Funnel marketing from a brand viewpoint.

If you build it, they will come. Right? That seems to be the basic assumption of most digital marketing these days. Build a better mousetrap, or website or app, or solution to a problem and all you have to do next is create a sales funnel to be filled.

While it’s true that people will always appreciate a great solution to their problem, it’s simply not enough to assume they will fall into your funnel thanks to some awareness activity and then slip through to the ‘pointy end’ of advocacy. Funnel marketing is a numbers game, and the numbers are much greater at the entrance than at the exit.

The accepted wisdom for funnel marketing is to use the most appropriate of all the channels at your disposal to gain awareness and tip prospects into the wide top-end of your funnel, assuming that conversion will be a percentage of this mass.

Nothing wrong with that, is there? Not in numbers theory. But how are these people being targeted? 1. Create helpful or educational content to get people interested and start building a relationship. 2. Drive consideration through contextual, targeted content. 3. Employ urgency, scarcity and offers to convert. 4. Create yet more helpful content and provide great service to encourage loyalty and retention. Yes, yes, yes and yes. But there’s something extremely important missing.

Digital marketing seems to be the victim of consistently granular thinking at the expense of a coherent strategy. People are even taught to develop customer avatars or personas in order to split messages to different customer groups based on the above activities, further splintering the approach.

What’s missing is the most important avatar. Your brand.

If marketing were just about saying the right things to the right people to get a sale, it would be the perfidious, sophistic activity that detractors so often portray.

Indeed, in a 2017 marketingmag.com article, chief data scientist at WPP AUNZ, Rob Pardini, predicts the imminent demise of the broadcast era thanks to the disruptive influence of audio-visual streaming, and goes on to say “The principles of brand management that have applied throughout the mass-marketing era will become obsolete, and split personality brands will emerge.”

I have no argument with the disruptive influence of video technology, but who decides to split the personality of a brand?

I think it shows a misunderstanding of what brands are — you can change what you say and how you say it to get a sale, but that does not mean you’re ‘on brand’. This approach will inevitably fail, even though digital channels are discreet and can even be ‘suppressed’ to separate different messages to different targets. In the end, consumers are smarter than that, and great brands — representing the organisations that develop them — must have more integrity.

The great power of a well-defined brand is that people will recognise you in any or all of these disparate digital channels, and understand your truth and your purpose — why you do what you do. This is far and away more important than how you do it and all the other granular elements of your business, including the functionality that supports them.

A great brand unifies an organisation and gives it a powerful method of expression to which aligned consumers can respond — the basis of forming a relationship. Because brand permeates a business and all of its activities, it is often mistaken for specific and separate efforts of branding at different points.

In truth, it is what holds your marketing efforts together — and it can be the secret ingredient that accelerates your funnel marketing, leading to greater conversion rates and much greater loyalty.

Now, you just need a strategy and a campaign…