Last month, we gave an introduction to the Marketing Funnel and
discussed how marketers need a balanced mix of programs beyond email and search to effectively reach prospects wherever they may be traveling online. In this paradigm, broad, top-of-the-funnel
branding initiatives such as social engagement and demographic-targeted display ads provide initial awareness, and mid-funnel tactics such as social ads pinpoint buyers who have engaged. Only when
your target audience is educated and primed to engage with your sales team directly will lower-funnel tactics, such as search and email marketing, perform at their best to convert leads and deals.
In this column we will focus on the top funnel and examine the different programs you can employ to increase brand awareness.
Top-funnel tactics
The top funnel is
where you focus to increase awareness and recall of your company and products, and to drive more of the right traffic to your Web site, corporate blog or landing pages. Top-funnel campaigns
convey what your company does, why your products are unique, and why customers should care about your company.
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There are many different tactics that you can implement at the top funnel,
including:
- Display ads. Display advertising is uniquely versatile and can be designed to impact the top, mid- and bottom-funnel. For the top funnel, marketers can
deploy a range of display advertising techniques including broad business demographic targeting (e.g., targeting campaigns by someone’s role or seniority in an organization) or company targeting
(i.e., running campaigns against a target account list). These techniques can help you reach the broader audiences you are targeting early on in the purchase process -- in most cases long before
these people are actively on the hunt for a solution or vendor.
- Social media. Most marketers are now also driving brand awareness through ongoing social media
programs: following and engaging with influencers in their target market, promoting their own news and sharing information from relevant industry publications on social sites such as Facebook,
LinkedIn and Twitter.
- PR. Generating media coverage for your company provides “air cover” for your sales team.
Increasing awareness for your brand through PR activities not only helps your sales team get in the door, but will also provide the third-party validation for your products and services that can help
them close the deal.
Top-funnel measurement
Top-funnel measurement can be tricky, which is why many marketers take the easy way out and simply attribute
success to the strength of the last marketing campaign that touched a deal before it closed. For example, if they have deployed a display advertising program to fill or accelerate prospects through
the funnel, and paid-search or SEO programs to convert prospects lower in the funnel, they may jump to the conclusion that search is driving all the new business, which may lead them to increase their
incremental spend on search alone.
Here's the conundrum. If all credit is given to search, and spending on search is subsequently increased, the shortage of budget in display is likely to
adversely impact the next quarter's search results. Simply put, the lower-funnel activity will plateau if you don't invest in the upper funnel.
One way to avoid short-changing your top-funnel
programs is to assign an equal share of attribution to each marketing initiative you use. In an equal credit attribution model, you can spread the value of a deal evenly among each marketing
touchpoint, and measure the ROI of each channel accordingly to guide future program investments.
Beyond proper attribution, there are several tangible metrics that you can track to get a
handle on the impact of your upper-funnel programs. Fundamentally, if you’re reaching more of your target audience higher up in the funnel, you should see a lift in:
- Brand recall. You can run an online brand study that compares increase in awareness among a control group (i.e., people who didn’t see your display ad) to an exposed group
(i.e., people who saw your display ad).
- Branded search. You should see an increase in the number of people searching for your company or products in their
search engine of choice.
- Targeted traffic to your Web site. Your Web site analytics tools should show an increase in the volume of targeted traffic to
your Web site.
- Form conversions. You should see an increase in the number of the right people who are engaging with your Web site content and
submitting forms (e.g., contact forms, downloading white papers, free trials)