There was a time when marketers could get away by showing a 30 second commercial on television and claim a large reach. Not anymore. The effectiveness of a marketing campaign in this digital era is measured on the basis of data collected from various sources. As a result now, marketers have begun to look at each stage of the funnel in an effort to create an impact at all levels. “Brands have always looked at digital in three distinct ways including brand building, performance optimisation and customer relationship management (CRM). True value can only be unlocked not by tearing them distinctly but by integrating them and optimising for the whole. So the new approach needs to be performance branding, performance marketing and performance nurture,” Preetham Venkky, president, 22feet Tribal Worldwide and chief digital officer, DDB Mudra Group, told BrandWagon Online.
The need to rely more on first-party data in the future, coupled with the objective of collecting data around user behaviour, is driving the shift towards full-funnel marketing. For the uninitiated, full funnel marketing is a combination of brand building and performance marketing. There are three main stages of full funnel marketing including awareness, consideration and conversion.
For Ajit Devraj, managing partner, Dentsu Impact, buying process is not a linear journey anymore. “There are multiple points where the customer engages with a brand and each of these represents a unique opportunity for brands and marketeers. All these touchpoints collectively influence the customer’s decision, so brands must look at each customer at various touchpoints across the funnel. As such that the customer expects communications to be very customised at each touch point and expects brands to have a real-time view of his or her interactions and also expects that the next communication message recognises the previous interaction – this makes full funnel marketing inevitable and a necessity,” he explained.
Further, with emphasise on RoI driven marketing tactics, brands such as Nykaa, BigBasket, Myntra, among others are now focussed on sales tools such as social and live commerce. As per Rahul Nanwani, co-founder and CEO, ImageKit in terms of return-on-investment (RoI), multiple evidence indicates that there has been a 15-20% increase in revenue post adopting the full-funnel strategy.
Although DDB Mudra Group’s Venkky echoed Nanwani’s view that the full-funnel approach can yield better ROI, he highlighted that most brands make the mistake of not establishing the right ROI parameters. “This can create dissonance between effort, spends and results. Having clarity on SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) objectives and defining them based on growth and progression from last efforts will help justify the investments in full-funnel marketing,” Venkky commented.
Interestingly, observers point out that the full-funnel strategy is not a new concept, and has not being replaced by martech. It essentially allows brands to integrate the five pillars of full funnel marketing – conversion, customer journey planning, content, media, data or analytics and technology. “Martech solutions help in analysing the impact created by a product in retaining the customer’s attention span. Such solutions will also help brands in creating personalized campaigns or assets that would help retain customers,” Nanwani said.
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