Dear Digital Marketers: For the Best Results, forget the Funnel.

A debate has raged on whether or not digital is a branding medium. I for one think it’s a ridiculous debate. All bias aside on what the proper way to do brand advertising on the Internet is, how can a medium so rich, engaging and massive not be a perfect branding channel? And yet a majority of digital marketing activities focus on the lowest portion of the purchase funnel (direct response) because it is the most measurable, where branding efforts are much harder to define. I think the point marketers are missing is that it doesn’t have to be one or the other in digital. In fact, in digital media one marketing unit can address the entire funnel. 

In a great conversation with IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg, he said having marketing efforts historically divided by various points in the purchase funnel, didn’t necessarily make sense any more. Even beyond the traditional purchase funnel described on Wikipedia, the new marketing funnel would include two steps past driving purchase — to manage customer loyalty (CRM) and advocacy (sharing brands with social graphs). Mass awareness campaigns and perception would be handled by one type of agency, couponing to drive product trial by another, local retail by another, CRM and customer loyalty by yet another agency. Finally, driving consumer word-of-mouth and advocacy would be handled by yet another agency. But with digital marketing, a single consumer engagement touch point, properly designed, could add value to consumers at all points in the new marketing funnel — and more importantly, for consumers moving from one point to another in the funnel.

If marketers considered each consumer engagement as an opportunity to address all points in the purchase funnel, they would get the most ROI on their digital marketing efforts. For example, a good digital marketing experience would start with an overarching brand message driving awareness and product/service positioning. After the consumers engage with the brand messaging, perhaps they are ready to move to the consideration portion of the funnel (wasn’t that the purpose of your creative?) and would like to know where their local provider of said product or service is. A great digital engagement would allow for the ability to let that subset of consumers continue their engagement by entering their Zip code and returning local results. Then, the funnel tells us, some subset of those consumers may be interested in trial, so a good digital engagement would allow for conversations to sales, be it coupons or e-commerce.
If consumers enjoyed the entire experience, some subset who spent time engaging with the brand might want to enter into a loyalty program or “like” the brand on Facebook (fast becoming the digital CRM tool of choice). Finally, some subset of consumers will share with their social graphs the results of their interaction with a digital marketing engagement, generating consumer word of mouth about a marketing campaign; this is usually highly correlated with the creative messaging.

The key is that if digital marketing effort is done in silos and measured as such, marketers are not getting the full ROI. The ROI from a campaign like the one mentioned above is best measured not by any one point in the new funnel, but by adding up all the values. Therefore a good digital engagement marketing campaign will deliver awareness and perception & consideration & trial & loyalty & advocacy.

By Joe Marchese
Joe Marchese is President of socialvibe.
Courtesy of http://www.mediapost.com