How a Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy Will Benefit Your Business

Nowadays marketing has a split personality. On one side is brand building, driven by TV ads and other broad-reach vehicles. Many old-guard marketers who have risen through the ranks excel at this. The other side is performance marketing, or the data-driven measure of online activity. The young guns of marketing who have grown up with digital tools have mastered this discipline.

For many companies, the split between performance marketers and brand builders is inhibiting growth aspirations. When budget and impact conversations occur, performance marketers tout their ability to drive clicks while brand builders argue for longer-term investments, although they often struggle to demonstrate the near-term value their teams generate. According to recent interviews with 24 top marketing executives, less than a fifth of them report having a very strong understanding of how their brand-building campaigns are performing.

The measurement problem in brand building has obscured its importance. As a result, many CMOs shift too much of their marketing spend toward the easy-to-justify capture of customers at the bottom of the funnel at the expense of the less tangible generation of customer demand and attention at the top.

Because customers who have an emotional connection to a brand tend to be more loyal and valuable over time than those who arrive at a site because of a generic keyword search or social media ad, marketers should focus on developing relationships with customers as early in the purchase funnel as possible.To address this imbalance, some leading companies are moving toward full-funnel marketing, an approach that combines the power of both brand building and performance marketing through linked teams and key performance indicators.

If you're looking to drive significant value, we think a thoughtful, data-driven full-funnel marketing strategy can help. We've found that by shifting greater media allocation to areas with higher returns and employing test-and-learn optimization for demand generation campaigns, we can achieve a 15 to 20 percent lift in marketing ROI. Additionally, many marketers have found that incorporating both brand building and performance elements in a campaign often increases the overall return on ad spend compared with spending on performance channels alone.

The fundamentals of full-funnel marketing

All marketers face similar challenges when launching a new product or brand, repositioning a legacy brand, or trying to drive in-quarter sales. They will want to embrace this essential elements:

• Brand-building measurement:
  Some advertisers have long struggled to track the effectiveness of TV ads. Traditional TV ads offer the potential to reach large numbers of consumers and elicit powerful emotional responses, but their inflexibility prevents marketers from collecting detailed insights on how exactly the campaigns are impacting consumer behavior.People are increasingly moving toward internet TV and digital streaming services, including audio. These options allow marketers far greater visibility into who is seeing their ads and allows them to show different ads to different households that are watching or listening to the same program.
  New measurement approaches to brand campaigns have emerged in recent years, which allow marketers to move beyond traditional coarse methodologies such as brand trackers and reach/frequency metrics.
  

• A unified set of KPIs:
  Linking key performance indicators between different channels and stages of the sales funnel to actual business results, such as conversions or leads, helps companies understand the real impact of their marketing and then create messages that will elicit the best responses. For instance, if unaided brand awareness is increasing, what effect is that having on website traffic or digital purchases? Are brand-building efforts leading more consumers to make branded search queries, which have a lower cost per click than generic product-category searches?
  This unified view of marketing data helps marketers see how touchpoints throughout the funnel affect one another and identify the metrics that matter most. If brand-building campaigns are leading to more website conversions or branded search queries, these are clear signs that investing in more brand building will likely pay off. Only when marketers link KPIs can they identify the interactions most tightly tied to business value and start making smart decisions to adjust or rebalance their marketing spend.
  

• A full-funnel marketing model:
  Marketing's full-funnel approach requires a complete top-to-bottom integration of the function; you can't simply tack it onto existing daily processes. That means rethinking how work gets done across functions. Four areas are especially important:
  -Incentives for full-funnel performance
  -Cross-functional collaboration
  -Deeper collaboration between media agency and partner
  -Adoption of test-and-learn capabilities by brand marketers

Full-funnel marketing is not just a campaign strategy; it’s a total shift in how marketing works. Full-funnel marketers harness the complete range of marketing capabilities to increase the impact from all campaigns. Most importantly, they provide the C-suite with a much richer and more complete picture of how exactly marketing is driving growth.If you want to implement a full funnel strategy and don't know where to begin, contact us today and learn more about how our tool can help you implement a full funnel marketing strategy.