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Full-funnel marketing is an approach to marketing that is known and understood by many. But according to Nielsen’s 2022 Annual Marketing report only 54% of marketeers are confident about measuring their activity across the full range of their customer’s journey. So why is Full-Funnel marketing so hard to do if half of all marketers don’t know what’s going on across their ecosystems? And more importantly if you’re one of the 46%, what can you do about it?
At Brands2Life we believe that there’s more to business communications than pushing a product or service. Buyers crave the value that comes with a trusted partner so emotional engagement is vital for initial interest. It’s why we developed our unique BETTER STORIES | BIGGER IMPACT formula. It places your proposition at the right touchpoints, at the right time, with maximum impact. Finding the right stories to engage your audience with is the key place to start.
It’s most likely that if you’re struggling to implement a coherent approach across the funnel it’s because of internal siloes or structure stopping you from getting to those stories easily. This may well be being compounded by focusing on the wrong measures of success, focusing more on internal KPIs than understanding the needs of your customers. Tackling these two things even in a small way can help you get at better stories, better focussed on the needs of potential customers. With these in place you can start to plan their distribution out across your customer journey.
Here are some practical things you can start doing right now to improve your efforts to find better stories and achieve bigger impact across the Funnel. We’ve structured them as per our LIFE project framework. It’s how we structure all our programs and ensures we’re moving toward action and outcome.
Understand the opportunity.
Get to grips with your first-party data – data that helps you measure, understand, and manage your customer relationships. Your hard-earned first party data is your most valuable treasure. The customer relationship is yours, meaning you don’t have to rely on third-party platforms to reach an engaged audience. And you can use it to build out pictures of likely prospects. It’s important to know exactly who you’re talking to and what’s important to them, so you can add value and connect in more meaningful ways. Audience clusters could involve traditional methods of segmentation, such as by vertical or line of business. However, a more personalised approach to segmentation based on a common business challenge, need or behaviour will typically deliver the best returns. We have a lot of data on the challenges being faced by business audiences, so if you’re stuck for this type of insight we can help.
Envision a BETTER STORY and strategy.
Explore the transformative thinking and stories that will have the greatest impact. Map out a comms calendar and maximise the way you plan to use the stories where possible, getting multiple formats and assets from single stories is the goal. In today’s world, prospects expect empathy and tailored engagement whether buying for themselves or a company, so personalised communication is critical. To cut through to the customer mindset of ‘how does this product or service benefit me?’, it’s important to have a deep understanding of their needs. Look to your eco-system to reveal this insight whether from within your own organisation, your partners, or your agency network.
Define the BIGGER IMPACT you’ll have.
Agree on goals, align objectives and map KPIs to these to ensure you develop the right measures for success before going to market. We use a tool called the LIFEcycle loop to ensure that this is happening alongside our measurement approach of AEIDA. Setting objectives and KPIs throughout the LIFEcycle loop that include engagement measures will allow you to have conversations about intent across an entire funnel, and to not be diverted off course by quick judgements and the switch to blunter tactics which can seem attractive.
Activate and amplify at scale.
The next step is to develop a communications strategy that addresses each audience segment individually throughout the LIFEcycle loop. An integrated, multi-channel, multi-touch approach is vital to ensure your audience can consume your content how, when and where it works for them. You may well have a lot of content in hand right now that with amendment can reflect the stories you’ve identified, and with some promotional budget can be re-distributed in channels where your prospects spend their research time. These channel preferences are changing all the time. For up-to-date views on the research habits of your audience, just yell.
We’ve spoken about several frameworks and planning tools here, and I’m delighted to attach them all to this email for your use. Should you want to talk more about how to implement them to a specific challenge or problem, I’d be happy to chat.
Tim Corcoran, Managing Director, Marketing & Creative Services
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