;03 – 00;20;36;14
Ralph Burns
The demand and the awareness and the consideration is happening on the other platforms. Yeah. And so if you’re looking at things in silos, you are mistaken. That’s not how you do digital marketing in 2026. No, you did it in 2025 either, by the way. But here we are in 2026. And for people who still continue to look at individual silos is like, oh, my meta does this, my Google does this, my TikTok does this.

00;20;36;14 – 00;21;00;16
Ralph Burns
You’re looking at it all wrong. The only metric that really matters for us when we look at clients is media efficiency ratio, which is how are all the platforms performing together. And that includes email. That includes SEO, that includes affiliates tracking everything in one place. Yes, we do tier 11 data suite to do this. Okay. So what get that get that over a tier 11 of course.

00;21;00;19 – 00;21;17;08
Ralph Burns
But you can do it on the back end on your back end CRM. And you can pull manual spreadsheets to be able to show this. But that’s the thing that really matters. So add up all your ad spend and then figure out what your sales were for that particular week month. Divide that into this, and then you got your media efficiency ratio.

00;21;17;08 – 00;21;19;29
Ralph Burns
And that’s actually how your advertising and how your marketing.

00;21;19;29 – 00;21;41;27
Lauren Petrullo
I would I’m going to think of like in the 2026 like in the coming months, because like I keep very much like the content marketing investment. And I know that we were talking about like the ad spend and that’s where you were focused earlier. But I think, now at least I’m having better conversations with new people of understanding that there is an investment required in the creative, like we talk about creative conversion events like we have.

00;21;42;03 – 00;22;02;28
Lauren Petrullo
We call it like the golden ratio. If, let’s say someone is spending $100,000 a day, they should have at least a $20,000 a day, same matching rate. So a 20% invested into content that you’re going to be using in that type of ad spend. So in like that, like I’m in all the things that you’re saying, like running ad spend and that’s your marketing efficiency ratio.

00;22;03;01 – 00;22;14;12
Lauren Petrullo
I think in the next six months, the investment people are making into the content that empowers the ads is going to start having a play in someone’s marketing efficiency.

00;22;14;12 – 00;22;29;06
Ralph Burns
I would say that. I mean, I look at it two ways, like F for marketing efficiency for BR for my company, for example, I actually look at I substitute the media efficiency ratio, which is how we do it with our paid advertising.

00;22;29;06 – 00;22;30;24
Lauren Petrullo
Right, with the spend, which makes.

00;22;30;26 – 00;22;36;03
Ralph Burns
Marketing. So I look at what am I paying for my marketing manager for my video. But you.

00;22;36;03 – 00;22;36;27
Lauren Petrullo
Do labor.

00;22;36;27 – 00;23;01;09
Ralph Burns
And I include I labor in addition to the ad spend. You know, like I don’t even add in like my time. If I really wanted to, but we don’t go that far. So to your point, yes, you have to have a well-rounded marketing plan. It’s not just all advertising, however. The marketing and the content marketing that you’re talking about can be very easily amplified, like this show right now.

00;23;01;12 – 00;23;28;09
Ralph Burns
Like we could use this. This is a podcast. It’s an audio, there’s a transcript, there’s a video. We can use that in our ads to promote tier 11. Humongous media like this is content we’re producing here. So we’re investing our time into doing it. To your point, I do think that all of that content that you’re talking about can be repurposed into part of your advertising and marketing on that side of the equation as well.

00;23;28;09 – 00;23;48;18
Ralph Burns
And I find that and if you’re doing that, you’re going down the right path, right now, because that’s what’s really resonating on high forms like meta with the Andromeda update. Because it’s all the other things that you’re doing. It’s not just like get this thing for 20% off, here’s my thing, go buy it. And your content marketing, you’re telling your teaching.

00;23;48;20 – 00;24;07;01
Ralph Burns
You’re telling your brand story through, you know, education through maybe something that has something related to your business. Yeah. So I, I would agree with you there. I just think that the world’s like to start off today show like the worlds have really completely intersected and they completely overlap.

00;24;07;06 – 00;24;29;12
Lauren Petrullo
But don’t this don’t they used to be completely intersected. Like, I think of like, Jon Hamm and Mad Men days. Everything was intersect. We, like, gotten to this like yo yo of a space where like, I mean, I get overwhelmed by the KPIs. And because I have more KPIs available, therefore I must be smarter. But but you used to look at like our grandparents marketed that way, where everything was intersected.

00;24;29;12 – 00;24;46;20
Lauren Petrullo
And then we like one of the swing of the pendulum the opposite way, almost like, how are you talking about like with AI, we become overreliant on it. We are over indexing on KPIs. Yes, they matter and they’re leading indicators, but we have to look at it at large, and I feel like I’m going to blame the vasos in the Brunson’s of the world.

00;24;46;27 – 00;25;16;21
Lauren Petrullo
That had a. So focus on one click upsell, had us so focused on like same day, like buy right now, this instant gratification that a lot of digital marketers hurt themselves by getting like a horse with blinders on. Yeah. And the this what we’re talking about isn’t new. It’s novel for right now. Yeah. But it’s not new. I mean, since the Babylonian era, that’s how you had to look at all of your wherever your dollar was going.

00;25;16;23 – 00;25;22;27
Ralph Burns
Yeah. I mean, what’s what’s all this new again really with this and Benjamin.

00;25;22;27 – 00;25;29;26
Lauren Petrullo
Button case of marketing, we should call this episode the Benjamin Button case of marketing case. That’s not going to fly.

00;25;29;26 – 00;25;30;29
Ralph Burns
I don’t know, that’s going to fail.

00;25;31;00 – 00;25;31;29
Lauren Petrullo
It’s funny in my head.

00;25;32;02 – 00;25;44;27
Ralph Burns
Yeah, it’s funny in your I don’t know if Claude will like it too much. My best friend. No, it’s it’s true. Like, I even think back. And dice uses this example all the time, which I think like, it’s too bad that he’s no longer a marketer to say he really is.

00;25;44;27 – 00;25;50;15
Lauren Petrullo
Like he’s never going to give it up. He’s not going to get it. It’s like how Harry is no longer a royal. Okay.

00;25;50;16 – 00;26;02;24
Ralph Burns
Yeah. Exactly. Right. Dice is still marker, Ryan dice. That is. You guys don’t know who is who used to own this podcast, by the way. But we bought it from him four years ago. He said, you know, the soap operas.

00;26;03;02 – 00;26;04;01
Lauren Petrullo
Oh, my gosh.

00;26;04;01 – 00;26;28;20
Ralph Burns
The greatest market content marketing invention ever. I think in so many ways, because the whole concept behind soap operas was to get women to watch content and see women in the soap operas, actually using the soap that sponsored the soap operas.

00;26;28;21 – 00;26;30;02
Lauren Petrullo
That’s where soap opera came from.

00;26;30;02 – 00;26;32;27
Ralph Burns
Soap operas were, content marketing.

00;26;32;27 – 00;26;34;27
Lauren Petrullo
Was the original integrated advertisers.

00;26;34;27 – 00;26;44;02
Ralph Burns
Sell laundry detergent and soap. That’s why they’re called soap operas. Watch. Yes, it is absolutely true.

00;26;44;06 – 00;27;06;02
Lauren Petrullo
I’m like, yeah, by Procter and Gamble ninety-thirds when you’re talking about soap I was I think of like the 1990s in telenovelas and I, I know they existed before because my godmother, like my best friend’s mom, was on a soap opera for like ten years. One of the guys I did, his mom has been the lead writer for a huge soap opera for her entire career.

00;27;06;04 – 00;27;29;11
Lauren Petrullo
But I didn’t know that soap operas were around in the 30s, because when you’re saying soap, I’m thinking like 1950s. I thought soap operas came out in the 90s. Going back to everything at the beginning, everything that relates to the Hammack brand, why you had successes because you were looking beyond the demand for the sale. You need to build demand for not just your product, but for your brand and for what is distinguishing your product against the others.

00;27;29;13 – 00;27;44;06
Lauren Petrullo
And we went back and forth a lot today. You got to do the open. I’m gonna do the outro. We went back and forth a lot today about how to control. Yes, this is my podcast now, in that, like, there’s a lot that goes on. And so I know it seems hard and it seems easy and it seems complicated.

00;27;44;06 – 00;27;56;18
Lauren Petrullo
And every day it’s like kind of like a hormonal shift in what’s happening in marketing. But the bigger thing here is brands that grow their brand will have more success long term than those that only sell a product.

00;27;56;21 – 00;27;58;27
Ralph Burns
Yeah. Well said. Thanks.

00;27;58;29 – 00;28;15;20
Lauren Petrullo
Well, thanks for listening to this in person library podcast. I am Lauren Petrullo, founder, Mongoose Media, and I’m in front of my amazing and wonderful real person. Whoa, it is sweaty. Oh, I can’t take the heat of our discussions.

00;28;15;20 – 00;28;16;07
Ralph Burns
That’s it. Hi, I’m Ralph Burns.

00;28;18;06 – 00;28;21;13
Lauren Petrullo
That’s my amazing co-host. Thank you so much.

00;28;21;16 – 00;28;22;06
Ralph Burns
So much.

00;28;22;12 – 00;28;28;03
Lauren Petrullo
So happy to have you on this episode. Thanks for joining me.

Episode 788: Why the Funnel Is Dead (And What Actually Drives Growth Now)

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Why the Funnel Is Dead (And What Actually Drives Growth Now)

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