How will you invest in marketing for your brand this year? If you’re like most, you have a million ideas floating around your head with no clarity as to the best route. Especially in the upper funnel, you need a clear strategy that gets your name in front of the right people at the right time. With a successful upper-funnel strategy, your brand gets more exposure than others in the industry.
Sadly, many marketers believe that the upper funnel is a bit of a stab in the dark. In reality, lower-funnel performance and data should lead the way. When you learn at the bottom of the funnel, you can apply these insights to fix problems and make the upper funnel more effective. If you’re just looking for glittery headlines, you’ll increase CLV (customer lifetime value), revenue, and conversions.
But how do you increase demand in the upper funnel? Here are three strategies to adopt in 2021 and beyond!
Use First-Party Data to Launch Campaigns
Too often, we see marketers looking for a magical solution to land on their doormat when they have all the data that they need in the business already. With third-party sources becoming less reliable, you need to prioritize first-party data. What does this mean? This is the data that your business generated and holds, with the permission of customers.
As you gather data about your audience, you’ll learn how to personalize experiences, who to retarget, and you’ll spot trends and patterns. Furthermore, technological advancement means that you can also predict the future (well, in regard to your audience at least).
Every month, it seems as though there’s another blow to third-party data whether it’s a change in the regulations or updates from platforms or browsers (or certain operating system updates from a fruit-named brand!). If you can rely on your own data, you aren’t then susceptible to industry changes. Here are some tips to utilize your first-party data more effectively:
Bring Everything Together
Do you feel as though you’ve got a little bit of data here, a little bit there, and then a little bit you can’t even locate? If so, bring everything together with one centralized tool. Allow all data to flow into one platform, which then generates actionable insights.
Align KPIs
Ensure that all departments are pushing in the same direction with shared metrics and aligned KPIs. Above all else, set ground rules for planning, communication, and budget processing.
Utilize the Holistic Approach
Instead of investing solely on the lower end of the funnel - a tempting strategy - take a holistic approach and encourage emotional connections with leads and maximize the return on your investment. How can you introduce strategies that benefit the upper funnel as well as the lower funnel? A holistic strategy sees the funnel as one organism, as it should be, rather than two very different systems.
Customers Over Channels
With any marketing campaign, the aim is to resonate with the audience and encourage them into action. Whether a TV, a social media ad, or a leaflet, you want to show off your business and resonate with the recipient. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to put channels before the customer. Why have a presence on channels that aren’t important to your customers?
This year, aim to meet your customers at every step of the funnel rather than having a presence across all channels just for the sake of boasting a united profile. Work out where your consumers engage with the brand and aim to provide as much value as possible in these areas.
Did you know that price is no longer the biggest brand differentiator? In other words, people don’t just go for the cheapest products. In fact, they don’t even base their decisions on product quality. Instead, they consider the customer experience. As well as a seamless experience, modern consumers expect personalized recommendations, tailored services, and experiences anticipated before they even know they want them.
Once again, we have three tips in this area:
Prioritize First-Party Data
This was the crux of our first point, so we won’t go over this in too much detail. However, using first-party data is the best way to learn about your customers and how they engage with the brand. You’ll take a customer-first approach and pay attention to trends, patterns, and behavior changes in the funnel.
Use Brand Awareness Scores
If you’re looking for pertinent KPIs, we recommend brand awareness scores. Why? Because this tells you where your brand is strong and where it needs improvement. Wherever possible, try to use real-time analytics rather than driving in the rear-view mirror and always looking backward.
Align All Goals
When considering the customer journey, align all collective and individual goals. Too often, the marketing team ends up working in a silo; over time, the same happens to the sales, customer service, and all other teams. This year, strive to bring the whole business together and remove the silos.
Identify Critical Touchpoints
Finally, another tip to help optimize your upper funnel strategy is to identify the most important attribution touchpoints. Not only to identify them but to complete this task across the many stages of the customer journey.
To achieve this, you may know about attribution modeling. Essentially, this area of marketing answers the question of attributing credit to different channels. Which should get the credit for converting? Which channels are contributing more effectively than others? Which need improving?
Thankfully, you don’t need to take lots of coding courses to master this process because we have access to various models. Firstly, we should note that there’s not a magical, universal system that keeps everybody happy (that would be far too easy!). Instead, businesses often need to employ various measuring techniques to keep tabs on their marketing channels.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Firstly, we have an approach that assesses the impact of every touchpoint in the customer journey. By analyzing them individually, you can calculate the importance of each touchpoint to the overall strategy. Compared to other methods, this model is designed to provide real-time insights because it continually assesses the value of each channel.
If you’re looking to make decisions on a day-to-day basis, this is the preferred model for many businesses. Known as DDA (data-driven attribution), machine learning enables each channel to receive a certain value. Therefore, no touchpoint is forgotten in the customer journey.
By looking at unique conversion patterns, you can also learn the paths of people who failed to convert. As you can imagine, this is invaluable in discovering the differences between people who did convert and people who didn’t. Is one touchpoint instrumental in converting leads? Is one touchpoint more likely to lead to failure?
Marketing Mix Modelling
While multi-touch attribution is best for day-to-day decisions, MMM is better for long-term decision-making. Generally speaking, this is the most common form of attribution modeling because it tells businesses how they should allocate their resources. The problem? The insights aren’t generated in real-time; instead, everything is based on past performance. As a result, you may struggle to keep up with the evolving market and audience.
Experimentation
It might be 2021, and we may be in a world where billions are spent on technological advancements, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from trial and error. After gleaning some insights, you might decide to test them with some experimentation. Does this touchpoint really work? Does this adjustment make the strategy more effective?
With controlled experiments, you can learn more about conversions and how to boost your strategy. Over time, the idea is to get the most from your investment (naturally!). As well as traditional A/B testing with creatives and other aspects of ad campaigns, you can also try incremental experiments.
In short, this is an experiment whereby you identify the impact of individual campaigns. For example, a test may show that a control group with a certain feature led to significantly more conversions compared to a group without a feature.
Upper Funnel Marketing
With this, you have three of the secrets to upper-funnel marketing. We recommend using first-party data rather than relying on third-party data, prioritizing customers over channels, and using attribution modeling to determine the performance of each touchpoint.
Remember, it’s important to use the lower funnel to fuel the upper funnel. When leads pass through to the lower funnel, they’ve left a footprint from which you can learn. You can see which touchpoints they viewed, which they didn’t, as well as compare this to leads who failed to convert. How did the two experiences differ? Is there a pattern between people who convert and people who fail to convert?
If you’re aiming to increase the efficacy of the upper funnel this year, pay attention to the advice in this guide and strive to always resonate with your audience!