Building ad campaign that work isn't easy.
Gone are the golden days of advertising, when mass media was the place to be and ROI was measured in tearsheets. Faced with today's increasingly complex media landscape—and an increasingly distracted audience—reaching the right customers isn't as intuitive as it once was.
Enter the Marketing Funnel. Conceived of decades ago by Fortune 500 advertisers, it's a proven framework that defines when and where ads should be placed for maximum effect. And if you've ever purchased a product from a Fortune 500 company, you've proven that it works.
Put simply, it’s a visual representation of the journey customers take when deciding on a purchase. For advertisers, it's a roadmap to reaching customers at key points in their decision-making process. The idea is to funnel consumers along the journey to your business' front door.
Almost every advertiser uses a different version of the funnel, but it's broadly considered to have three main sections:
To understand how this works in practice, let’s take a hypothetical example (which we’ll simplify for brevity’s sake).
A new, all-natural laundry detergent comes to market – we’ll call it Pure Clean. You see a Pure Clean commercial on TV, and it catches your attention. You’ve been using the same detergent for years, but Pure Clean has no harmful additives. Interesting.
A few days go by, and you’re browsing social media in a momentary respite from your daily routine. There, between baby pictures and a post from grandma, is another ad for Pure Clean. You see the same message about health and organic ingredients, but now there’s something else: opinions, likes, and shares from other customers, raving about Pure Clean’s crisp scent and powerful stain-fighting abilities. You tap the ad, and arrive at a blog post on Pure Clean’s site about how dangerous detergent additives can be.
Suddenly, you’re giving Pure Clean serious thought. You wonder how much harm your old detergent has done. You’re not sure, but you just got an email from a coworker. Time to move on.
You’re at the store a few weeks later, and guess what’s on your list? Laundry detergent. Of course, you can’t remember the name of that new product, so you whip out your phone and search “organic laundry detergent” online. ‘Pure Clean,’ you read at the top of the search results. It goes in your cart, and you go about your day.
It’s important to note that real customer journeys are far more complicated than what you just read, with plenty of twists and second-guessing along the way. (In fact, we tell our clients it takes consumers an average of seven ad impressions to make a purchasing decision.)
But in our streamlined example, a strategic ad campaign moved you through a marketing funnel. The moment you saw that first TV spot, Pure Clean entered your consciousness; you became aware of it.
Next, you clicked a social media ad and engaged with the Pure Clean for the first time.
Finally, at the point of purchase, you searched the product online and picked it off the shelf.
The power of the marketing funnel lies in its basis on human psychology of decision-making. With strategically placed messages guide consumers to a purchase.
In our Pure Clean example, one ad wasn’t enough to drive your purchase. If that sounds expensive, don't worry—it doesn’t have to be. In future posts, we’ll explore how the marketing funnel strategy applies to any business.
For now, evaluate your current ad strategy through these lens:
