How Full Funnel Marketing Strategy Will Take Your KPIs Beyond Targets

As technology advances and user’s shopping habits move towards online shopping, marketers ought to adapt to a more “intelligent” digital era, where attention span is at an all-time low and users’ savviness at a peak.

Connecting at the right time and in the right way with your target audience is paramount in customer acquisition and retention strategies. Now, more than ever, guiding the user from awareness and consideration straight down the funnel to purchase and retention can be achieved online.

Introducing full-funnel marketing in your strategy has been at the forefront of innovative media strategies, however it has been widely accelerated by the users’ behaviour, with over 60% of customers trying a different way of shopping and where 30% of these ventured out with new brands and products. The data shows customers are more ready than ever to shift their favourite brands, and have quoted the brand’s purpose and values as one of the main points of consideration.

Beyond Conversions

When it comes to purchases, companies believe lower funnel strategies will deliver a high ROAS. However, these customers coming to convert in store or online at the lower part of the funnel will need to have heard of the brand, believe in its scope and purpose. You’ve never heard of a great company without, well, hearing about it! This is where a full funnel strategy will build the company’s name and reputation, educate customers, present products, and convert customers as well as keeping them along for the ride.

KPIs are key when it comes to a full funnel strategy, more specifically individual KPIs per channel and overall KPIs for the full media mix. In simple terms, users will see an ad for a food delivery app with a 10% off discount code and will proceed to download the app. However, there is so much more between awareness and conversion that goes on in the consumers heads and advertisers cannot solely rely on one channel to drive their conversions.

For example, after looking through the attribution platform, advertisers identify that customers who see a discovery ad and then search for the brand tend to have a higher Average Order Value than the users who only search for the brand. This type of information and discovery would be possible if advertisers assign the same KPI to all channels when some of them are important touch point, but they will not be the last touch point.

Attribution & Tracking KPIs

The way upper funnel and lower funnel strategies worked previously involved rudimentary TV ads and demand capturing channels like Paid Search and Paid Shopping. The ubiquitous issue of tracking the incrementality of TV ads has forced marketers to adopt online video and audio content marketing such as Programmatic Display, Discovery Ads and the newly released Performance Max campaigns – an innovative way to target both upper and lower funnel users.

However, extensive marketing efforts still need to have their value in bringing customers assigned correctly. Some companies will drive the most customers with programmatic display, whereas others will focus their efforts on generic keywords and succeed. Hence why multi-touch attribution models (MTA) are the only way to assign the much needed for reporting and optimization purposes incrementality to different touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

Choosing the right attribution model and creating custom attribution in Google Analytics will aid the assignment of correct channel contributions. Innovative companies have started analysing their users’ behaviours at different touch points, moving away from the ‘only conversion’ based approach for advertising. Whilst higher intent channels will of course help convert customers, a lot of these customers will search for the brand after seeing it on social media, TV, hearing about it through WOM or even through influencer marketing. Looking into how demand increases with the help of other demand-generating channels is key to understanding how your brand is perceived and when the decision-making happens.

Budgeting & Spend Models

Many companies, especially big media budget corporations, determine how much to spend on different types of advertising with the use of media mix models (MMM). The traditional way of splitting budget between channels has led to missed opportunities. Because they require long periods of planning, these models are not very susceptive to immediate change or needing to reallocate budget around. 30% of marketers admit to having been held back by the inflexibility of the model as it doesn’t consider the intricacies of consumer behaviour and how those might change every month. For example, an MMM model might say there is an extra £30,000 allocated to paid search shopping campaigns, however these have maxed out their impression share. This would lead to missed opportunities in other areas, such as display or programmatic advertisement that would create demand at the top of the funnel.

Instead, companies should focus on a data-driven media budget, employing multi-touch attribution models and creating a fluidly allocated budget based on actual customer behaviour data.

Channel Diversification

‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ could not be truer when it comes to effective digital marketing. Displaying an ad to the same person four times on the same channel will not be nearly as powerful as showing that ad to the same user on four different platforms. Diversifying your channel strategy, showing a unified messaging across multiple platforms, and presenting your products multiple times creates trust and builds brand equity. This strategy also reduces creative fatigue and audience saturation since people’s attention spans differ from platform to platform as well as their purchasing behaviours and intent.

A good lower budget channel diversification strategy, depending on the type of the business you’re advertising for, would be combining search, shopping, display & social. Performance Max campaigns on Google Ads will do most of the search, shopping, and display for you, creating a wider funnel approach. Whilst paid social, with LinkedIn advertising & Meta will ensure you’re getting through to the users whilst at work as well as during their free time.

Finally, all 4 levers mentioned above cohesively contribute to a successful marketing campaign. As scary as fluid budgets, different channel KPIs and platform diversification sound, the end goal is always building a strong brand equity, acquiring new customers, and keeping those loyal. Hopefully this article gives you some insight into where to start building your holistic funnel approach and making your brand ubiquitously known and seen.

Ilinca Prodanel, Senior Performance Manager