January 25, 2023
Commentary
Lower Funnel Fallacies
- by Sree Nagarajan , Op-Ed Contributor, July 6, 2016
Data is getting a lot of love these days in the marketing world. And money. But not all data sets are created equal.
With the rise of big data, marketers have skewed their efforts
toward tactics that utilize lower funnel data (purchase, intent, etc.) that tell a neat, defensible ROI story. The luxury of measuring one-to-one conversions and transactions is a big reason why
digital spend is going to surpass television spend for the first time in history next year, according to eMarketer.
Lower funnel data can quickly become problematic for brands if they focus too much of their overall branding strategy guided by deterministic, 1-to-1 targeting and measurement solutions. By only focusing on the signals that a fully converted consumer is sending, marketers are neglecting their responsibility to feed the top of the funnel, making sure more consumers become aware of their brand and ultimately choose it over the competition on their way to conversion.
advertisement
advertisement
Lower funnel data is super effective when it comes to driving a sale.
If I had one day to sell as many crab cakes as possible, I would want to know precisely where the most voracious crab cake eaters were hanging out, so I could sell to them. But for most products, the consumer journey is lengthy and nuanced.
There is much branding a marketer can and should do to steward a consumer to the moment of conversion, and that, like many strategic initiatives, requires marketers to take a long view.
See the benefits side-by-side, and it becomes clear that lower- and upper-funnel strategies demand equal attention.
Lower Funnel | Upper Funnel |
Limited scale. There is no omniscient view of the consumer.
| Massive scale. Casting a wide net, you can connect to infinite new audiences that could become active members of your customer base. |
Difficult to optimize efficiency. While lower funnel data may drive a nice, demonstrable sales lift, it ignores the fact that often regular buyers are going to buy regardless of your marketing efforts. In that way, it’s like doing a rain dance 15 minutes before a forecast monsoon -- and then taking all the credit for making it rain.
| Highly efficient. Lower CPMs reach more potential customers and there are many robust data sets and providers that can drive massive efficiencies and pay off for brands. |
Narrow reach. Lower funnel campaigns are tactical.
If you are a big soda company, it makes sense to run media on a mobile platform that can target people as they are walking past a convenience store. | Broad reach. Walking among the masses are millions of consumers that are likely more engaged with a brand than the marketer realizes. They can be identified via their affinities, and then reached through traditional and digital media … wherever they are, whenever is most appropriate. |
Measurement also has to evolve. There are mid- to upper-funnel data sets that can quantify consumer affinity if we can identify them properly. Social media is a great example of this, with a footprint of 1.5 billion people world wide.
Most of them are actively engaging with brands every day. Using machine learning and big data in a smart way, we can examine millions of consumer engagements to understand branding outcomes of media.
By using data to build more powerful brands, marketers can invite more of their best prospective consumers into the upper funnel to ultimately create many more people to convert via tried and true direct response campaigns that are geared toward the lower funnel.
