A New Digital Marketing Funnel for Performance Marketers

One of the things we’re most proud of at Metric Theory is our record for growing our clients’ businesses. In fact, on average, our clients grow 68% in their first year with us. Much of that success is due to us working with our clients to quickly tackle their efficiency goal, and then to have a conversation about growth. That conversation inevitably involves assessing that client’s digital marketing funnel.

As the performance digital marketing landscape has evolved, we’ve been leading the discussion about what the implications are on that funnel, which has led us to develop our own new funnel that summarizes our approach to marketing refinement and expansion. We’re happy to release it today for you to download in both PNG and PDF format! It’s not form gated, so you can use it in any presentation or research right now with no friction. All we ask is that it is attributed back to us so that its origin isn’t misrepresented. If you use it on the web or in a blog post, small links back to us and this post are great.

So, what does the digital marketing funnel look like in 2019 for performance marketers? Here’s how we see it.

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Off the bat, you’ll notice some differences between our funnel and most others.

1. The Expanding Base. Ours isn’t the only model that has embraced post-conversion activities, though we go beyond retention activities into mining conversion data for the purposes of future prospecting.
2. Audience Profiling. Most concepts of the funnel are unidirectional toward conversion, but our clients wouldn’t be growing the way they are if we stopped there. With immense strides made by Facebook, Google, and programmatic display in lookalike technology, every new conversion we drive makes us smarter in finding new ways to increase our prospecting pools in a targeted and informed fashion.

Though it contains some detail around the tactics associated with each point in the funnel in the downloadable graphic, we want to offer a further explanation of the digital marketing funnel itself and how you can apply its approaches to your business today.

Prospecting (Awareness & Engagement):

This is unavoidable for new customer acquisition, and therefore growth. You need to get in front of people unfamiliar with your brand to gain mindshare and credibility in a crowded market. This requires some risk tolerance, though you should also have a high standard of targeting that is based in a data-driven understanding of your customer personas. Refining prospecting will have a powerful effect on all other points in the funnel, from increasing CTR during consideration to informing how much advocacy your customers do for you even after purchase.

Common Prospecting Tactics: Programmatic display, digital video advertising, lookalike audiences, and interest targeting on social channels.

Consideration (Intent & Conquesting):

Consideration is the marriage between a prospect moving into research on options in your market and targeting that’s geared at those people. This is your chance to offer strong unique selling propositions. If you’ve done a good job with them while also influencing this audience with prospecting messages and targeting, it will help you get the edge on clicks and site time, which raises conversion rates.

Common Consideration Tactics: Non-brand search ads, mobile advertising, social remarketing, competitor keywords, display managed placements.

Conversion (Justification & Urgency):

Converting a prospect is all about lowering the natural hurdles of skepticism that involves selling anything to anyone. Even something as commoditized as milk has an expiration date on the carton – information that’s relevant to the customer that makes the leap to purchase that much easier for them. Investing in Prospecting and Consideration will maximize the number of opportunities you have to make your case to close sales.

Common Conversion Tactics: Brand search ads, shopping and feed-based advertising, Amazon advertising, remarketing for search, display remarketing, social remarketing, landing page testing and other conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Nurturing (Repurchasing & Retention):

Conversion is a critical point, but it’s also an ongoing process, of which the first conversion is only a part. Digital marketing plays a critical role in post-conversion functions like return purchases, lead nurturing, app usage, and even brand advocacy up to months or even years after an initial conversion.

Common Nurturing Tactics: Remarketing (all channels), custom audiences, account-based marketing, app reengagement ads, reputation management, brand search ads.

Expansion (Upselling & Audience Profiling):

Just like retention, well-planned Expansion strategies help to generate more value per acquired customer, which allows for expansion to new markets and strategies in Prospecting to maximize your reach. With advances in digital consumer data, Expansion is more than just upselling and cross-selling to existing customers. Every acquired customer now makes lookalike targeting that much stronger for expanding prospecting efforts. Our funnel demonstrates this effect with continuity between post-conversion activities feeding back into growth in prospecting.

Common Expansion Tactics: Remarketing (all channels), Dynamic product ads, behavioral and demographic targeting, lookalike and similar audiences.

These consistent themes and tactics apply to all digital marketing, regardless of industry. We plan to continue developing our digital marketing funnel as it specifically applies to the types of digitally led businesses we work with most often – ecommerce retailers, direct-to-consumer brands, B2B lead generation, and user acquisition – so that we can even better equip performance marketers of all stripes to explore more of the funnel in growing their businesses.

If you like our digital marketing funnel and want to use it for your own purposes, download it now in PNG or PDF, and to see what Metric Theory can do for your business’s funnel, fill out the form below to chat!