Making full funnel marketing campaigns fly!

With purses shrinking and belts tightening, it’s no wonder brands, along with consumers, are reviewing their expenditure and looking for ways to cut back. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the IPA publish articles on why brands shouldn’t pull back on investing in marketing despite the instinct to do so, during a crisis.

We at equimedia understand the many challenges brands are facing as ‘competitiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ become even more frequently used buzz words. We’ve recently generated fabulous results for brands big and small with full-funnel marketing campaigns. Campaigns that are multi-channel and seek to find the engaged audience at each stage of their decision making journey allow us to refine our understanding of customers and what they need as they move from consideration, through research to purchase. With a consistent reinforcement of brand and message, retargeting and conversion activity can then be really efficient.

Why are full funnel campaigns important right now?

We saw during the pandemic, brands take more of a brand-led approach to marketing rather than ‘sell, sell, sell’, and it appears that we’re experiencing similar trends during this economic downturn. Big brands are focusing more on brand awareness, no doubt to ensure they are top-of-mind as consumer spending slows down. With purchasing decisions made by consumers and B2B decision makers becoming more discretionary, it’s important that brands understand how best to stay engaged with their audiences even when they’re not totally ready to buy.

What are the key elements of full-funnel marketing?

We all know that any customer will go through these stages in their journey towards becoming a brand advocate:

• Awareness; stage 1: Going about their business, with no knowledge of our brand or products, but has a need for a product we offer
• Awareness: stage 2: Knowing of our brand and products, with some idea of what kind of product they want
• Consideration/Engagement; stage 3: Been to our website and our competitor’s websites, but not sure of who to buy from yet
• Purchasing; stage 4: researched the options and ready to make a buying decision
• Customer; stage 5: evaluated our brand and product
• Advocate; stage 6: Invested in the brand and willing to buy more, and happy to recommend our brand to friends and family

But of course, our customers aren’t all going through these consideration and decision phases at the same time, so we need to consider how we address these different customer needs concurrently. This is crucial so that our brand remains present during a user’s day-to-day online experience and ensures we can drive conversion once they are ready to buy. This is where we can use a range of insights to engage our key audiences at every stage of their consideration timeline.

• Awareness stages 1 and 2: We all know the last thing you want to do when you first meet someone is to tell them what to do (right?), so why would we put a strong call-to-action in front of a cold audience? This phase is really to ‘sow the seed’ of who you are, what you do and what you can offer this audience. It’s about developing brand recognition and reaching as many of your potential customers as possible. This is where introductory messages really work well, and by testing a variety of messaging can generate data insights to use in the consideration phase.
• Consideration/Engagement stage 3: At this point, we should know that our audience is interested in our competitors, or our brand, or our product type, and be ready to promote tailored messaging to engage our audiences. This content is going to get them to understand our product in more detail, begin considering a purchase or encourage them to engage with the brand and website.
• Purchasing stage 4: Not everyone’s going to purchase on their first or second visit to your website, but by building your data insights, continuing brand reinforcement and re-targeting customers with different messages according to their actions can drive sales:
  • Early leavers – Is this audience genuinely not relevant to your brand/product, or do they just need more time or convincing? This is an opportunity to prompt them with your value proposition and remind them why you are relevant to them
  • Funnel drop-offs – Some users may get part-way through purchase and the phone rings, or they realise they need to save a little more, or they just feel the funnel process is too much at this stage. Retargeting these audiences and prompting them to complete their purchase can support in driving more sales from audiences that so nearly bought. It may be that offers or a reinforcement of your product or brand values are key messages that drive users back to the funnel to complete their purchase
  • Purchasers – Of course, it doesn’t just stop once someone buys. Depending on your product, you may have opportunity for them to buy something similar, upgrade, or even refer a friend to drive more word-of-mouth conversions for you! Just don’t re-target them with the product they just bought from you! You will also be adding these new customers into a CRM nurture process either at purchase, or at show of intent, and this can help to further your brand advocacy as you build touch points with those who invest in your products.

What do I need to make full-funnel marketing successful?

There are a number of key points to consider when planning a full-funnel marketing campaign:

• Audience – Understand who your audiences are. This really under-pins most of the decisions you’ll make, so it’s important to have a good understanding of your key audience personas, their demographics, their attitudes, interests and media consumption habits. If you’re wondering how best to go about this, we can help with audience profiling, and give you a competitive edge.
• Channel activation – Now you know who you want to target, and what they want to see, it’s important to make sure your ads are seen by the right people, with the right message, on the right platform. No brand needs to be on every channel, you need to be on the channels your audiences use. Depending on your audience insights, you may want to activate any number of channels to achieve success; display advertising, industry publications, paid search, paid social, email, or influencer marketing.
• Measurability – It wouldn’t be a surprise if by now you’re wondering; this is all well and good but I need to prove to my senior leadership team that our marketing is working. "How do I do that?" Well, great question! When launching a multi-channel and multi-phase campaign each element will work individually as well as support each other. This means we need to adapt our ability to measure and report to understand overall success.

What do I need to effectively measure full-funnel marketing?

Back to my point about belts tightening and efficiency coming under scrutiny; measurement and evaluation can often be a big challenge for marketers, particularly for brands who use activity like display ads or social media, which often drive conversions on a post-impression basis, after a longer period than channels like Paid search. It can be difficult to understand and measure Return on Investment and understand the effect of such activity on other channels that deliver sales.

Our expert team have developed an innovative, propriety technology solution which brings together data from numerous sources so we can model conversion insights so that brands can understand the contribution each strand of marketing activity has on overall sales. It’s called equiEDGE. Cool, right?

With this technology we can work with any brand to build bespoke attribution models, centralising their data, pulling together 1st and 3rd party data, deduplicate data, and visualise insights. By doing this, we can comprehensively and confidently report on the individual and blended elements of tracked sales. We display these insights in dashboard reports adapted to what each brand wants to see, which allows not only the day-to-day stakeholders, but also senior stakeholders, to understand performance of marketing spend.

Interested in knowing more about our Web Analytics solutions? Our team are more than happy to chat with brands of any size about how our data solution, or any of our range of services can support them in driving success. I hope we’ve given you some ideas for how to approach your marketing moving forward. It’s important that full-funnel activity is planned and delivered in the right way. If you’d like to talk to us about your objectives and challenges, and how we can support, please do get in touch!