Human behaviour keeps changing; people respond differently based on situation and time.
If you’re still using the traditional marketing funnel for your digital marketing campaigns, it’s time to evaluate your strategy.
Today, people are no longer following a linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase.
For more details, I highly recommend read the post from Think with Google: How Intent is Redefining The Marketing Funnel.
But of course, there is not a universal marketing funnel for all products and services. The most important thing we would say, is understand how your clients reach you.
We see the above digital marketing funnel everywhere.
From Facebook Ads campaign setup, Google Ads, email marketing to content marketing strategy, all the content somehow have the touchpoints at least in one stage of the funnel.
Is the marketing funnel dead? Of course NO. But it can work so much better if you change it accordingly to your audience.
Why? Here are my thoughts, based on years of experience in digital marketing.
Who do I want to sell my product to?
Yes, all market surveys, persona, data, competitor research have been done. The truth is: you need to know more than that.
We might think we understand the behaviour of our clients but their journey can be so different across every stage.
I think the first thing to change is the concept about targeting strategy.
Sometimes, we keep asking this question: Who is interested in my products? In fact, shouldn’t it be: Who do I want to sell my product to?
Once we got the concept right, it’s time to pivot some of our current digital marketing strategies.
The benefit of this marketing funnel is you’re able to target more audiences and potential leads.
The challenging part is in order to identify the potential targets, you need to fully understand all the possible customer journeys.
The more you plot all the touchpoints, the more you’re able to get higher quality clients in the long run.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel
To have an online presence in the digital marketing environment, one must at least have a website or social media account so people can start looking for you.
This is just the starting point, and of course, not the end.
Many small and medium enterprises are applying “Multichannel” marketing. One of the issues of applying “Multichannel” marketing is the marketing campaigns are not integrated.
So what’s the solution? You need to have a system, for example, a customer relationship management (CRM) software, helpdesk ticket system, email marketing software to be able to integrate with each other.
We know the cost is high for these solutions, but think deeply, and many will come to realize that these tools are helping the business to save time and energy, and become much more productive and competitive.
Certainly businesses can still go back to free solutions, such as manually inserting using Google Sheet, but the fact is this way, your business will not be able to scale.
People can enter and switch to any stage anytime
Today, leads or customers can enter the new marketing funnel at any stage.
As mentioned in the introduction, people no longer follow a series of standard marketing funnel until conversion/sales.
It might start from “Engagement” stage straight to “Purchase”, and return to different stages.
Not applicable for all vertical industries, sometimes you can literally jump straight to “Purchase” stage, even people don’t know about you.
You need to experiment and make quick adjustment to your current target audience.
Automation and Remarketing
More and more artificial intelligence (A.I) solutions for advertising have been launched.
Even Facebook and Google are encouraging us to utilize their “automatics” feature to let machine learning algorithm do their work.
Many e-commerce online stores in fact, have not made use of Abandoned Cart Email marketing strategy to close the deal.
*I highly recommend everyone to apply this 5 types of email marketing for online stores.
Besides, with remarketing campaigns, do you know it can always give you the highest conversion rate?
Unfortunately, many advertisers prefer to invest on new pools of clients, and neglected the potential of remarketing audiences.
While it still depends on your business objective, I highly recommend businesses to allocate a budget for remarketing for their digital marketing campaigns. It is worth it, especially for ROI.
Conclusion
Regardless of what digital marketing funnel you learn, follow or experiment, keep in mind that human behaviour always changes.
A strategy that doesn’t factor in ‘changes’ can never last long.
Remember to allocate some time to research new tools, software or solution that can automate your routine digital marketing tasks.
Until then, keep learning and happy testing!
