S4

Episode 1

Marketing Funnels Demystified: Strategies for Success

About This Episode

August 15, 2023

Learn how to build a full-funnel marketing strategy and optimize your marketing funnels across platforms and industries.

Chris Barr | Programmatic Media Supervisor Add3

Adam Ansoff | Programmatic Media Supervisor Add3

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

In terms of industry trends for programmatic so far this year, the first thing is just leaning into more channels that have become digital that used to be more traditional people moving from linear to CTV. Same thing with digital out-of-home. I think a lot of brands are comfortable with traditional out-of-home are starting to better understand the advantages of digital out-of-home and looking to test that as well testing a lot of contextual targeting solutions where we don’t have to rely on a third party cookie to reach relevant customers.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:24)

But then you think about the social landscape. The research data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touch points, so that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in, you’re tuning in, you’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.

Sneha (00:00:48)

There’s no doubt that the world of marketing moves quickly. And as a marketer at any level, staying updated with these changes cannot be easy. Keeping your brand relevant. And doing this consistently, by keeping up with the trends will help you stay ahead of the curve. And that’s why we have some industry experts joining us today to give you the latest scoop on what’s happening right now in the digital marketing landscape. Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive Podcast. I’m Sneha Suhas from StackAdapt. And with me, I have Adam and Chris, both from Add3, a digital marketing agency. Welcome to the show, firstly, and let’s do a quick round of introductions with your areas of expertise and experience so far. So let’s start with you, Adam.

Adam (00:01:38)

Yes, I am a senior digital programmatic Account Manager here at Add3. I have been working in Add3 for about five years now. And I guess in overall marketing and advertising for 10 years. And I’ve done everything all the way from traditional ads, buying radio and TV all the way down to you know doing retargeting in the digital space.

Sneha (00:02:05)

Awesome. Thank you for joining us. And welcome to the show over to you, Chris.

Chris (00:02:09)

Yeah, thank you. And thanks for having us. My name is Chris Barr. I’m also a senior programmatic Account Manager at Add3. Adam and myself, oversee what’s called Add3 Connect, which is the awareness arm of Add3, primarily programmatic buying, but also some direct buying as well. I started at Add3, just a few months after Adam. So been here, just about the same amount of time I’ve been in the industry for close to seven years, prior to working in the agency world worked more on the arbitrage side of things. So a little bit different world but always been in the digital media space. Really excited to be here today and discuss what’s going on in digital advertising with you guys today.

Sneha (00:02:53)

Great. So nice to have both of you on the show. Welcome once again. And let’s start with the basics. Could you define the different parts of a funnel in a marketing strategy?

Chris (00:03:04)

Sure. Yeah, I can take this one. So I think everyone’s probably seen the image of a marketing funnel before. But going through the different parts, we have the top of the funnel, which is focused on awareness. That’s really where Adam and myself and our team come in. This is really looking to make people aware of your company, recall your ads, and really set the stage for the rest of the funnel. This is the entry point in the customer journey. Down from there we have the middle of the funnel. This is typically where from our end on programmatic we have things like retargeting, but more predominantly, we have things like paid social, which are really geared towards educating people who are now aware of your company on what you do and what your expertise says, and really nailing home what the value of your company is. So you’re not quite at the point of the purchase, but you’re really letting people know that you know what we’re talking about and that you have something to offer. And then the part of the funnel that the top two are really trying to feed and get people into is the bottom of the funnel, which is really geared towards some sort of conversion, whether that be a purchase, sign up, whatever that goal may be for your particular client. This is where the end goal comes to fruition. This is where you’re trying to drive them to your site and complete that action. This is mostly done through search, but the other channels social and programmatic can play hand in this as well.

Sneha (00:04:34)

So you spoke about the funnel and if we could connect this to customer journeys, customer journeys may not be linear. And customers may be aware and they may make a purchase in an instant. But sometimes it will take ages despite a lot of engagement from the prospect. So how do you understand which part of the funnel applies where and to whom? And if you could give an example that would be great.

Adam (00:05:02)

Yeah, so the funnel does, you know, a good job of explaining that user journey. But as you mentioned, it does a poor job defining of how quickly that journey occurs. We definitely see the biggest discrepancy here, when we’re comparing, you know, a B2C or business to consumer versus a B2B business to business transaction, where the B2B transaction is gonna take a lot longer, have a lot longer path, and the B2C is going to be much shorter. Awareness, as we mentioned earlier, is really there to help consumers be aware of your brand, but also with brand recall. So this top of the funnel is really driving people to get make sure your brand is within their consideration set. So it might not be the time of purchase, or there might not even be considering purchasing. But awareness is really to make sure that when the time comes that your brand comes to mind, even in the process, because when someone’s making a purchasing decision, usually it’s very, it can be very quickly in the moment. And if you’re not in the consideration set you’ve already lost. So as we kind of continue down the funnel consideration is when you know the customer is in the decision-making process. But usually, as I mentioned, it’s it can be very quick, but sometimes it can take a little bit longer. Sometimes there’s a fact gathering information-gathering part of the process. And this is where consideration is really key. So using paid social ads, native ads, that drive to, you know, information pages, blog articles, more information, that sort of thing can be extremely helpful in driving home, your expertise in your vertical. And then kind of as we continue down the bottom of the funnel is really where you want to be there when they’re making that purchase. So this is where brand search really shines. You know, in digital marketing, we obviously you know, brand and paid social always are kind of the golden child when it comes to return on ad spend, CPA and all of these metrics, but it’s really because it’s capturing all of the efforts that you’ve done at the top. So the top of the funnel tactics that you’re using aren’t going to be driving direct revenue or conversions. But your bottom-of-the-funnel tactics or your net that is capturing everything that you’re doing at the top.

Sneha (00:07:38)

You mentioned something about B2B and B2C customer journeys being different. So could you highlight some key differences here and the approaches to using the funnel and also understanding the customer journey when it comes to B2B and B2C?

Adam (00:07:53)

Yeah, so B2B. So I guess we’ll start with B2C because B2C is your, the purchases you’re making are a lot lower value, so you’re buying hydration capsules, or you’re buying makeup, or you’re buying you know, shoes, right. So those purchases are, while important to you are lower overall value, and you can make those decisions much quicker understanding that, because those purchase cycles are a lot shorter, we, you know, need to make sure that our advertising is you know, very targeted, we have a lot more information on who we’re going after, we have a lot better customer profiles, and there’s usually also a lot more customers available. So to the people that are trying to buy shoes, a lot gonna be, there’s gonna be a large number of people buying shoes, so we have a lot more opportunities to make that sale. When it comes to B2B, however, you’re a lot more, you have a lot smaller pool of people that are making those buying decisions because those purchases are worth a lot more, there are a lot higher value. And so when you’re doing b2b marketing, you have to, you know, look at your funnel a little differently because your top of funnel is going to be the actual funnel piece is going to be much smaller, you’re starting off with a much smaller group of people. And you’re also dealing with a much longer decision timeline. Businesses move a lot slower than people, individual people do. So whereas a consumer if I make the decision go through the entire funnel within a day, a business might take three months to get a lead. So really understanding the timing it takes and how much. This is like in B2B. The consideration phase is definitely massive because making sure that you provide the articles and the value add and all of the value props for your business to make other businesses keen on buying your product. It’s a lot more important, whereas in the b2c space, the middle of the funnel is going to struggle or not struggle, but it’s gonna be a lot quicker of a process. There they went, there’s some times where they’ll go straight from the awareness once they’re in the consideration set when they go to make the purchase. They just make the purchase. So there’s definitely a big difference and how the B2C and B2B look in terms of the funnel.

Sneha (00:10:33)

Have you noticed any changes in the general media strategies that marketers are using? When it comes to social search paid, programmatic across the board? What are your thoughts?

Chris (00:10:47)

Yeah, definitely. There’s a few things that I think that are going on right now. Some of it is new, some maybe as a leftover of the last couple of years. Starting with the challenge. I think this is something that has been pretty widely reported and shared across a lot of different brands and agencies. But overall marketing budgets are a bit lower this year, or at least slow to be released, we’re seeing a lot of budgets released towards the end of Q1, as companies are trying to figure out how best to spend those marketing dollars. In terms of just industry trends for programmatic so far this year, I think it’s nothing new necessarily. It’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about for the last couple of years. The first thing, it’s just leaning into more channels, let’s say that have become digital that used to be more traditional. By that I mean, people moving from linear to CTV, CTV is still a huge discussion for all clients. Not that clients are abandoning linear TV, but definitely looking to lean more into CTV. And it’s an initiative from our end as well to grow the CTV side of the business. Same thing with digital out-of-home. I think a lot of brands are comfortable with traditional out-of-home, but are starting to better understand the advantages of digital out-of-home and looking to test that as well. And I look at both of CTV and digital out-of-home as things that will probably continue to grow. In addition to those two channels, we’re also still seeing a lot of cookieless targeting solutions being tested, you know, Google Chrome continues to push back their date for when the third party cookie is going to be deprecated. Who knows when that will happen, or if it will happen at this point because it gets pushed back every time you turn around. But that doesn’t change what we need to do as marketers and continuing to test in that ensuing period. So we look at specifically trying to use first-party lists, clients CRM lists to find new customers off of those through similar audiences or reengage current customers depending on the client. In addition to that, testing a lot of contextual targeting solutions where we don’t have to rely on a third-party cookie to reach relevant customers. Outside of the programmatic space. We’re seeing a proliferation of SNAP-paid social media channels, I think, at least at our agency, a lot of social dollars had gone to Meta in the past and maybe Meta Instagram, but we’re starting to see those budgets get split up between Meta and Instagram. And in addition to that channels like TikTok, which, of course is huge right now and Pinterest are starting to see a bit more investment. So we’re seeing additional social channels that maybe we weren’t seeing as much investment in the past. And then search is actually from our end starting to see a little bit of disruption, which is interesting, since that’s a channel that at least from my outside programmatic point of view has seemed pretty regular for a while. But with things like AI and ChatGPT we’re seeing some changes. And that’s kind of twofold on one end, that’s the you know, and this might not affect necessarily directly the purchasing or conversion side of things. But in the consideration phase, if people are trying to look something up where maybe they would arrive on a brand’s page to learn about a certain topic. Now they can learn that via AI. So maybe they don’t go to your customers page to learn about what they’re searching for. On the other side of things we’re seeing, you know, the ChatGPT can be a help in terms of efficiency if you need to create a lot of new ad copy. You know, I saw an article recently where someone actually not only got creative copy for search from ChatGPT, but also was able to establish parameters for the testing. So ChatGPT was actually able to pass that back why they put together version A versus version B, which is pretty interesting. I know a lot of people like to write their own copy but you know, sometimes it is good to get an outside perspective. Even if it’s not a human. So it’s interesting to see how that might change things as well. But those are the big trends that I’m seeing so far this year.

Sneha (00:15:09)

Wow, that’s definitely a lot of things changing. And keeping all of these changes in mind, if you could, you know, give us top five ways to optimize a full funnel strategy across industries, platforms, and channels, what would they be?

Adam (00:15:26)

Yeah, I think the number one thing that I think is extremely important when you’re looking at a full funnel strategy, is to establish your KPIs. And by this, I mean, you’re gonna have different goals across your funnel, and you need to make sure that you’re not judging the different parts of the funnel on one specific metric. And what I mean is, return on ad spend is probably the king metric for all anyone that has revenue in their campaigns. But when you’re looking at the difference between CTV and brand search, you’re not going to be able to compare both of those the same way like your CTV is not going to be driving the CPA return on ad spend, your brand searches, you have to understand what is success look like for top of funnel? Does that is that gonna be you know, reaching frequency goals? Is that a brand list study, but you really have to determine between you and your client, what does success look like for top of funnel to make sure that you’re going in the right direction. Same thing with middle of the funnel. Like are what kind of KPIs are you looking there? Because you’re not looking to drive conversions yet, you’re really just trying to drive that traffic and that information gathered. So is that going to be time on site? As I can be in, you know, how, what is the bounce rate on your page, like a lot of these, you know, your Google Analytics metrics there, I find are extremely helpful for middle of the funnel. And then bottom of the funnel, or you know, pretty much all the metrics that we like to use already. So return on ad spend, CPA, things like that. I think so just going through and establishing all of your KPIs with your client at the outset, will really help to ensure that you’re continuing to drive success and then can help add dollars to top of funnel, middle of funnel because you’re seeing the success there. And then, you know, tracking like, okay, now that we’ve seen success at the top, in the middle of the funnel, are we also increasing and improving our efficiencies at the bottom of the funnel at the same time? So just understanding the different KPIs but also looking at everything in conjunction. So I guess that’s the first thing I guess another thing would be to align your messaging and your creative with your objective. So I see a lot of times, because creative, it takes it’s a lot of heavy lifting to do. It’s extremely difficult sometimes to stratify your messaging for upper funnel and bottom of the funnel. But we do want to make sure that when we’re doing ads to top of the funnel that you have messaging that correlates. So things like learn more versus buy now can be a very simple way to change what your call to action is on your messaging. But you want your top of funnel to be more, this is our brand, this is who we are. And then as you go down the funnel, you’re adding unique selling propositions and things of that nature to really drive home, why they should be buying. And then finally, bottom of funnel is just very much just like a lot of the times we see things like doing percent off or sales or promos are really helpful at the bottom of the funnel where you don’t want to start those messaging at the top of the funnel, because then you just are become the sales kind of brand. I guess the next thing would be to continue AB testing different tactics to make sure that you’re using the right tools to hit your established KPIs. So if we go back to the first point, you know, you’re setting the KPIs by part of the funnel. As you’re running different tactics, you want to make sure you’re continuing to test to make sure that you’re hitting the KPIs with your different tactics within the funnel. So by that I mean if you’re doing awareness campaign, and you’re running you know CTV versus digital out-of-home, really understanding like okay, you know, what within CTV is driving the metrics, what within digital out-of-home is driving the metrics? Are we getting, you know, the right reach and frequency? Are we seeing the brand list studies improve? So just continuing to AB test, I think is extremely important, especially in digital marketing, where we’re able to get this really quick feedback I think just testing and digital marketing is always going to be. And I guess, the next thing that I would want to talk about in terms of optimizing is, you know, as I’ve just mentioned, for top of funnel is leveraging brandless studies for upper funnel, this is something that we’ve seen emerge, especially from a tech perspective from a lot of our partners is this has become a lot more turnkey than it has in the past. So I know things such as like YouTube and Facebook, you have to hit certain spend thresholds to get studies there. And so they run those very well and very efficiently. But in no partners that we’ve run with from StackAdapt, and Trade Desk and other things, they’ve made it very turnkey to run these studies in platform and you actually get the results in fairly real time in platform. So it is an upper funnel technique, or testing technique that you’re able to use. It does take a lot longer than your standard conversions and clicks and things like that. But it is something from a technical standpoint that has been made much easier. And definitely would recommend leveraging to help optimize your full funnel campaigns, kind of one final thing is an invite sounds silly, but be patient. I think one of the things that we really want to do as digital marketers is, you know, we have our weekly calls with clients, we want to show like, hey, we’re making this change, we’re making this change, look at all the cool things we’re doing. But when it comes to looking at the full funnel, I really push that you need to have patience, because there’s times when we look at our consumer journey, especially like we’ll run like have campaign manager and we’re able to look across all the different touchpoints sometimes it takes 12 to 14 days for someone to you know, initially see an impression, and then they convert. And these are, and I’ve seen this for you know, very quick part like things that we naturally think are quick purchases, e-commerce purchases, 30% of their conversions will take will take at least 14 days. So, that’s just the quick purchases. So there’s a lot of times, especially with the attribution windows that we’re used to using in top of funnel and programmatic, the 30-Day view and click windows. Sometimes it takes you know, the 30 days for you to be running for you even know what’s working and what’s not working. So while I know I said earlier that you always want to be testing and optimizing. That’s definitely always going to be the case, I do think that stressing patience is also key to just making sure that you’re not changing direction when you just don’t have enough data.

Sneha (00:22:58)

I think whatever you share today can be super useful to not just people starting off right now, but to people who have been in that in the industry for a really long time. So thanks so much for all those tips and tricks you shared. Great to have the both of you here. So we’ve come to the end of our conversation. Thank you once again, for joining us and to you, the one who stuck around till the very end listening to this, make sure you subscribe to the podcast to listen to new episodes right when they drop, share it with your teammates, it could be a cool resource to post on your office work chat as a recommendation. So go ahead, do that. And if you want to get in touch, write to us at academy@stackadapt.com. That’s academy@stackadapt.com we have episodes releasing every alternate Wednesday. So stay tuned. Until then, this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. See you in the next episode.

Episode Outro (00:23:45)

Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at StackAapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

S4