Staircases
A simple visual on how to level up your customers, your content, and your marketing
We have tried to do two things with the business:
1. Create a ‘staircase’ of product offerings (and pricing) that allow customers to go from good to better, to best products
2. Help shepherd your customers along a maturity curve that they can easily understand
As customers mature, they should have incentive to buy their way up your staircase of products.
— Jeff Allen, Sr Director of Product Marketing for Analytics at Adobe (via)
What does this insight mean for a marketing team? Clearly, one of the effects this could have is with the sales funnel. And in some cases, like for us at Buffer, it might mean a fundamental shift: Do we drive traffic to our free signup page in the hopes that the free signups eventually mature into business customers? Or do we put our efforts into driving business trialists from the start?
When I shared these questions with friends, the answers were great … and varied:
- Staircases work better with premium tools rather than freemium.
- Why choose? You can do both: aim for free and trialists, and level people up in the app.
- You gotta choose. Align your messaging & branding to attract the customer you want (ideally, the highest LTV one)
How might you answer that question?
So the staircase is the funnel.
But what else could the staircase be?
Here are some thoughts:
- You can staircase your social media marketing: Impression > Follow > Clickthrough > Reshare (advocacy)
- You can staircase content: Visitor > Returning visitor > Email subscriber > Commenter > Social Media Sharer
- You can staircase paid: Low intent ads w/ free content > Medium intent w/ webinar or course > High intent w/ demo or signup
Where else could you see the staircase making sense?
If this post sparked any thoughts … I’d love to hear them!
Feel free to respond below, or click recommend to get others involved in the conversation. ✌︎
