The Missing Middle and why it matters
Part 2 of 3 from The Missing Middle article series. Read back Part 1 'Empowering CMOs to grow their brand' here.
Author: Theo Theodorou, Managing Director at Microsoft Advertising - Listen to this LinkedIn article on Spotify below:
The long stretch of time between awareness and action is too easy for marketers to overlook – but it’s where the value of their campaigns takes shape.
The marketing funnel owes its enduring relevance to the idea that it somehow represents the entirety of the buyer journey in a simplified form. That’s the theory. The reality is that the way we discuss, describe and plan around the funnel means that we only really focus on two parts of that journey – the beginning and the end.
We have objectives, tactics and rules of engagement for the top of the funnel: broad reach, prioritising impressions and frequency, building awareness among all those who might potentially buy now or in the future. We have objectives, tactics and rules of engagement for the bottom: identifying and responding to signals of intent, nurturing those in the market to buy right now, serving direct calls to action, capturing leads, generating and acting on demand, and measuring all of this through performance metrics.
What happens in the middle? Well, it’s largely a mystery. We tend to label it ‘Consideration’ – but there’s not all that much that’s considered about what happens in this stage of the buyer journey, or how marketers approach it. This represents a huge missed opportunity.
The stretch between awareness and action is the longest period in the buyer journey, the most influential and the most important. And yet, in too many marketing strategies, it goes missing - author name - Theo Theodorou
1. Meet the Missing Middle
There’s an assumption within marketing that demand equals brand awareness plus time; that people eventually fall from the top of the funnel to the bottom through sheer force of gravity. But that’s not what happens in the crucial middle reaches of the buyer journey at all. It’s not how people experience brands and advertising.
Most buyer journeys don’t pass through well-labeled stations on an inevitable downward descent: starting with brand awareness before dutifully moving on to consideration of rational reasons for purchase, and then proceeding to a buy button. They reflect the way the human mind decides – and that’s far from a linear process. It notices, forgets, remembers again, doubles back, revisits, feels familiar, feels reassured. And then when the time comes to make a purchase, it makes what seems like the obvious choice without wondering how it became the obvious choice.
This is the reality of how broader brand awareness, which might not feel particularly relevant to any choice you make in the future, translates into far more important and relevant mental availability. It’s the way that intentions and emotional associations slowly form, often beneath the surface, before translating into action. It’s a mixture of the conscious and the unconscious, of interactions that people remember and those they don’t, of actions they decide to take and things they just do.
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2. Your buyer doesn’t categorise their brand experiences
Your future buyer doesn’t know that a performance ad or a search ad isn’t supposed to have any long-term impact on their impressions of the brand. They don’t know that a purely awareness driving video ad isn’t designed to make them want to buy. They don’t know that a piece of thought leadership content or a case study isn’t supposed to generate an emotional reaction. Different touchpoints play different roles simultaneously. All are creative opportunities, all are capable of establishing brand memories and brand associations. All contribute to eventual decisions to buy.
3. Why it’s time to integrate purpose into the marketing model
And those are just the elements of the Missing Middle that are being deployed and distributed by marketers themselves. We’re na?ve to believe that the brand advertising we create at the top of the funnel lands in a mental and emotional vacuum – and is free to create perceptions and mental availability on its own terms. The reality, in 2021, is that advertising is placed into context by audiences’ search for information – and the importance they attach to values, purpose and socio-economic impact.
The generation of millennials now entering positions of buying authority at work, the Gen Z members that will dominate consumer categories over the next few years: none of these groups make buying decision solely on the basis of unconscious memories formed by brand ads. They make decisions based on the interactions of those memories with what they consciously know about the brand.
If we’re to take control of the middle of the funnel, we can’t rely on investing at the top and the bottom and just hoping that everything connects up. We need to plan activity for the middle of the funnel, signpost and connect different experiences (brand-related, demand-related and purpose-related), and carefully analyse how they come together to generate action.
4. Mapping the Missing Middle
The digital transformation of marketing that has grown in momentum over the last 18 months, provides us with more options than ever to map the Missing Middle. We’re able to use Share of Search as a real-time indicator of awareness and mental availability, analyse search trends to understand the priorities of our audiences and the context in which the middle of the buyer journey takes place. We can capture and segment signals of intent, analysing how they are influenced by previous engagement with brands – and how they go on to influence brand engagement in the future. We can benchmark the timeframes over which we can reasonably expect all of this to take place – and start to answer enduring questions about how and when different types of marketing activity drive Return on Investment (ROI).
The real opportunity is to do this with open minds – and in a spirit of discovery. The middle of the marketing funnel has been obscured for too long. With ambition and a willingness to learn, we can change that.
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For more on The Missing Middle of the marketing funnel – and how engaging with it can lead to a new view of brand impact – explore our full White Paper: The Long, The Short and The Missing Middle.
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