All marketers are familiar with the so-called marketing funnel. It has a long history – 1898 to be exact. An ad executive by the name of Elias St. Elmo Lewis developed the first concept of the marketing funnel. In 1951, he was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame posthumously. You can check out their site at www. aaf.org. In this blog, we’ll take a look at how we can apply funnelization in digital marketing, i.e. in display and paid search. YouTube can play a vital role here as well but we’ll save the YouTube strategy for another blog. You can read our blog “No Complete Internet Marketing Without YouTube Advertising” to get more information on this platform if you can’t hold your horses.
The first concept I learned in regards to the marketing funnel was the acronym AIDA. It stands for Awareness, Interest/Consideration, Decision, and Action. Of course, there are now many different variations of the funnel and nowadays, savvy consumers can enter the funnel at different starting points but the original concept still stands and will assist you to create an ecosystem of a good marketing strategy.
A funnel can differ in regards to B2C (business-to-consumer) vs. B2B (business-to-business). The stages don’t differ all that much but the way each consumer or group moves through the funnel can differ. A B2B sales-cycle can take weeks or months and the B2B target audience usually consumes more assets (e.g. white papers, e-books, webinars etc.) before a decision is made towards purchase. You can see a good illustration of assets consumed in an informative blog on www.bafton.com.
It’s common for digital marketers to merely focus on paid search (intent) in the funnel and then some remarketing (lower-funnel activity) but Google Ads, with all its wizardry, allows you to build a full digital marketing funnelization for your business’ goals. We wrote an excellent blog on “The Power Of Remarketing“. However, it doesn’t need to stop there. You can help your audience move down the funnel towards conversion with a full funnelization strategy in Google Ads. Of course, Bing is an option too but Google Ads is the #1 search engine and usually gets most of the budget. The strategy on the Bing platform wouldn’t be all that much different with only some nuances.
Display can be a good strategy for upper-funnel activity, i.e. for awareness, and also towards more mid-funnel activity like intent. For brand awareness applying Google Display, you can create audiences based on certain affinities, i.e. targeting audiences based on what they’re passionate about and their habits and interests. Display is cost-effective with low CPCs (cost-per-click) and this strategy can catch an audience that is at the beginning of their research phase.
When it comes to ad copy, you want to apply the appropriate language to each stage of the funnel. Awareness ad copy language should focus more on a) worry, b) doubt, c) FOMO (fear of missing out), and d) apply a more “educational” tone if applicable. This is especially important in B2B. Applying more display strategy, you can then implement intent audience targeting, i.e. people that have a certain purchase intent. That is the high-level explanation but there are more nuances to this. Moreover, you can also create a “custom intent” audience and SEMrush wrote an excellent blog on this that you can read here.
Ad copy language at the display intent state should focus more on a) pain points, b) differentiation (how can you position your business differently from others), and c) resolution (how does your business resolve the problems, the pain points, the challenges;). The next stage of the funnelization in Google Ads would be intent and paid search will cover this stage. This means that you need to have a solid paid search strategy with a good ad group structure, keywords, and bidding strategies. Brand Search will play an important role in this stage and you can read our blog “The Power Of Branded Search And Then Some“, which dives deeper into the branded search concept. Don’t underestimate the power of branded search and what you can do with it.
The last stage for another display strategy is remarketing. Google Ads creates default remarketing audiences for you but you can customize your remarketing audiences more in Google Analytics, which you should do with your business’ goals in mind. It’s vital to have proper conversion tracking set up. We use Google Tag Manager for this and we can cover this tactic in a future blog. If you are interested in learning more right now, you can read this blog by PPCexpo.
Remarketing is another cost-effective method to give your interested audience an extra push towards a viable conversion. That’s what we all want, right? It’s a powerful strategy that doesn’t have to break your bank. You need to make sure that your ad copy language reflects the remarketing strategy. Here, you should focus more on a) testimonials, b) CTA (call-to-action), c) reassurance, and d) credibility; This is your time to shine and to bring your brand forward even more. Don’t take this lightly! Conversions at this stage of the funnel can be your big money makers.
And there you have it on a high-level at least. A well-thought-out digital marketing strategy can cover all stages of the marketing funnel. We are very keen on applying this strategy with the insights of Google Analytics and good business data. Our blog “Leverage Business Data For Successful Digital Marketing” will also give you more information about the importance of business data, which is often ignored, unfortunately.
If you already have a Google Ads (or Bing) strategy, we offer a free audit to point you in the right direction. If you don’t have any kind of strategy at all, well, we would be happy to take care of this for you. Just contact us here.
For now, please be safe out there and practice your responsibilities. Many businesses had a very rough 2020 but times will get better and it’s paramount to be prepared for the economical surge to come. Cheers!
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
