Build your own funnel: the foundation of marketing strategy

The goal of marketing for most brands is to do the minimum amount required to deliver the maximum return in customer engagement and, yes, sales.

This is as true for brand marketing as it is for sales engagement, really. And doing the Marketing Week mini MBA has helped crystallise my own thoughts on how to articulate to a brand as to where the investment ought to come.

I previously wrote a post called 'Why do we lose' explaining that I thought it was a critical question to ask brands to help them articulate their strategy.

This is particularly key in the context of this discussion here.

Build-your-own-funnel

When you construct a marketing funnel, you'll notice a natural tail-off at each stage of the journey.

Let's consider the following (massively simplified) situation:

1. You have 80% awareness in your market
2. You have 25% interest
3.  You have 75% consideration
4. 80% of the time, your products are the preferred option
5. And 80% of the time, you 'win'

What does marketing strategy tell you to do? Clearly you don't need to worry too much about your product or necessarily your sales team - they are winning four fifths of the time. And your market awareness is ludicrous.

Now establishing this data is a whole other challenge. But interpreting and analysing it is a core foundation for establishing an approach to comms and marketing, and allows the creation of tactics that will effectively address that challenge and allow the setting of SMART objectives for the brand. Specifically, in this case, tailoring your brand content and engagement programmes to improve the interest you get from key target audiences from 25% to something higher within a given period of time. And any impact you have there, will have a direct impact on your bottom line (especially given the fantastic conversion metrics you have through the rest of the customer journey).

So understanding why - and where - you lose is a critical foundation to establishing what needs focus in your marketing efforts, be that in terms of positioning, or in the needs for specific marketing tactics to push the needle in one or other aspect of your customer journey.

This is the theme for an upcoming piece of content on the B2B customer journey which you'll hear more on soon…