Have you heard of the CATT funnel?

The CATT Marketing Funnel can help your business expand faster.

Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction are all referred to as CATT.

It is a system I have developed to help you think about the marketing funnel simply and easily.

C – Content
A – Attention
T – Trust
T – Transaction

THE CATT Funnel

You can think of this as an evolved version of the AIDA funnel.

The CATT funnel is more relevant in the digital marketing era.

But then I realized that I cannot stop with CATT. So I added OST and R to it.

O – Onboard
S – Service
T – Transform
R – Reputation

So, now it is:

CATT + OST = R

Together I call it the Deep Marketing Framework.

Let’s look into each of these in-depth:

Content (C)

Content is the foundation of everything that we do in digital marketing. Without content, no one will pay attention. You are reading this content right now because it is useful to you.

Content can be ebooks, books, blog posts, videos, newsletters, community posts, social media posts, and so on. Even the content that we make for ads is content.

Attention (A)

People often forget the marketing part of content marketing. It is not just about creating content. You need to actively market it. You can use both organic traffic and paid traffic to promote your content. (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, SEO, and Social Media).

In short, you have to drive “Attention” to your content. Attention can be bought. But trust has to be earned.

Trust (T)

Once you have driven attention to your content, you have to build trust with your audience.

We trust people who add value to our lives and the people that we know for a long time. Trust is built through community, events, and follow-up messages.

Whenever a new lead is captured in our system, we send follow-up emails through drip marketing sequences. We add the leads to a community and engage with them. We conduct online events (webinars) to interact with the audience and build trust with them.

The more you do it regularly with consistency, the warmer will be your pipeline. This is the stage in which you convert all your cold leads into warm leads.

But building trust alone doesn’t convert into revenue. To generate revenue you need to do a transaction.

Transaction (T)

You created the content, you drove the attention, you generated the leads, and your warm up the leads by building trust with them. What next?

All the warm leads are of no use if you do not sell to them. Only when you sell (transact) you generate revenue. That can be reinvested into making more content, driving more attention, and building more trust with the leads.

Transactions range from low-ticket prices to high-ticket prices. For low-ticket items, a landing page is enough because the sales resistance is usually low. For high-ticket items, you might need to do webinar sales or 1-to-1 sales.

If you are doing 1-to-1 sales, you need to build a sales team. Without a sales team, you cannot scale sales. If you are selling mid-ticket items, a webinar sales (1-to-many) format can work well.

That makes the CATT funnel.

Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The purpose of a marketing funnel is to build a brand. A strong brand is built with good products and customer experience.

A lot of companies and brands have gone down the drain despite building a good marketing funnel. They forgot about product delivery and customer experience.

If you screw up with the service and delivery, your reputation will go for a toss and will directly affect your trust-building efforts.

The purpose of creating content, driving attention to the content, generating leads, and nurturing the leads is to build trust with them. But if someone has a bad experience with your products and they bad-mouth your brand on social media, all your CATT funnel efforts will go down the drain.

That’s why you need to add OST to the funnel.

Onboard (O)

Once the transaction has been done by your customer, you have to realize that they have taken a leap of faith. They have trusted you and parted with their money with the expectation that they will get something back that is more valuable.

They won’t get the value immediately. The value delivery with most products and services happens over some time.

The right onboarding process sets the customer expectations right and removes any possibility of buyer’s remorse.

Depending on the price of the product, onboarding can be done in different ways. If it is an online cohort-based course, the onboarding can be as simple as a welcome email combined with a welcome video.

In this communication, you should inform your customers how they can reach out to your team in case they need help regarding invoices, refunds, etc.

If it is a high-ticket product or an agency client, it is recommended that you do a welcome call by an account manager who is handling the account.

Half the customer service problems will be solved if the expectations are set right once they have entered your gates.

Service (S)

After onboarding, you need to provide the service. When I say service, it includes products as well. If you are selling a product, the product does the “service” for the customer.

Apart from commodities, every product that is sold has a manual service component to it. Apple iPhones might be seen as a product, but the software updates they give are the service component. If your phone breaks down, then you take it to the service center where the interaction is with a human being.

Some products have 90% product component and 10% service component. Some have 50/50. Sometimes it is 10% product and 90% service.

Our cohort-based training programs are a hybrid. The content that is already recorded and given is a product. The Q&A sessions delivered by our mentors are a service.

Poor products cannot be replaced by effective marketing. But poor marketing may be replaced with good products. The goal of marketing is to establish a brand, and marketing does not establish a brand—the customer experience does. Simply put, marketing allows customers to find you, which enhances the customer experience.

That’s why the service component is the most important aspect of the entire CATT+OST=R funnel.

Transformation (T)

It is not enough that you deliver a good service. You have to make sure that the service helps your customers to go from where they are to where they want to go.

For example, you could be selling a gym membership and provide excellent service with trainers, clean and functional equipment, and a good location. But after people buy your membership, many will not show up.

You have to make sure that your customers use the service that you have sold to them and transform themselves. Without which there is no customer experience at all. Without that experience, there will not be any recurring revenue and brand building.

Online courses are another example. 90% of the people who purchase online courses do not complete them. That’s why in our Micro Internship program we incentivize them to complete what they have started by offering cashbacks for assignment completions. We do that because we care for our customers, and that’s what builds our brand.

Reputation (R)

If you do all the above right, you will build a reputation.

Reputation makes your CATT funnel more efficient, well-lubricated, and fast.

People don’t need too much convincing to transact with you because they trust you. They trust you because their friend told them good things about you. That’s reputation, the ultimate form of branding.

That ends the funnel, on a good note.

Reputation can lead to a lot of revenue and profits that can be reinvested back into CATT & OST.

You can provide a better service, which leads to better transformation, which leads to more reputation and the cycle goes on.

Screw up with the service and transformation component, you will screw up your reputation, and no matter how great your content and marketing are, it will be of no use. Because the trust that you try to build with content will be taken away by a bad reputation.