Buying Funnels: where modern MarTech meets ancient AIDA

According to Gartner, marketing technology (aka MarTech) has consistently accounted for at least a fifth of budgets over the last 5 years. Gartner’s data suggests many brands have been spending as much on technology as on media space. This has made Salesforce one of the world's fastest growing brands and means many CMOs now find themselves needing to generate a return on their significant cumulative tech investments.

Buying funnels are the backbone of tech-enabled marketing strategies, but they’re rarely used correctly. That’s especially true in B2B where funnels typically start with ‘awareness’. This flawed starting point can be traced back to the ‘AIDA’ model, which was originally developed as a sales aid. It gained traction during the door-to-door sales era of the late 19th century and was envisaged as a way to teach salespeople how to push buyers towards a sale - long before the ‘silver bullet’ that is MarTech arrived to drive the same outcome at scale.

The reality of journeys (whether tech-enabled or not) is much more complicated. Prospective buyers travel at different speeds – business priorities change, people leave and simply get distracted due to conflicting priorities. Some buying journeys may start again from scratch while some may be picked up where they were left off. Much of the journey, in some Categories, is inked to Category dynamics. For example, we see market peaks in company car orders which reflects the DVLA’s March and September new vehicle registration cycle. Add to this the issue that it’s harder to measure some marketing effects on prospective buyers (brand perceptions vs. clicks) - not to mention an overwhelming urge to track everything that the digital age allows us to measure. 

This leads to a related inconvenient truth, which is that brand perceptions change significantly over time. According to YouGov data, positive impressions of a brand are actually at their lowest at the ‘awareness’ stage and they don’t actually peak until the purchase stage. YouGov’s data goes as far as to suggest this pattern is consistent across brands, markets and categories. This suggest that the customer’s experience is key to the way brands that are perceived are prospective buyers.

So, what should B2B marketing teams actually be doing? Firstly, they should be investing in building a distinctive brand identity and consistent messaging tuned to market needs and aspirations. Secondly, they should be balancing their comms plans to build Mental Availability (familiarity and consideration) amongst “out-of-market” buyers while simultaneously making it easier for a prospect to find your product or service the more likely once they’ve been ‘primed’ to buy it (Physical Availability). It’s important to remember that according to the likes of LinkedIn and Gartner only 5% of potential buyers intend to decide and buy in the next 30 days, so a hyper-targeted approach to in-market prospects is unlikely to result in sustainable revenue growth. 

Thirdly, they should acknowledge that B2B buying cycles are often long and a multitude of circumstances can kick them off, so they need to cast their net widely in terms of activity plans to drive reach but also monitor a wide range of KPIs to measure success – don’t expect your MarTech provider’s attribution model to tell you how you’re doing with positioning the brand and creating future demand.

I think it’s safe to say every brand would subscribe to the principle of targeting the right people at the right time with the right message. To help with this challenge, tech-investing CMOs should be focusing on, is conducting market research to thoroughly understand their prospective buyers to allow them to ditch generic models and develop a funnel that’s unique to their situation. This would also allow them to structure detailed plans around known customer needs and the questions prospects typically ask at each stage of their buying journey. It should also the goal of simultaneously driving conversions and delighting customers more achievable.