The Gist
- Engagement shift. Marketing funnels have become less linear and more complex due to diverse customer interactions across multiple platforms.
- Strategic revision. Marketers need to adapt their strategies to focus on engagement across various stages and platforms.
- Content optimization. The use of advanced search engine features and content structuring can improve visibility and relevance in search results.
Marketing tips feel like a dime a dozen these days. The ability to develop a strategy that establishes a customer experience is challenged by the onslaught of tips and tool recommendations that appear daily.
The tips and tools introduce changed customer engagement within the marketing funnel.
The number of platforms where marketing messages meet your customers is enticing marketing professionals with features meant to encourage platform users to act as customers and make purchases while on the platform. Each platform feels like its own highway with a direction distinct from each other.
The funnel now has a nebulous feel that is forcing marketers to pay special attention to a less-linear customer engagement feeling in their planned marketing funnel. How should marketers adjust their tactics to meet where their customers are?
What Changes Have Happened to the Marketing Funnel?
To appreciate how much the marketing funnel has changed, let’s start with the basic mission of a funnel.
Marketing funnels are a framework for a series of stages that show the customer’s journey from awareness to purchase. Each stage is an element of the customer experience. The funnel serves as an essential starting point for planning a campaign. A campaign is a variation of the journey structure, containing specialized messaging meant to match moments in the customer experience.
But these days your marketing funnel is on a different highway than you think. Funnels involve channel activity that serves as proof that customers are reached and sell their products. However, the successful path is not always the platform that marketers have deemed vital to a given customer journey channel.
Marketers are discovering how long a journey is taking to establish. 6sense conducted a 900-respondent survey which indicated that 80% of B2B customer decisions to purchase occurred before being ready to purchase — an eight-month window. This reflects how much marketing wins the customer’s interest.
The duration also implies that the opportunity for customers to see those messages on different platforms is immense. People are inundated by more locations where they view your brand and offerings. A billboard with a simple URL for a landing page is a starting point for people to have an iterative experience to learn about your business and what pain points your offering solves. Consequential views happen on multiple channels, the sequence of which can be varied and mixed with noisy messaging on those channels. Thus, a funnel may be more opaque than a marketing team had expected.
Marketers are under increasing pressure to prove their campaigns make an impact on customer purchases. As a result, they are making choices that are in reality snap decisions on marketing campaigns rather than ones that smartly weigh the risk to customer engagement.
Related Article: Light the Funnel Darkness With Content Marketing
What Can Marketers Do With an Altered Marketing Funnel?
The natural answer to the funnel concerns is to make changes to the strategy. However, altering a tactic needs to be integral with the sequence of campaign elements to be effective. If you are making strategy changes, you should consider any new tactic with the campaign elements that customers will encounter.
For example, a content strategy will naturally fall into an overall search optimization strategy, so improving the search strategy involves the selected content creation that incorporates the latest keyword phrase research. The result must yield high-intent keywords that align with the purchase and branded intents from mid- and bottom-funnel customer traffic.
To plan content that best aligns with the marketing funnel, marketers use advanced search engine features such as Google’s AI Overviews in mind. Marketers can optimize for mentions through keyword phrases incorporated in content text, but they should also look for text structure that plays into augmented search. Adding content elements like Q&A, lists and step-by-step procedures within written posts or within text associated with video are usually picked up in augmented search features like AI Overviews and ultimately made a part of the answer.
Some industry experts feel that specialized search features may be a hindrance to sending people to a site for conversion. But enhanced search features like Google AI Overviews view these examples as reliable content elements that can be part of a search result snippet that is related to a stage so that it ultimately drives traffic to the site.
You can then focus on engagement metrics, such as visits, session time and associated click-through rates for site pages. These metrics have always been valuable for indicating if your customers are finding what they need. An average session time benchmark of two minutes for blog pages, for example, can indicate the pages where visitors feel that the context is relevant to the campaign messaging that brought them to the page.
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If influencer marketing is part of your plan, you should consider the influencer’s input on how customers are responding on a given social media platform or digital community. Their insights can help identify if customer behavior is shifting — this is especially useful for long purchase consideration cycles, as the 6sense survey has indicated. The insights can also provide additional context to the metrics associated with planned channels. Attribution has been a challenge in analytics as the funnel has become nebulous, but influencer context can reveal useful clues to channel effectiveness.
Finally, you should also consider a mini-survey at certain journey points, such as a pop-up survey when customers leave an unfinished cart in an app. Doing so reveals a more immediate understanding of customer behavior for why they drop out. The survey should be brief — roughly three to four questions are best, rather than presenting a myriad of questions. The most important aspect of a survey is the capability to export the data into a data model for analysis and visualization. The results can be transformed using programming languages like R or Python so that advanced techniques like factor analysis can be used.
Long Live the New Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is not dead. But its structure is looking more altered as a funnel cloud rather than a static funnel. Marketers will see more alterations like this as customers from each generation segment reveal more retail behavior through multiple channels.
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