Marketing is heavily based on the concept of the marketing funnel, an essential tool for visualizing and planning our strategies.
When used correctly, it can greatly benefit your marketing efforts, especially in PPC, where budget allocation directly influences results.
This article breaks down what a full-funnel PPC strategy looks like, from top to bottom, so you can use it as a template for your own PPC strategy.
The Marketing Funnel: An Update
At its core, the marketing funnel is a simple way to illustrate the consumer’s path to purchasing a good or service. The stages of the marketing funnel are:
awareness: The first stage of the buyer’s journey is awareness, where people are just learning about your brand or what you offer, but haven’t delved further. Think of all the brands you’ve seen ads for but never clicked on or researched further. This is consciousness.
Consideration: The middle of the funnel is the research phase of the buyer’s journey, where they’ve identified a problem (“I want to buy a hot tub”) and started looking for a solution (“Google search: best hot tubs”) . Brand awareness plays an important role at this stage because people are more likely to trust a brand if they have heard of it before.
conversion: The final stage of the marketing funnel is exactly what it sounds like: the actual purchase. The customer has identified the problem (“I need a hot tub!”), researched solutions (Google searching, going to brand websites or a brick and mortar), and decided to make a purchase.
There are even stages in the marketing journey beyond the point of purchase, such as loyalty and advocacy, but for simplicity we’ll focus on these three stages.
Now that we have the definition of each stage of the marketing funnel, let’s go step by step and see what a full funnel marketing strategy looks like in the PPC world.
Top of Funnel PPC: Awareness campaigns
The top of the funnel, or awareness stage, is the first stage of the customer journey, where people haven’t yet identified a problem that needs solving.
These people are still valuable to the market because even though they may not be in the market for your product now, they may be in the future, so you want them to think of you when they finally start researching.
Some examples of PPC campaigns that can help build awareness are:
Display campaigns. Video campaigns. Discovery campaigns.
Deeper: Guide to PPC Top of the Funnel Reporting
PPC Middle of the Funnel: Consider Campaigns
Once a user learns about your brand and starts researching, you want to provide informative content that helps them make an informed purchasing decision. Users often use keywords like “best” or “review” to help find the best brands to buy.
Some examples of PPC campaigns that can help target the center of the funnel are:
Search campaigns. Video campaigns (more informative, such as tutorials or demos). Display campaigns (using more refined interest targeting).
Bottom of Funnel PPC: Conversion Campaigns
The moment of truth comes after users finish their research. Make it as easy as possible for you to be found through brand search campaigns and shopping campaigns.
If the user takes a while to make a purchase decision, using remarketing can help keep your brand top of mind.
Some examples of PPC campaigns that can help users convert are:
Search campaigns (branded and non-branded). Display remarketing campaigns. Shopping campaigns.
Deeper: Setting PPC Goals: How to Tailor KPIs and Metrics for Each Stage of the Funnel
Get the daily search newsletter marketers trust.
A full funnel PPC strategy in action
What if your PPC budget is small? Can you focus on one of these categories instead of all three?
Yes, but with a small caveat.
If your marketing budget is too small to cover these three categories effectively, it’s best to start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up. Make sure you maximize your effectiveness at the bottom of the funnel, then add to the middle and top of the funnel once your budget improves.
While this is useful for increasing revenue on a limited budget, it is not the best strategy for long-term growth. Let’s illustrate it with an example.
Continuing with my hot tub example from above, let’s say your business consistently receives 100 customers in the conversion stage of the funnel per month, and a conversion is worth $10,000 on average. If you have a 5% conversion rate on these customers, that’s $50,000 in monthly revenue.
Focusing only on the bottom of the funnel will help you increase that conversion rate by getting more people at the bottom of the funnel to convert. That 5% could turn into 10% if things go well, which would be $100,000 in monthly income!
Amazing, right? It is, in the short term.
While you’ll initially see an increase in revenue with this strategy, long-term growth is difficult because you’re not trying to grow the real number that matters strategically, which is the number of people at the bottom of the funnel. If you don’t increase the number of people who want to convert, it becomes more and more difficult to grow the business.
Now, let’s do the math on what a full funnel strategy can do:
Same example as before: 100 customers in conversion phase, 5% conversion rate at $10,000 per purchase. Adding advertising to the bottom of the funnel can help increase the conversion rate by 5% to 10% (ideally), but what if the top and middle of the funnel increased the number of customers potential 100 to 200?
200 customers x 10% conversion rate = 20 conversions at $10,000 per purchase. That’s $200,000 in revenue, with the potential to continually grow the number of customers in your target market.
While this example is obviously a best case scenario, it’s all to illustrate the point that while targeting the bottom of the funnel is good, implementing a full funnel strategy , where you take customers from awareness to consideration to conversion, is the best and most consistent way to achieve long-term growth in paid advertising.
Creation of awareness, consideration and conversion PPC campaigns
Implementing a strategic, full-funnel approach to your PPC campaigns requires more upfront effort, but pays dividends through continuous, scalable growth to chase short-term profits.
By guiding leads from initial awareness to consideration and conversion, you increase lead volume and gain momentum.
Display, video, search, shopping, and remarketing all play different roles in the conversion funnel. Evaluate your company’s current customer volume and conversion rates to prioritize budget and resources.
With the right full-funnel PPC foundation supporting your efforts, enable the revenue growth your business needs to thrive.
Learn more: How to use always-on marketing in paid search
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
[ad_2]
Source link
