A Unique Perspective on the Traditional Marketing Funnel Leads to Powerful, Holistic Campaigns
The traditional marketing funnel assumes all your customers start at the top and move downward, starting at awareness, then dropping to evaluation, until they ultimately make a purchase. But believing that all customers take the same path to get to the purchase phase is an expensive misunderstanding.
Your customers enter – and exit – the marketing funnel at any point; a prescribed, linear path is unrealistic in 2022. Business owners must approach their marketing strategy and budget in a whole new way if they want to reach their goals.
The foundation of iFocus Marketing is built on this very idea, and it’s why our digital marketing agency has seen such great success – including earning data-driven marketing awards and being crowned the best ad agency in Kansas City.
Marketing Relay Race Basics
Our relay race concept horizontally rotates the marketing funnel. Each part of the marketing relay is as important as the rest, and the metaphorical baton can be passed back and forth through each “hand” at any moment. That’s the reality of how today’s consumer makes purchasing decisions.
- Brand Awareness: name recognition and recall when a customer needs your service or product
- Research: exposure to a potential customer when they’re actively looking at your services or products
- Lead Generation: being top-of-mind and visible when your potential customer is ready to make a purchase decision
- Retention: re-engage customers throughout relevant moments in their life – when they need your product or service again
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll focus only on brand awareness today. Stay tuned for future blogs that explore the rest of the marketing relay race, and read more general information about the digital marketing relay.
Measuring Brand Awareness Among Consumers
Brand awareness is one of the most straightforward marketing concepts – until it’s time to crunch the numbers. When you build brand awareness of your company, you’re simply making consumers aware of your existence and what you offer. If your brand is memorable or recognizable, you’ve probably attained brand awareness with your audience.
It’s hard to measure brand awareness, because it’s impossible to crawl inside everyone’s brains to find out whether they know about you. Instead, our digital marketing agency looks at several metrics to determine how successful we’ve been in this leg of the relay, for example:
- Impressions: the number of times consumers saw your ad or content.
- Website Traffic: how many unique visitors came to your site, either organically, or by clicking through online ads.
- Social Media Engagement: how many people followed, mentioned, or interacted with your brand or company on social media.
Why Build Brand Awareness Through Digital Marketing Strategies?
You can’t often skimp on building brand awareness and expect success from your digital marketing strategy. Brand awareness tactics shouldn’t only happen first or once in an omnichannel marketing campaign. It’s an ongoing process, especially as your audience grows or changes.
Brand awareness is necessary for building authority and trust, creating positive brand equity, and making automatic associations between your brand and the problem it solves.
For example, if you needed to ship a package, three services would likely come to mind immediately: the United States Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS.
- The problem: needing to send something to someone else.
- The solution: a shipping service you’re familiar with.
That’s because each of these services has built brand awareness. Their customers seek them out without having to use an online search engine or social media to learn about them. These consumers may even express loyalty to one of these shipping services that leads to them recommending them to a friend, or choosing them again and again – that’s retention, a blog for another day.
So what tactics does our Kansas City digital marketing agency use to build brand awareness? We have lots of options and ideas for you already.
Customized Digital Marketing Strategy, Just for Your Business
If you asked iFocus Marketing to draw a picture for you, you’d never find us using tracing paper. We’d free-hand all the way. That’s because we believe in customized marketing solutions for each of our clients; no two omnichannel campaigns or strategies should ever be identical.
And because we customize our tactics just for you, we employ a range of channels for brand awareness. Most any digital marketing channel can generate brand awareness, if your campaign is properly structured, including:
- Geofencing & Display Ads
- YouTube Video Ads
- Google Discovery Ads
- Programmatic Audio Ads
- Digital Out-of-Home Ads
- Social Media Ads & Management
We think these three give you the biggest bang for your buck, however:
- Google Discovery Ads, for their massive reach, easy scalability, excellent targeting options, and cost-effectiveness.
- Display Ads, for their ability to reach users across the ‘net, not just one one platform, and to generate a high number of touchpoints, crucial for brand recognition and recall.
- Social Media Ads, for customizing and optimizing campaigns and the ability to use high-quality creative assets.
Run the Digital Marketing Relay Race with a Marketing Agency Near You
Pass the baton of marketing strategy to our ad agency in Kansas City when you’re ready to build brand awareness and enjoy big wins in the rest of the relay, too.
We’ll manage and continually optimize your campaigns on each marketing channel, plus provide you with in-depth data and analysis in terms you can understand – no marketing PhD required! Our boutique service means our door is always open for you – and we’re ready to construct creative marketing solutions that are high-achievers – just like we are.
Talk to one of our business development pros to learn how iFocus Marketing can help you gain brand awareness among your audience and start strong in the marketing relay. Contact us by phone or online.
Jenifer Calandra is an award-winning digital copywriter and copy team lead at iFocus Marketing with 12 years of marketing experience. She curates copy from conception to completion, capturing client voices, and building their authority in their industry. Her knack for storytelling is deeply rooted in journalism, and you’ll find her work published in various regional newspapers and magazines. At home, dogs and a never-ending cascade of home-improvement projects rule her life.
