You can’t improve what you can’t measure

If you’ve been following our thoughts over the last year, you’ve heard that the traditional marketing funnel has changed completely. Change has become the norm, forcing today’s brands to constantly adapt to meet evolving customer needs. To effectively generate demand for products and services, brands need to target ‘new to brand’ and ‘new to category’ prospects. Oftentimes, these prospects don’t have the kind of brand awareness and brand sentiment required to make the relationship profitable. Therefore, building demand for the brand and increasing market share requires thinking about your marketing “funnel” differently.

Our 2021 Growth Marketing Report demonstrates a need to shift from performance marketing to integrated growth marketing. Typical performance marketing, bottom-funnel tactics like SEO, PPC, and paid social advertising are targeted at short-term goals and, while important, can only get you so far. These activities are tracked by metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS), ROI, conversions, and revenue. On the other hand, upper-funnel tactics are focused on generating increased awareness, demand, and leads.

The right combination of upper-, middle-, and lower-funnel tactics will go a long way in attracting, engaging, and converting customers. An integrated measurement framework provides a holistic approach that measures brand lift, reputation, customer satisfaction, market share changes, customer lifetime value, and churn.

Brands need to ensure there is a healthy demand generation effort that will translate into qualified leads and conversions. The goal of demand gen is to broaden awareness and educate consumers about the brand, its services, and its products. To measure the success of these top-of-funnel actions, we establish metrics such as aided and unaided brand awareness, ad recall, and unique reach, which are tracked utilizing brand lift studies and other data sources. Mid-funnel stages such as consideration can best be measured by active engagement such as likes, shares, reviews, downloads, access to gated content, or participation in a webinar. Then, we track the customer’s intent by looking at time spent on the site, adds to cart, and overall depth of engagement with your site.

Lead generation goes beyond awareness building to qualify potential customers and nurture them along the journey, with the ultimate goal of converting them to customers. You want high-quality leads, which can be measured with lead scoring algorithms, monitoring visitor-to-lead ratio, and lead-to-opportunity rate. These are specific upper- and lower-funnel metrics that are instrumental in measuring your brand’s lead generation activities.