Emma Spivey
When it comes to paid media, it’s easy to fall into the trap of tunnel-visioning on sales or leads. But don’t! Taking this approach can mean missing out on some golden opportunities.
Let us open your eyes to the power of the full-funnel paid strategy and why it’s absolutely the best choice for your business. In this guide, we’ll cover what exactly a full-funnel paid media strategy is, showcase its amazing benefits, and challenge the misconceptions that might be getting in the way of you enjoying them.
The paid media funnel refers to your consumer’s path towards purchasing your product or service.
At the top of the funnel is the awareness stage – when a consumer first learns about your brand. Target these customers through discovery campaigns, video campaigns, or display campaigns. All of these campaign types involve ads online that give a brief but enticing overview of your business or product.
The middle of the funnel is the consideration stage – the potential consumer is considering your business but hasn’t quite made their mind up yet. Campaign types that we use to help them to choose you include:
The bottom of the funnel is focused on conversion to sales and includes things like:
It’s understandable to want to hone in on this part of the funnel if you have specific targets regarding ROAS or cost of sale – but when we unpack the benefits of the rest of the funnel below, you’ll realise what a huge mistake that is.
Do you want a larger audience? Of course you do! A larger audience means more sales and leads. If you focus too much on bottom of the funnel conversions, you’re limiting your audience to people who already know about you, therefore missing out on awareness and all the potential new customers it can bring.
This, in turn, gives you a larger pool of people to target with your bottom-of-the-funnel conversion campaigns, meaning you won’t exhaust your audience by continuously hitting the same people with the same ads.
So, new customers are the goal – should you focus on top of the funnel awareness campaigns then?
Well, no. You don’t want to focus so much on new customers that you lose the amazing, loyal customers you already have. By giving attention to both bottom of the funnel campaigns and remarketing as well as top of the funnel awareness campaigns you can enjoy business from both new and old customers.
Put simply, a full funnel paid media approach ensures that you aren’t, as our Paid Media Strategist Ross puts it, “putting all your eggs in one basket”.
As Google plans to eliminate third-party cookies by Q3 of 2024, we’re all going to be more reliant on first-party data. This is where your full funnel paid media approach swoops in to the rescue – as the data you obtain from one channel in your paid media strategy can be used across the others, keeping you informed with or without cookies.
On top of this, the wealth of first-party data you acquire from running a wide range of paid media campaigns gives you plenty of information that you can use to remarket to your existing audience more effectively for enhanced brand loyalty.
Despite its fantastic benefits, people still have their doubts about a full funnel paid media approach thanks to some common misconceptions that we’re more than happy to debunk.
One of the biggest reasons people choose not to opt for a full funnel strategy is the cost.
While it’s true that paying for campaigns in every part of the funnel isn’t as cheap as focussing on just one, the paid team at Flaunt Digital are more than happy to work out a full funnel approach that fits within your budget.
By portioning what you have and testing out the full funnel approach, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at exactly how much of a difference a full funnel strategy makes in comparison to the extra money spent.
Another option for those with a lower budget is P-Max campaigns. Using Google’s Performance Max to access all of Google’s ad inventory, including YouTube, Display and Discovery, etc, which can sometimes be a cheaper option due to lower cost per click. This gives you an element of a full funnel approach from just one campaign.
When creating a full-funnel approach, social media campaigns are a great middle-of-the-funnel option. However, you may think that certain apps aren’t worth the ad investment as they don’t fit your demographic.
One example of this is TikTok – this app is commonly viewed as being Gen-Z focused, so businesses with older audiences tend to neglect it in their paid strategy. However, TikTok is filled with people from all ages and backgrounds. One of the fastest-growing audiences is actually males aged 35+, so don’t rule TikTok ads out of your paid strategy just yet. Our guide to TikTok ad formats can help you to understand how to master marketing on this app.
