Deep Dive Wednesdays

Author

Crys A.
July 31, 2024

B2B Business Marketing Opportunity

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DEEP DIVE WITH IBRAHIM

12 Step-By-Step Tactics to Build Awareness & Top-of-Funnel

Happy Wednesday!

I hope you’ve had an amazing week so far! It’s crazy how much of your life changes once you get married—it feels like a whole new chapter and how you change as a person, so I’m still trying to adapt to these changes.

Alright, getting to today’s deep dive..

Regardless of how amazing your performance marketing skills can be, there is no denying that having strong brand recognition or awareness helps drastically reduce your customer acquisition cost. I know that brands like Jones Road Beauty have a much more efficient cost to acquire a new customer than a lot of their competitors. Why? Because their brand is well known, and so is their Founder. This is why celebrity brands generally do so well, granted the talent involved understands how to drive buzz/awareness. It is also the gateway to not being held hostage to a single ads platform.

Today, I want to discuss marketing funnels and 12 ways to move your customers from top-of-funnel awareness to middle-of-funnel engagement to bottom-of-funnel conversions for your brand. I’ll provide some tactical insights on the best strategies for each stage. If any come to mind for you, you can share them here or simply hit reply and let me know. I can compile and share it in the next deep dive.

Let’s dive in..

What are funnels, and what is the AIDA framework?

In short, inside the world of marketing and sales, almost everything we do is driven by the concept of converting customers through some kind of funnel. Your “funnel” represents the full customer journey from someone’s initial awareness of your product all the way to their final purchase decision. Think of that upside down cone, that funnel.

It’s visualized as a funnel because at each stage, there is going to be some percentage of drop off in the total number of people who graduate from the next step. It always gets narrower and smaller the further down the funnel they go.

The most common framework for talking about funnels is the AIDA framework, which was invented in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, who was an American advertising and sales pioneer. AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.

Lewis believed that in order for a customer to actually buy something from you, they needed to progress from being aware of your product to being interested enough to learn about the product's benefits and value props, to then having the desire to benefit from your product.

He also believed that the fourth stage, action (or the decision to buy), would naturally result from a marketer simply doing their job to move the customer through the first three stages of the funnel.

Here’s my interpretation of the AIDA framework and what you need to know:

A) is for Awareness: This is pure top-of-the-funnel marketing. The goal here is to get as many potential customers as possible to become aware of your product and brand. This stage is about capturing the attention of your target audience through any means necessary, including organic content, ads, partnerships, sponsorships, affiliates, influencers, TV, PR, billboards, etc, to drive the largest possible awareness for your product or offer.

I) is for Interest: After becoming aware of the brand, you want potential customers to show interest in learning more. At this stage, your goal is to educate the consumer on more of the specific benefits and differentiators your product offers to get them more excited to buy. You should do this through different kinds of ads, more educational content in your newsletter, a podcast, SMS marketing, product-in-use content, comparison charts, FAQs, etc. The goal is to nurture their awareness into genuine interest by guiding them to the next stage.

D) is for desire. This is when you need to use marketing to make them desire to buy. The best way to do this is through emotionally driven content. I like story-driven lifestyle and product-in-use content, and strong testimonials. In general, people buy something because it either A) solves their problem, B) makes them look or feel good, or C) helps them gain new status around their peers. In general, you want to show them what life will be like after they buy. Reviews and strong testimonials also work incredibly well here, as consumers want to know that others have purchased and received the end result or experience they are looking for as well.

A) And the final A is for action. This is when they either decide to buy or churn. The goal here is to hit them with the right hook to purchase. The best way to get them to convert is typically to offer one more final incentive like a free gift with purchase or a percentage off. If you have done a good enough job in the first 3 stages, they will feel compelled to buy.

With the tragic losses we continue to have with tracking capabilities, from a content and creative standpoint, everything should feel full-funnel. Meaning that whether someone is at the top of the funnel (doesn’t know your brand) or at the bottom of the funnel (ready to buy from a website retargeting email), all your content/creative/landing pages should properly educate and sell. You never know which user wasn’t properly tracked and may get served the wrong ad or shown the wrong email flow.

To expand your top-of-funnel reach, you have to use all of the tools in your toolkit to generate awareness and demand. These are my go-to recommendations:

Meta and Google Ads: The Holy Grail of Top of Funnel

Meta and Google, specifically YouTube, are the two of the biggest ad platforms for a reason—they work. Most of your top-of-funnel ad dollars should still be spent on these two channels, with the majority going toward paid social and maybe 20-25% toward YouTube/Google. The key to standing out isn’t in the campaign setup, it’s all in the creative. Invest in creating quality content that tells your brand story, who you are, why you’re better, what gives you the right to compete in your category, etc.

TV: The King’s Still Here

TV is the next best place to get massive top-of-funnel awareness beyond paid social. I recommend using Tatari to buy, manage, and measure your TV spend. The CPMs on remnant TV are incredibly competitive (can be as low as $3) and convergent TV inventory (linear and streaming channels) still add massive ability for your performance paid social to scale efficiently.

You can start simple—produce one engaging 60-second founder story commercial. Think of this like paving the road with reach, and then the Ferrari driving on that road is your performance ads. The better the road is paved, the smoother that ride will be.

Podcasts: The New Frontier of Product Discovery

Podcasts are a sleeper channel and have become a great place to discover or learn about new products. I know podcasts aren’t anything new, but let me tell you what is… cult-followed influencer podcasts.

You can go to different exchanges to buy inventory on random health podcasts, crime podcasts, etc. But when you sponsor something like The Skinny Confidential or the Melissa Wood Health podcast, you’ll drive some insane numbers. People aren’t there just for the content. They’re there to absorb and try to replicate the lifestyle of the host. These listeners also know the hosts aren’t going to promote products they don’t actually believe in—it’s similar to customer acquisition through influencers on YouTube a couple of years ago. Also, this is basically leveraging the trust that these Podcasters have built with their subscribers.

Short-Form Content

It’s obvious, but short form video has been and still is dominating social platforms and new product discovery for so many brands. Platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts are surfing the wave of content consumption. Use these platforms to answer the basic questions about your brand and product. Engage with your audience through comments and DMs, and use their curiosity as inspiration for your next video.

The way these platforms can immediately drive hundreds of thousands of views right now, completely for free… it’s a shame if you’re not taking advantage of the reach right now. Talk all about your product, show behind the scenes, explain why you started it, put up 35 videos pitching 35 different reasons people should buy your product, etc.

You can jump on trends to try and get views while riding a trend, but that doesn’t need to be the strategy to get views. Genuinely talking about your product in a way that’s exciting to listen to is all you need. Just pretend you’re explaining your company to a 6th grader.

Creator Seeding: The Influencer Effect

When influencers share your product, it's not just the direct engagement that benefits you. Platforms like Instagram notice who views these posts, lowering your CPM and significantly boosting your awareness in a way that’s also a co-sign by the poster. Remember, it's about who sees your product, not just the immediate sales.

Brands like Aritzia, Cadence, and others do a fantastic job of this. Their fans/customers help them promote new products, new ways to talk about the products, or just help drive awareness in new pockets and communities. This is something that either has to be done at scale or not done at all. It may not be worth it if you’re only seeding to a few people a month (aka less than 100 minimum).

Minisocial is actually a great way to easily seed product to creators at scale and get content in exchange for it that you own the rights to.

Affiliate Marketing: Generosity Pays Off

You can encourage affiliates to promote your product by offering a higher commission rate. Amazon affiliate programs generally pay publishers/affiliates 3-10% commission on various products. Brands usually offer 10-15% commission. Goli used to do something smart: instead of running promotions for their customers (i.e., get 30% off this weekend), they’d tell their affiliates, that weekend, they could earn 30% commission instead.

Remember, you’re already likely paying Facebook 50-100% commission, so if getting a promotion from another channel where you’re even paying 15%, 20% 30% or even 40% can still be worth it. For a previous brand, I would pitch premium publishers that I’d pay them 30% commission to because it was a win-win for both of us—they’d place us high on lists and often on their site and we’d pay them more for it!

Brand Collaborations: Mutual Benefit and Visibility

Collaborating with another brand can significantly increase your general visibility. It can be as grand as launching a collaborative product like the recent Liquid Death x Elf Cosmetics collab, but it can also be as light as swapping branded post cards in each others shipper boxes or doing an Instagram giveaway.

The whole point is to cross-polinate audiences that you believe have benefits from being exposed to the other. American Express and Equinox. TRUFF and Hidden Valley Ranch. All these overlaps create a win-win for both brands, and a win for the customers who’s a fan of the brand.

Another interesting form of collabs I've been seeing is similar to licensing. Disney, specifically, has been approaching brands like Sanzo and Immi to create a collab product that advertises a movie of theirs. It's using the brand as a platform to reach the audience they want, and it's helping the brand by giving it the Disney co-sign, as well as advertising rights to reach the fans there.

Product Launches: Enticing New Customers

Launching a new product can attract a fresh audience and serve as a great way to build new interest. By solving a new problem or targeting a different demographic, you can tap into a customer base that was previously out of reach.

Limited Edition Products: Creating Urgency

Releasing products in limited quantities can spur fence-sitters into action. This strategy works well for brands that can offer unique or exclusive items with limited availability. If you have a sizeable customer list, limited product drops are a fantastic way to drive up engagement and LTV from existing customers, as well as create buzz.

Out of Home (OOH) in Major Cities: Get Drive/Walk By Awareness

Billboards on the 101 or in NYC can be great for top-of-funnel awareness. I definitely wouldn’t count these out as a way to drive visibility for a new product launch or a great offer for your brand. Similar to creator seeding, you want to go big or not go at all here, if you’re doing billboards. Just having 1 or 2 won’t do much.

If you have a smaller budget for OOH, I would recommend one of the following for maximum impact:

  1. Running truckside billboards where they drive around major cities and get in front of thousands of people per day.

  2. Run taxi-top inventory—this is efficient and high impact.

  3. Put up a big posters/bills campaign around a major city with loud creative.

Native Ads: Unlock Billions of Page Views on The Open Web

I wrote an 8-page email about how to leverage native ads and why they matter. Just search your inbox for “8 pages on the $100BN/yr ad category that you aren’t leveraging today!” if you want to read it.

The top native ad platforms (Taboola and Outbrain) allow you to place ads programmatically on major publishers for competitive CPMs. Both companies claim to have access to over 7,000 publisher sites, including nearly all mainstream media sites that each generate billions of page views per month. The product works.

A funnel you can rely on here is driving native ad traffic to an advertorial you know converts and then testing it across different publishers. You’ll likely find that 3-10 publishers will work well for you out of all your testing, and then the rest may just be okay or not perform that well.

Traditional PR: Borrow Brand and Distribution From Top Publishers

Traditional PR isn’t as powerful as creating your own content, but it’s definitely a quick way to borrow someone else’s brand and get fast distribution. Getting covered in Forbes, Town and Country, or CNBC can still be very effective if you can do it. It’s also another great way to get social proof, which helps you earn trust and validation from potential customers.

Alright folks, that’s it for today! What did you think of today’s deep dive? Please let me know here.

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