When we think about measurement strategies, especially with a full funnel approach, it’s not always a direct path from plan to implementation. So, what comes next once you’re on board with a full funnel media strategy? It’s not enough to just check the boxes of various funnel stages to make sure you have a presence in each part of the consumer journey, from upper to lower funnel. It’s vital to think through the user experience and how your brand interacts with new, prospective, and existing customers when developing the framework. As you’re working toward a full funnel approach, here are a few things I like to think about during the measurement planning process as it relates to how you’re showing up for users.
Creative Messaging
Messaging can and should be different for users depending on where they’re at in their journey and their relationship with your brand. It’s a crucial piece of the puzzle to pay attention to the messaging you’re serving to new vs. existing customers. A new customer needs to be exposed to a different experience with advertising than a repeat customer that is already brand loyal. Similarly, creative messaging for retargeting is going to be served to an audience that was already exposed to your previous messaging or took a certain action, so you should speak to them differently with ads that are tailored to a lower funnel conversion that is highly relevant to that user.
Market Share
Along the same lines of creative messaging, it’s key to understand your brand’s market share if you have a local or regional presence across various markets. You shouldn’t have the same rinse-and-repeat strategy that is a blanket approach across those markets, especially if you’re introducing your brand to new locations. If you hold the highest share among your competitors in certain areas, your channel and measurement strategy should be different from markets that have a lower level of awareness for your brand. Brand awareness studies can be a great way to keep a pulse on this.
Landing Page Experience
Once you get users to your website, how are they experiencing it? I like to go through my clients’ landing pages from a consumer point of view during the planning process to make sure that experience is seamless. If we’re asking users to fill out a form, but that form is buried five pages deep within the website, you’ll struggle to get conversions. The URL that your ads lead to should be reflective of what you’re asking customers to do in your creative messaging, which will ultimately lead to a positive user experience – a win-win for everyone!
Journeys Are Not Linear
With all this being said, a key consideration of the user journey and developing a full-funnel strategy is that the customer journey is not linear. We often visualize and present the journey as a top to bottom, one-time process, but it’s more of a continuous (and sometimes indirect) path. Customers don’t all behave the same way because no two customers are the same, making things a bit more unpredictable. But this is all the reason to show up for customers no matter what part of the journey they may be in, which is why full-funnel strategies are so beneficial. By casting a wider net at the top of the funnel to promote awareness, you’re priming that audience to hopefully turn into long-term customers.
Take note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that only certain tactics can be used to drive awareness, while others can only drive sales. Any tactic could find a place within any stage of the journey, but a good media partner will use research and past learnings as a foundation to develop a channel and tactical strategy that works best for a given client and campaign, and will know where and how to use certain tactics as part of a full funnel approach so your paid media is working as hard as it can to achieve your objectives. Everything we do at True Media is rooted in data and research so we’re bringing the best recommendations to the table for our clients, which also means every media plan we develop is different.
Taking all of the above into consideration, this is why it’s so important that creative teams and media teams work together as early as possible in the planning process. These teams are often thought of as separate entities, but both of these teams should be talking to each other at every step of the way to ensure the process is seamless and that creative and media are cohesive. And when the time comes to report on campaign success and performance, everyone will know what that success ties back to because you’ve had a solid measurement framework in place from the very start.
