Is the funnel dead?
I have a complicated relationship with the purchase funnel. Something’s always sat uneasy with me, yet I’ve added it to dozens of client strategies.
What is it? Essentially it’s a framework for marketers, a consumer-centric view of every stage of a consumer’s relationship or journey with a brand or product. The ‘conversion’ is actually often buying something, but can also include anything from an EDM subscription, entering a competition or consuming content. You can see why so many marketers use it - it’s hella practical and versatile. (I even liked it enough to blog about its application to find pitfalls in your dating journey.)
There are a few versions of the funnel with subtle differences, but it tends to follow this format:
Awareness: Letting your target consumer know you exist.
Consideration or Engagement: Promoting your point of differentiation, your features and benefits, and pricing. But depending on the product, it could also be social engagement or on-site engagement.
Conversion: The ultimate goal.
Loyalty: Sometimes ignored, but essentially ensuring people keep using you (silently). It’s more expensive to acquire new customers, so it’s imperative to ensure people already using you continue to do so.
Advocacy: This is the stuff of dreams that only a lucky few brands achieve at scale. It’s one thing to have a large pool of consumers quietly using your product, and another when they are ambassadors.
(If you are a visual person like me, you might find Google Images helpful.)
So what’s my problem with such an elegant, tried-and-tested model? Here’s just a few…
It assumes the buying process is linear. This vintage model wasn’t made with the modern consumer in mind. In other words, the person who bounces around 10 different retailer sites, going back and forth between awareness and consideration, before closing Firefox out of decision fatigue.
It assumes a broad > narrow progression with messaging. With this model - you start off with the biggest, most generic marketing message and only get more specific and granular as you go down the funnel. It ignores people who are after a very specific feature or benefit (e.g. 2L water bottles, a tax accountant) and care more about how you answer their needs than your actual brand.
It posits advocacy only occurs with converted audiences. Sometimes (and especially for luxury brands), advocacy actually happens before the consumer owns the product. Think of people re-sharing content from their favourite fashion houses, using the Ferrari Instagram filter or wearing Gucci shoes on Snapchat without ever owning anything from the brand. (Although one could argue that our conversion here is the social content.)
It doesn’t feel right when brands are playing the long game. The model works best when consumers have one touch point per phase and can relatively quickly move through the funnel, but not so much if consumers might stay in the awareness phase for years.
It assumes people only convert at the conversion level, and that audiences need to be warm to convert. This is the biggest argument against the funnel for me. Marketing platforms like Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and Google are getting increasingly sophisticated and can use AI optimisations for find a customer with practically any audience at any stage. If the offering or marketing is good enough, people often purchase at the awareness and engagement phases.
So what models have I been exploring recently?
1. Google’s Messy Middle
It makes perfect sense that Google’s purchase framework focuses on how consumers use their Search product: for researching and purchasing. Think long tail keywords like ‘best XYZ item’ or ‘cheapest XYZ’ item, followed by ‘PRODUCT reviews’ and then ‘purchase PRODUCT now’ or ‘STORE near me.’ They have an excellent blog here with diagrams, but to summarise:
Trigger: The ‘thing’ that makes you want to buy something. This could be an influencer’s #sponcon on TikTok, seeing your bestie with a new winter coat, your running shoes falling apart, or that imminent summer vacation where you don’t have anything booked.
Exploration: Seeing what’s out there.
Evaluation: Deeply reviewing whether a certain item fulfils your needs and price requirements.
(And bouncing in between exploration and evaluation as many times as needed)
Purchase: Actually committing and buying one item.
This schema works well when people are hunting for items that fulfil a certain feature (I need waterproof running gear because it rains all the time) or benefit (I need something to help me stay fit). But not so much for experiential and fun purchases. I’m not sure if someone buying music festival tickets would Google every single summer festival to compare lineups and ticket prices. Google’s framework also doesn’t speak to driving brand loyalty or advocacy - it ends once the item is used.
2. The 95-5 Rule
I listened to this insightful MI3 podcast when it was released a few months ago, and was blown away by The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research. The rule says that you have 95% of potential customers not ready to purchase, and only 5% ready to purchase. It matters less about their immediate awareness of you and more about purchase intent. The model rings true for brand building that takes place over years. Because realistically while your remarketing audience may expire after 180 days, real humans may need months or years to get on board.
95% tactics: Your goal is to increase brand awareness, salience and love. Think content marketing, influencer strategies, sponsoring events and even your BAU social media.
5% tactics: Your goal is to then be the most easily recalled brand (thanks to your 95% activities) OR be the brand that’s the easiest to convert/the most available. This could be Google Search keywords (both on your own brand as well as category), a clear website, and depending on your product availability from as many retailers/sources possible.
For a PR agency, the 95% activities could an EDM, industry parties and social media. The 5% is the CONTACT US form on their site, and having a seamless enquiry > signing on process for clients. For a milk brand, the 95% it might be having product for consideration on Masterchef and spon con with food bloggers, and the 5% is being available at all supermarket chains and being on sale.
Again - this model isn’t perfect. Similar to Google’s, it still ignores how to increase brand loyalty and drive advocacy. But it works beautifully for digital marketing in 2022 where we are after a simple purchase and don’t have KPIs around loyalty and advocacy, especially for those where we can lean on machine learning to pinpoint our converters.
Which one should we use?
Let me be clear - the marketing funnel is still a great lens to look at marketing. It’s inaccurate as hell when it comes to mapping out the customer journey on an individual basis, but it’s still useful when you zoom out. I use it to plan out content and ad messaging to make sure that all your potential consumers are being covered. The worst thing is getting an ad that assumes that I have prior knowledge about the brand and offering, and is asking me to purchase without ‘wining and dining’ me first. It’s also handy to find issues particularly around scale. (That is if you are only reaching 100K people with your overall campaign and you have a very low conversion rate then it’s a quick fire way to know that you are very unlikely to hit your targets. Again - read my dating blog.)
But we need to recognise the marketing funnel (and all these frameworks) as imperfect, and just one framework to look at things. Use the schema that is most relevant to your campaign, but don’t be afraid to have the others in your pocket when things aren’t working to view the problem from a different angle.
