Is the marketing funnel still relevant today? Does it matter how you differentiate between stages? Our hot take is yes, the funnel still has a place in the world of business: but only if you have a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of different stages and tactics. And that means you have to leverage the right measurement methodology.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the funnel as it applies to modern consumer buying paths, the unique importance of the top-of-funnel (ToFl) stage, and how to best measure the effectiveness of your ToFl tactics.
One of the reasons people say that the traditional buying funnel is no longer applicable in today’s world is that it’s linear, whereas the way consumers actually purchase is far from straightforward. The marketing funnel seems to suggest that consumers always enter the buying process at the top—awareness—then proceed in a linear fashion to the consideration stage before moving to purchase.
In reality, consumers might enter and re-enter the funnel at any stage, they might be in multiple stages at the same time, or they may skip steps altogether. Imagine mapping an actual customer journey. Instead of a sequential process, it would be more like a tangled string with multiple overlapping steps.
However, while consumer buying habits might be all over the place, it remains helpful and relevant to have a cohesive, organized way of thinking about the various stages buyers may go through. If you were to look solely at the messy reality of buying paths it would be easy to lose all focus on the different types of content you need to produce. The marketing funnel’s simplicity, while inherently limiting, offers a helpful mental model for creating content and strategies that real-life buyers can use to make their own way through the buying process.
For the purposes of this blog, we’re focusing mainly on the concept of “top-of-funnel” strategies. The ToFl, as it sounds, refers to the first steps that buyers take in the journey to become a customer—generally their first introduction to your company as they’re evaluating a wide range of options.
The goal of ToFl marketing is to give buyers enough information about your brand and your offerings that they’re prompted to look further into your company and do more research. ToFl strategies generally focus on more high-level messaging that introduces people to your brand and to the problems that you solve. Buyers at this stage aren’t usually ready for all the details about your offerings, so the purpose of this stage is primarily to spark interest.
Content at this stage can include:
ToFl marketing is crucial for attracting brand-new customers that have never heard of your company. If this is a priority for you, it’s important to have a way to analyze your ToFl marketing techniques and evaluate which ones are the most effective so you can continue to invest or even scale your investment in those.
There’s not simply one way to measure your marketing effectiveness. Two of the main methods include MMM and MTA, and they both have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the questions they can help your marketing team answer.
For ToFl marketing analysis, we recommend MMM over MTA for its ability to determine a high-level correlation. We’ll go into more detail and the differences between the methods below.
MMM in short is a high-level marketing analysis that allows marketers to examine the impact of the money they spend on advertising and marketing on their bottom-line KPIs, like revenue and subscribers. MMM also takes into account non-spend related factors that may impact revenue and delivers recommendations on where to focus marketing efforts and budget.
When it comes to ToFl marketing, MMM is the ideal method of measurement because of a few reasons:
At Rockerbox, we don’t believe that measurement is an either-or situation. We recommend marketers leverage MMM for ToFl insights and high-level budgeting questions, and also take advantage of the strengths of MTA. Rockerbox’s MTA solution—Journey—can help marketers explore the impact of lower-funnel channels and also can be helpful for ToFl channels where trackable (such as Linear TV and OTT). Ultimately MTA does have some limitations with hard-to-track channels like OOH and Influencer, but for many channels, it is helpful in determining individual channel performance and where to make budget adjustments within channels.
Rockerbox MMM leverages Marketing Mix Modeling to help marketers build models to understand the relationship between spend and revenue and make data-driven decisions around budget.
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