Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers. I'm Louise Crossley. And I'm Daniel Rowles. And today we are asking, do we really understand marketing funnels?

Speaker 2: Okay, so this one comes from starting point of me teaching a lot of my MSc students and going through marketing funnels and kind of realising they didn't really get it. So we went into it a bit more and then I thought, does everyone else get it? And I started speaking to a few podcast listeners, a few clients. And I was like, nah, people don't really understand some bits of this. So I want to go through it just to see what other people's understanding is. And I want to talk about the connection between marketing funnels and user journeys and then models like RACE, which is the Dave Chaffee Smart Insights model and AIDA, attention, interest, desire and action and those sorts of things. Before we do that, a couple of announcements. Let's talk competitor app. So we announced when we did the AI marketing tools, we announced this thing competitor.app that was really great little tool. You went in, you put in your competitors. It looked to their websites, it looked at their social media, it could subscribe to their e-mails, and it basically notified you when they were doing things. I've been using this a little bit and it's absolutely awesome. So, for example, if they go in and they change their H2, it will say they've changed their H2 from this to this. So you can literally see what they're optimising their website for. You can see all their social posts. I really loved it. But we did it and the guy that built it got in contact and went, oh, thanks so much for mentioning it. Basically, since you went through and did it, we've had loads of people subscribe and loads of people sign up for demos and stuff like that. So first of all, if you've got a tool and you think we should take a look at it, let us know because it does work by the sound of it, which is great. But then really kindly got in contact and said, oh, I saw that you had a trial, Daniel. I've given you a year's free agency membership and then offered you guys membership as well. So thank you so much for that. The more I've been using it, the more I've loved the tool as well and it's kind of given me insights that I wouldn't really realise it gave.

Speaker 1: Well worth taking the trouble to set it up, because that's the thing, you have to give it a bit of information so it can go away and just do its thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and you need to leave it for a couple of weeks running and then it really does provide some value.

Speaker 3: The detail it goes into is pretty impressive.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I was amazed because it wasn't just like the page has changed, it tells you what's changed on the page. That was good fun. So thank you, Razvan. Yeah, exactly. We love you. Nice email out of the blue. Another one both Kieran and I noticed recently. So Google Trends, we love Google Trends, tells you trends in search volume over a period of time. The problem with it was that it always gave you a number between 1 and 100, which was a relative search volume. It didn't actually give you the amount of searches. So that's a bit frustrating. And then both you and I, obviously over the last couple of weeks, went through and went, what's that?

Speaker 1: Oh, no, it's better than that. So I'm in the middle of teaching a whole class of people. Right. And, of course, it doesn't give you volume data. Oh, look, there's volume data. Well, I am. Well, that's surprising.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I did the same, but I styled it out. I did not style it out. It's some numbers. And then I mumbled for a bit. And this is search volume. And then I was like, oh, right. It's because the Keywords Everywhere extension for Google Chrome does loads of great things, but what it now does, it extends Google Trends to above the Trends graph. It gives you a slightly more precise graph, I noticed, as well. It's more kind of dot by dot. And it gives you actual numbers, and you can mouse over to see the numbers.

Speaker 1: But it only does it if you go worldwide. Oh, does it? No, this is the thing. This is why I got caught out, because I was looking at stuff, and it was all fine. And then I went worldwide to show, like, global trends, and it did it just after I'd said. Yeah, it doesn't. But it's an occupational hazard, isn't it? How often do we get caught out by – because everything's changing all of the time. People don't send you an email to say, this has changed since you last went.

Speaker 2: My favourite thing is I've been demoing GA4 live in training sessions. Do you want to go, here is the admin –

Speaker 1: Oh, it's me.

Speaker 2: And I'm just going to find it live and just keep talking amongst yourselves. There is that whole awful moment when you're doing that, as well. I have a really bad thing of going red, as well. So I'll be training. I'll go red. And because I go red, I become more self-conscious of the fact that I'm going red. And then it kind of –

Speaker 3: Snowballs.

Speaker 2: I snowball a little bit. But it's even worse. With my MSc students, they're lovely, but they're brutal. And I'll say something, and then I'll go red. And you can see one of them going, he's gone red. Look. Is it like you'll tell? And then it gets worse and worse.

Speaker 4: That doesn't happen. Never play poker, Daniel.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't a good thing. I think I'm getting better as a guy, because I care less, really, what anyone thinks. But, you know, anyway. So, anyway, we digress slightly. Mentioning GA4, actually, we have got a masterclass coming up. So we did one of these before. Really, really popular. Half a day course, deep diving into setting up GA4, getting up and running. So 21st of February, 2023, targetinternet.com forward slash GA4. And you'll get all of the details of that as well. So let's get into the task at hand. The funnel. The funnel. So what about the funnel? It is. So the idea of the funnel, okay, you've got the top of the funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, loyalty. Reach does something, sorry, race does something similar, which looks at the same kind of stages. The actual full race is price, because there's a planning stage at the beginning. Just doesn't sound as good, though. No, race is a bit easier to remember, right? So reach, act, convert, engage, which I love that. And that was Dave Chaffey's, and on the Smart Insights website. You've got ADA, which is attention, interest, desire, and action. And I'm really glad I'm remembering all of these. But be aware of this one little slight difference. ADA just goes until the point of conversion, the bottom of the funnel, okay? It doesn't talk about loyalty afterwards. They're slightly differently aligned.

Speaker 1: See, I've always used ADA as a writing tool rather than a funnel representation. Interesting, okay. So you can do this in a piece of writing. Right. But it is interesting, because it does, in a way, it's designed. It's funneling in one piece of content. Yeah, a funnel for people right the way through to the end. But I guess you could use it as a slight elaboration. And Jasper, the AI tool, uses ADA, doesn't it? Well, that's how I discovered it. Yeah, because it's like, okay, that's cool. And then Jasper started writing these paragraphs for me, and you realise, oh, my goodness, just about every advert I've ever seen on YouTube follows this, and it works.

Speaker 2: Grab your attention, drive some interest, create some desire, and then make you do something. Yeah. Okay, I like it. The funnel, let's just go through. If we talk top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, then you're at this point of conversion. So the bottom of the funnel is the point where people are actively seeking out what you want, right? So if you look at your content, that's your sales pages, that's your product pages. They should be the best answer to what do you do, right? And they should be well optimised, and they should also cater for every level of detail. So if I want just to quickly get, got it, I'm buying, impulse, that's great, but also if I want loads of detail and I want to drill into it, it should give me that level of data as well. So that's the bottom of the funnel. I think everyone kind of gets that. Where I'm seeing the confusion with this is the top of the funnel. So you say to people it's top of funnel content. Yeah. Okay, well, we'll talk about, you know, the product area and stuff, and it's like, nope, it's not about that. They know nothing. No, no, that's it, right? They're not thinking about your product or service. They don't know anything at this stage. It's got to be persona-based.

Speaker 1: They're just an addressable audience. Yeah, right.

Speaker 2: So this is well-worded, right? Because if you go through and you look at the Google model, I think it was the Avanash model. Avanash, yeah. The See, Think, Do Care.

Speaker 1: Yeah, See, Think, Do Care.

Speaker 2: So See was your largest addressable qualified audience. Think was an audience with some commercial intent. Do was an audience of lots of commercial intent. And the care stage is the kind of loyalty stage at the end. They've already transacted with it. And they say transacted twice, I think, was the original model in the description of it. I'd like to point out for those that aren't watching this video, I didn't look at my notes once when I went there. Very impressive. It's stuck in my head.

Speaker 1: You remembered four things.

Speaker 2: Exactly. In sequence. That's a challenge, right? So they're the same thing. So I would kind of say, and other people may argue, the See, Think, Do Care, the funnel, and the race model are basically the same things. They just align in that way. The top of the funnel is that stage where you're not actively thinking about this. But if I look at my persona, I can go through and say, what kind of stuff might that persona be interested in on a day-by-day basis? Now, if you look at a lot of the stuff that we've got on the target into the resources section, it's tried to appeal to that side of things. And the logic behind that originally was that if you searched in digital marketing, e-learning, we were number one or number two in Google. It's like, yeah, what a winning situation we're in, right? That's great. Then you look at the search volume using something like Keywords Everyone. It goes, there are 110 people on the planet that search that every month. That's a bit disappointing. So then you go, okay, we need to use some different search terms. But then you go, actually, what I want to do is create demand. So if I go to the top of the funnel, I can get the right people in the door, then I've got the opportunity of saying, by the way, we've got this great stuff. So there was loads of pieces of content that worked for us. How do different age groups use social media? Because I know someone searching that is a marketing manager or a marketing student or whatever it might be, researching the topic of digital marketing, but they don't necessarily want my stuff yet at all. So very much, that's the kind of stuff at the top of the funnel. General interest to my target persona. Bearing in mind that if you've got different personas as we have, they might need different top-of-the-funnel content. So my average L&D, learning and development manager, they might be responsible for educating 200 people. They're an important potential customer for me. They don't care about digital marketing. It's not really of interest. What do they care about? Well, they care about kind of HR-related things. So maybe a digital marketing skills benchmark might be of interest because that's specifically about their remit. Well, that's probably a bit further down the funnel. So it's going to actually, on a day-by-day, what do they care about? Well, they might look at L&D trends. They might look at HR trends, those kind of things. So it's a hard audience to identify what they care about at that stage as well. But you've got to think about them as in what's troubling them. What are their challenges on a day-by-day basis? Maybe it's like dealing with difficult people or it's about how to upskill a huge team or whatever it might be. Again, that might be a bit further down the funnel. Middle of the funnel is where we get a bit grey. So we've got tofu, which I like this, top of the funnel. Mofu, middle of the funnel. Bofu, bottom of the funnel. Someone's going to be, yeah, it's very mofu. And I was like, is he swearing at me? I don't know. Okay, I understand. So the top of the funnel, just stuff that's going to help me on a day-by-day. You're going to normally find that stuff by searching for a problem, searching for a question, or maybe it's browsing social media and you try and get it in front of the right people.

Speaker 1: So where do you think it goes wrong? Because that's the correct definition. But I agree with you. I think a lot of people jump in at the wrong level and they're not really thinking about how the full... Because the big thing with a funnel is the most obvious thing. It's a funnel.

Speaker 2: So you're supposed to move people down it.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you are. But remember that less in at the top equals less out at the bottom.

Speaker 2: Well, yes and no, because some people enter the funnel at the bottom or the middle. Because if you think Amazon, we don't care about the top of the funnel. All we care about is we do the products cheapest and fastest. So it's not really a funnel at all. It isn't. It's just the point of conversion. And actually it's true because in many categories you don't go to Google and search for something you then find in Amazon. You go straight in. So that's a marketing strategy. That's fine. It's okay to do that if that's your choice. But the problem is if that's your choice, you either have to be someone like Amazon where everyone knows you or you have to shout at people. Buy our stuff, buy our stuff, buy our stuff. And then what happens is that you catch some people and you annoy a lot of other people.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I suppose from my perspective though, I've always taken the fact that, yeah, it's a model. It's a funnel. It's an imperfect model. Because it's only really trying to represent otherwise a very complex thing. Because actually, right, people jump all over that funnel. They go up and they go down and they come in from the sides. And they spill out of the sides as well. So if it was literally, if it was a funnel, if you were using this to put petrol in your car, it would be a horribly expensive thing. But as marketers, actually, we're using it to put sales into the business. We're going to bring in that revenue. And actually, it is horribly, horribly expensive to get more and more people in at that top level because you lose a lot of them.

Speaker 2: You do, and it depends how you do it. So if you are paying for your top of the funnel visitors, you've got a problem, right? Because unless your conversion rate is very high, so all these people in, then you move them to something of interest, then you get them to buy the product. You've got to have an exceptionally high conversion rate. Bearing in mind, the average conversion rate is well below 1%. Well, well below 1%. Whereas if you can get top of the funnel from organic search, that could be great. But actually, on Target Internet, we had the opposite kind of problem. We had loads of top of funnel content. You know, tens of thousands, literally tens and tens of thousands of people coming in. But we just weren't converting them at a high enough rate. So we've just done, I mean, if you look at targetinternet.com anytime soon, we've just done a whole piece of conversion rate optimisation, a big piece of research to get more people to do the things we want them to do, to drive them down that funnel, to show them what they're getting and improve that user experience.

Speaker 3: So when you're looking at your funnel, then, what are the most important metrics to track? Like how do you know how well you're doing?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would always kind of come and get to the point and go, start with the conversion point, right? So you set what you want people to do as an analytics goal, and then you can actually look at all the traffic to your website. You can see your conversion rate. As I said, 1% would be a miracle to some extent. So it depends on the business.

Speaker 5: And it's that other thing as well.

Speaker 2: Maybe you're doing so well at organic search that you get all these hundreds of thousands of visitors. You can't really expect a hugely high conversion rate. And that's why it depends on the situation. But I would always look at the conversion rate, and then I want to look at how much traffic I'm getting into the website in the first place. And then I want to try and look at what do I define as the middle of my funnel? Because this comes back to your point, Kieran, a little bit as well, which is where do you think people are going wrong? I think they think the top of the funnel is the middle of the funnel. They're already talking about the subject matter area. So let's give another example. Target Internet is an easy one because it's, you know, online learning. Well, actually, if you go through middle of the funnel, that's someone who's got any interest in their own skills and development. So, you know, benchmarking your skills, which is why we developed our skills benchmark. Because if I can get to the website, here's some useful content. By the way, do you want to find out what your skills say? Oh, yeah, I'm interested in that. I know you're moving in the right direction. But then if I benchmark you, I've got a ton of data, right? I suddenly know who you are, your email address, what company you work for, and what you're like, if your skills are any good at SEO, social media, email. And then I can go, here's something that's really useful. By the way, you know, bottom of the funnel, there's some lovely free stuff, and it's free for 30 days kind of thing. So we've kind of looked at those stages. But also, if someone were to do a search like how to get Google Analytics certification, that's probably middle of the funnel because it's answering a problem, but it's also somebody that's already thinking about their skills. So it's just trying to make sure you've got all three of those pieces aligned. Yes, you've got great sales pages. Yes, you've got stuff that will bring people in the door in the first place. But how do you move them on that journey? You can't just go, here's some really useful stuff, buy our stuff, because, you know, it's like just go away. You're just putting pop-ups and all that kind of stuff. So you've got to move them, hopefully, gradually. Some people will leap. They'll come in and say, yeah, this is great. Oh, that looks interesting. I'll sign up for it.

Speaker 3: You just have to keep showing the value, don't you? Well, this is it.

Speaker 2: You've got to really show enough value to overcome friction. So I love this all the time. If I'm on Instagram and I'm a sucker for this, right, and I see a product, I'm like, that looks amazing. I'm an absolute sucker for those Instagram videos. This product is the best one that's ever been made. Anything from the best T-shirt that's ever been in the history of T-shirts to all sorts of other nonsense that I've purchased. Torches, I'm a sucker for bright torches. This is a bit of a thing.

Speaker 4: Noted.

Speaker 2: Yeah, right, exactly. 5,000 lumens.

Speaker 4: Wow, if I looked at that, it would blind me.

Speaker 2: That's amazing. You watch the video, right, and they turn it on and it's like, it's just lit up a stadium. Yeah. And then you get on, like, this one's 40. Anyway, if I go, that looks great, and I click on it, and then it's like, put your credit card details in. I'm like, you've lost me. Because I'm on my phone and I'm browsing. I'm not in the mood for going and finding my wallet. And, you know, I don't even carry a wallet most of the time anymore because of the phone. Whereas if there's an Apple Pay, click, click, purchased, I'm all over that and I've just spent a load of money on something. They go, this will be drop shipped to your house in four months. Oh, that's slightly disappointing as well. So if the friction is overcome by the value you're offering, which is why, you know, free trials and all those kind of things can have a big impact, that will move people down. Then also bear in mind, you talked about it being non-linear. The thing is, you might come back to my top of the funnel stuff a load of times. We know that people visit our website quite often seven times before they move down. But also, people at the loyalty stage that have already transacted with you, giving them your top of the funnel content can provide value. So we know this with Target Internet that actually our paying subscribers still love all our videos and podcasts and stuff like that and still listen to it and feel it's part of the overall kind of offering. So it's not linear, but we've got to try and work people kind of through it.

Speaker 1: It's really not. Back in the day, Daniel, I listened to your podcast you used to do with the agency you then worked for. Oh, so the Internet Marketing Podcast, old school. Eighteen months before I made contact with the Internet Marketing guys.

Speaker 2: And we've seen this, the Digital Marketing Podcast, that people listen for a long time and then go, oh yeah, those guys, I trust them, they do this stuff. I'll get them to do it. So I think there's definitely, you've got to build that relationship as well. And sometimes going from the top to the middle or the bottom of the funnel, you need to build trust. And if you're sitting there going, buy our stuff, buy our stuff, you're not building trust. What you're doing is actually irritating. You can take it too far.

Speaker 1: Well, you're also fishing in an overfished pond, essentially. Because if you've overfished it already and you've not got strategies to pull extra people in so they're aware of you and thinking about you. And that's the thing with the funnel that's quite cool. You never know really who's at which stage. I know we all love the fact that we've got tons of analytics and we can measure everything in digital. Yeah, you can't really though, can you? Because you know people are there, but you don't really know what stage. You can make a guess depending on what they're looking at and stuff. And I think that's where it gets quite exciting because we've got lots of levers in digital marketing that work particularly well at different stages of the funnel. So at that C stage, organic's amazing because it's free and a lot of people are doing their research and they trust the organic answers that come to the top. You've also got display. There's all manner of different display networks that you can leverage to make people aware of. And with that, you can target specific content that they might be learning and gleaning information from anywhere. They're naturally there, but they didn't know you existed and you can lodge that in and get them thinking about you. And then you've got things like, for me, pay-per-click. It's brilliant at that do stage. It's active interest. It is, yeah.

Speaker 2: That's it. And I think it's the right channel, the right content for the right person at the right stage of the journey. You've got to align all of those things. And I think a lot of people miss the top. They don't have a middle stage and they haven't revisited the bottom because that's the other thing that I've noticed is that people are building their websites and then they're off doing marketing, marketing, marketing. Whereas actually, a bit of user testing, conversion rate optimization, you're getting all this traffic to the top of the funnel. Surely, if you could convert half a percent more or one percent more, that's much more valuable than spending more money or just pumping more traffic into the top of the funnel as well. So we've been trying to address both sides of this. How can we improve our content? More top of the funnel. How can we go through and improve the benchmark and encourage people to do that to the middle of the funnel? And then how do we make our offering better? So actually improve the product. So that's the other thing as well. We were debating and discussing this before, but actually, if your product is incredible, you don't really need to do as much marketing because it's like, wow, that looks so good, I want that. It's like my 10,000 lumen talks. So actually, I mean, that was all marketing. But anyway, the reality is that if you focus on product, you kind of start to fix the bottom of the funnel potentially, hopefully. You do need to kind of explain it really well as well. So you can't just do one thing. And marketing is responsible for each of those stages. And if you've got a terrible product, you can do all this great marketing, but actually just destroying your brand because people are disappointed. They churn and they leave and so on as well. So I think we have to take this holistic view, but we have to be really clear on those different stages as well. And that's where all these tools that we've spoken about come into as well. So we'd love to hear from you as normal. Do you think you're getting this right? Do you think you should be improving your journey as you go through? What tools are you using to kind of do that stuff? Anyone out there that's got any tools as well, and you want to give them a bit of a plug, get in contact. We're really happy to try stuff out. If we like it, we'll plug it. If we don't, we won't. But get in contact for that as well.

Speaker 1: I'm really interested in how you're using different channels at different stages. Right. Because it's interesting, wasn't it, Louise, like social. It's a fascinating one for me, and I've just been thinking about this while you've been talking, Daniel. But social is actually brilliant at all stages of the funnel. You paid social when you fit that in. It really makes a huge difference. But then it's got me thinking, do you know what? In a way, actually now with retargeting and remarketing options you've got, display can be brilliant at all stages of the funnel. The one that I'm not convinced is brilliant at all stages of the funnel is pay-per-click ads, things like search ads. Well, they're too expensive. Because they generally are a bit too expensive at the top of the funnel. But even there, you've got interesting new models with Google Performance Max where they're trying to resolve that issue. And actually, give Google their due. They've been almost sort of encouraging everybody to, like if you do a search campaign, also include an element of display. I've never do that because it makes a mess of your data. Because one thing's about awareness and the other thing's about conversion. It makes it hard to always split them up into separate campaigns. But what are the ultimate channels for different stages of the funnel? What have you found has worked specifically for you? We would absolutely love to hear from you and get in touch because we're all interested in this.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think email, again, it's not at the very top of the funnel because you obviously need someone's email address. But you can get an email and keep providing value without trying to sell something to somebody. So, you know, it can work with each of these things. So, yeah, get in contact with us over targetinternet.com forward slash podcast. Got all the show notes in there and you can get in contact that way as well. Don't forget we've got that GA4 course on the 21st of February, targetinternet.com forward slash GA4 and you will find that there as well.

Speaker 1: It's like the 10,000 lumen light torch but for GA4. I don't think it's that good. There's no video.

Speaker 2: I'm not going to buy that immediately. Maybe we should have one.

Speaker 1: Maybe we should give away bright torches as a prize.

Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, I'm going to get some bright torches and give them away. You've got a few out here. They're not very bright, unfortunately. Anyway, we digress. Thanks for listening to Digital Marketing Podcast and we'll see you again soon.

Speaker 3: Please subscribe for more videos like this and visit targetinternet.com for more free digital marketing resources.