The marketing hourglass is the 7-step journey a customer takes through the buying process: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

Now, if you’ll remember the beginning of our marketing sophistication series, we talked about how a strategy can be absent, reactive, sporadic, or consistent.

In the case of the marketing hourglass, an absent strategy finds you trying to move prospects from know directly to buy, skipping like, trust, and try.

When your marketing hourglass strategy is reactive, you’re still skipping like, trust, and try but have added random programs in an attempt to achieve repeat and refer.

If you’re moving prospects through know, like, and trust to buy (skipping try) and have programs for repeat but are still not accomplishing refer, your strategy is sporadic.

Finally, there’s the holy grail – a consistent marketing hourglass strategy. In this case, you know all 7 steps of the customer journey and have marketing tactics designed to address each of them.

Next week we leave the hourglass behind and move ahead into lead generation strategy!