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hello and welcome back to the digital marketing podcast my name is Kieran Rogers I'm Louise Crossley and I'm Daniel rolls and today we are asking do we really understand marketing funnels [Music] okay so this one comes from starting point off yeah me teaching a loaded my MSC students and going through marketing funnels and kind of realizing they didn't really get it okay so we went into 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 no one people don't really understand some bits of this so I want to go through it just see what other people's understanding is um and I want to talk about the connection between marketing funnels and user Journeys and then models like race which was the Dave Chaffee smart insights model and Ada attention interest desire and action and those sorts of things before we do that couple of announcements let's talk competitor app so so we announced when we did the AI marketing tools we announced this in competitor.app that was really great little tool you went in you put in your competitors um it looked to their websites it looked at their social media could subscribe to their emails 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 the H2 from this to this so you can literally see what they're optimizing their website for you can tell their social posts so I really loved it but we we did it and uh the guy that built it got in contact went oh thanks so much for mentioning it um basically since you went through and did it we've had loads of people subscribe and loads of people sign up and sign up for demos and stuff like that so first of all if you've got a tool yeah and you think we should take a look at it let us know because it does does work by the sound of it yeah the switch is great but then really kindly got in contact 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 remember yeah so thank you so much for that the more been using them or I've loved the tool as well and it's kind of giving me insights that I wouldn't really realize it gave so it's well worth taking the trouble to set it up yeah because that's that's the thing you have to give it a bit of information so it can go away and just do its yeah you need to leave it for a couple of weeks running and then it really it really does provide some value the detail it goes into is pretty impressive yeah I was amazed because it wasn't just like the pages changed it tells you what to change on the page that was good that was good so thank you razvan yeah exactly yeah we love you nice email out the blue um 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 when oh no it's rated it's better than that so I'm in the middle of teaching a whole class of people right and I go in and I like and of course it doesn't give you volume data oh oh look yeah it's volume data well I am well that's surprising yeah yeah I see the same but I sold it out I was like and I did not I did that stuff is is some numbers yeah and then I mumbled for it and then and this is search volume and then I was like oh right it's enough it's because the plug the keywords everywhere yeah extension for Google Chrome does loads of great things but what it now does it extends Google Trends to above the trends graph yeah it gives you a slightly more precise graph I noticed as well it's more kind of dot by Dot and it gives the actual numbers and you can Mouse over to see the numbers but it only does it if you go worldwide yeah no this is the thing this is why I got caught out because it was I was looking at staff 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 it's an occupational 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 this has changed I've been demoing ga4 live in training sessions you want to go here is the uh admin oh it's me okay but I'm just gonna find it live and just keep talking about 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 do you so I'll be training I'll go ready because I go red I become more self-conscious of the fact that I'm going red um and then it kind of snowballs a little bit but it's even worse with my 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 when I go it's gone red look and they're like you'll tell you never play never play poker dining yeah I think I'm getting better as a girl because I care less really what anyone thinks but you know anyway so anyway we don't dress slightly mentioning ga4 actually we have got a master class coming up so we did one of these before really really popular yeah half a day course deep diving into setting up ga for 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 sorry about funnel please so the idea of the funnel okay you've got the top of the funnel middle of funnel bottom of funnel loyalty okay uh reach does something sorry race does something similar which looks at the same kind of stages um the actual full race is price because there's a planning stage at the beginning just doesn't sound as good then no race is a bit easier to remember right so reach act convert engage which I love that and that was Dave Chappy's and on the smart insights website um you've got Ada which is attention interest desire and action and I'm really glad I remember all of these okay but be aware of this one little slight difference um Ada just goes until the point of conversion the bottom of the funnel okay it doesn't talk about loyalty afterwards it's slightly differently aligned see I've always used Ada as a writing tool rather than a funnel interesting question so it's it's uh you can do this in about the writing right but it is interesting because it does in a way you it's it's designed if you if you write funnily in one piece yeah right funnel for people right the way through to to the end but I guess you could use it as a slight elaboration just for the AI tool uses that's how I discovered it yeah okay because it's like okay that's that's cool and then Jasper started writing these paragraphs I mean you realize oh my goodness just about every advert I've ever seen on YouTube follows this and it works grab your attention Drive some interest create some desire yeah and then make you do something yeah okay I like it um The Funnel let's let's go through if we talk top of funnel middle on the bottom of funnel then you're at this point of conversion so the bottom of the funnel yeah 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 optimized and they should also cater for every level of detail so if I want just to quickly yet got it I'm buying impulse that's great but also 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 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 so it's basically they don't they're not thinking about your product or service they don't know anything at this stage it's got to be Persona based they're just an addressable audience yeah right so this is this well worded right okay because if you go through and you look at the the Google model if it was avenash model avenasher yeah see think do care so C was your largest addressable qualified audience think was an audience with some commercial intent do was an audience of lots of commercial intent and uh the the care stages like on the Loyalty stage at the end they've already transacted with they say transacted twice I think was the original model in the description of it um I'd like to point out those that aren't watching this in a video I didn't look at my notes once when I went here very impressed it's stuck in remembered four things exactly in sequence that's a challenge so they're the same thing so I would kind of say other people may argue the the sea thing do get yeah the funnel yeah and the race model basically the same things okay they just 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 person to 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 is try 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 on number two in Google 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 every month that's a bit disappointing um so you 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 at 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 that was you know there was loads of pieces of content that work for us now how do different age groups use social media because I know someone's searching that is a marketing manager or you know a marketing student or whatever it might be researching the topic you know 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 you 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 anything 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 but 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 you know as in what's troubling them what are their challenges on a day-by-day basis you know 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 gray right so we've got tofu which I like this top of the funnel mofu yeah middle of the funnel yeah someone's going to be yeah it's very mofu and I was like is this where okay so the um 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 yeah searching for a question um or maybe it's browsing social media and you try and get it in front of the right people so where do you think it goes wrong because like that's that's the correct definition but I 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 like the big thing with a funnel yeah is the most obvious thing it's a funnel to try to move people down yeah you are but remember that like lesson at the top equals less out at the bottom well well yes and no because some people enter the funnel at the bottom or the middle yeah right because if you think Amazon Amazon we don't get air at 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 theirs isn't there's the point of conversion and actually it's true because you don't in many categories you don't go to Google and search something you then find in Amazon yeah right you go straight in yeah so that's a marketing strategy that's fine it's okay to do that if that's your shortest but yeah the problem is if that's your choice you either have to be someone like Amazon where everyone knows you yeah or you have to shout at people buy our stuff buy us stuff buy our stuff and then what happens is that you catch some people you annoy a lot of other people yeah right I suppose from my perspective though I've always taken the fact that yeah it's a model it's a funnel it's imperfect model yeah 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 or they might lose and they spill out other sites as well so if it was literally if it was a funnel if you're using this to Perpetual in your car be horribly expensive thing but there's marketers actually we're using it to put sales into the business right we're gonna 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 you do and it depends how you do it so if you were paying for your top of the funnel visitors you've got a problem right because unless you're a conversion rate is very High shoot all these people in then you move them 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 one percent well well below one percent whereas if you can get top of the funnel from organic search that that could be great but actually we had a 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 ten thousand people coming in but we just weren't converting them at high enough rate so we've just done I mean if you look at Target internet.com anytime soon we've just done a whole piece of conversion rate optimization 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 but 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 yeah so I I would always kind of come and get the point and go start with 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 okay as I said one percent would be a miracle to some extent so depends on the business yeah and it's the other thing as well 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's it's 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 here in 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 I.E they're already talking about the subject matter area so let's give another example just 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'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 skill set oh yeah I'm interested in that I know you're moving the right direction but then if I Benchmark you I've got a ton of dates right I suddenly know who you are your email address what company you work for and what you're like if your skills any good at SEO social media email and then I can go here's something that's really useful by the way at the bottom of the funnel there's some lovely free stuff and it's it's free for 30 days kind of thing so we've 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 that's it's just trying to make sure you've got all three of those pieces in line 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 it you know it's like 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 and say yeah this is great oh that looks interesting I'll sign up for it I think you just have to keep showing the value don't you well this is it you've got to really show enough value to overcome friction yeah right so I love this all the time if I'm on Instagram I'm a sucker for this right and I see a product I'm like that looks amazing I'm an absolute sucker of those Instagram videos this product 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 um torches I'm a sucker for bright torches this is a bit of a thing no time yeah right exactly so a thousand lumens yeah if I looked at that it would blind me well it's amazing you watched the video right and they turn it on and it's like let's just lit up a stage yeah and then anyway um 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 there you go this will be drop shipped to your house in four months oh that's slightly disappointing as well so if the friction is 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'll 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 are 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 it's really not like back in the day Daniel I listened to your podcast you used to do with the agency you then were oh so the internet marketing podcast old school 18 months before I made contact with right with the internet marketing guys and we've seen this the digital marketing podcast that people were listening for a long time then go oh yeah those guys I trust them they do this stuff I'll get them to do it so um I think there's definitely a you've got to build that relationship as well and sometimes going from the top to the middle of the bottom of the funnel you need to build trust and if you're sitting there going buy that stuff buyer stuff you're not building trust what you're doing is actually your team you can take it too far well you're also fishing in an overfish Pond yeah because if you if you've overfished it already and you've not got you know strategies to pull extra people in so they're aware of you and thinking about you and that's 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 we've got tons of analytics and we can measure everything in digital yeah you can't really though can you yeah um because you you know people are there but you don't really know what stage right you can make a guess depending on what they're looking at and stuff and I think that's you know 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 you know organic's amazing because it's free and you know a lot of people are doing the research and they trust the organic answers that went to the top top you've also got display it'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 you know learning and gleaning information from anywhere they're naturally 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 like for me pay-per-click um you know it's brilliant at that do stage was active injury it is yeah right 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 line all of those things um 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 was actually a bit of user testing conversion rate optimization you're getting all this traffic into 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 we've been trying to address both sides of this like 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 like 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 okay it's like my 10 000 Lumen torch right so actually I mean that was all marketing but anyway that the reality is that if you if you focus on product you kind of start to fix the bottom of the funnel potentially hopefully okay you do need to kind of explain it really well as well so there's you can't just do one thing and marketing is responsible for each of those stages and if you've got a terrible product 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 those different stages as well and that's where you know all these tools will be spoken about come into as well so we'd love to hear from you as normal um do you think you're getting this right do you think you should improving uh your journey as you go through what tools you're 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 um but get in contact with that as well I'm really interested in how you're using different channels or different stages right because it's interesting what is it Louise like social it's a fascinating one for me and I've just been thinking about this while you've been you've been talking Daniel but social is actually brilliant at all stages of the funnel you paid social work when you fit that in it but then it's got me thinking do you know what in a way actually now with you know retargeting and remarketing options you've got display can be brilliant at all stages of the of a funnel the one the one that I'm not convinced is brilliant at all stages of the final is is pay-per-click ADS you know 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 you know they're trying to resolve that that issue and actually you know give Google that to you they've been almost sort of encouraging everybody to like if you do a search campaign also include an element of display now I've never do that because it makes a mess if you data because one thing's about awareness and everything's about conversion it makes it hard to always split them up into separate campaigns but you know what is the what what are the ultimate channels for different stages of the funnel like what have you found has worked specifically for you we would absolutely love to hear from you you know get in touch because we're all interested in this 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 about trying to sell something to somebody so you know it can work each of these things so yeah getting contact is over Target internet.com forward slash podcast got all the show notes in um and you can get in contact that way as well uh don't forget we've got that ga4 course on the 21st of February Target internet forward slash ga4 and you will find that there as well it's like the the 10 000 Lumen like torch but for ga4 there's no there's no videos should give away bright torches that's a surprise 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 [Music] subscribe for more videos like this and visit targetinternet.com for more free digital marketing resources