Middle of funnel marketing has pillars? Who knew? Well, we call them “pillars” but another term could be checkpoints. Basically, what’s important to consider when sorting your MOF marketing.

First of all, let’s sum up middle of funnel marketing. It’s all about turning interest into engagement through ‘nurturing’ a customer that is snooping around your website or app. But what are the pillars? 

We like to plan

It’s oh-so-tempting to start with the shiny, fancy tech. That’s a really common mistake in middle of funnel marketing. So pillar number 1 is strategy – always start here. When planning your communications there are a few elements you need to consider… 

Personas

Who are your audience? Personas are fictional characters based on who your audience could be. This exercise involves putting people into boxes, essentially stereotyping them. No, we don’t like doing this either in everyday life but as a marketing strategy it can really help! 

Value

So now we’re thinking about our aims, let’s make sure they provide value to the customer. Here are some middle of funnel goals that could add value for your customer:

Onboarding – introduce your brand, tell your story, and explain the benefits.
Engagement – offer the customer something that will benefit them.
Retention –  when you have their interest, keep them involved.
Education – what can we say, learning has value! People like to learn!
Referral – ask for a review or suggest referring a friend.
Upsell – this is all about getting your customer to commit more time to you! This could be a repeat purchase or even a loyalty card/points scheme

Behaviors

Think about what you want your customer to do and how to get there. Consider why they have downloaded/purchased, what are they doing with the product, and align this with your aims. 

A behaviour that we identified in the customer journey is that an app purchase is harder to achieve than a web purchase. Customers seem to have less faith in mobile checkout making it a difficult task getting them to purchase. With our client ESOOKO, we flagged this and recognised the need for strong abandoned cart comms. When a cart is abandoned it is historically difficult to get the customer to finish the purchase. By considering tone, personas, value and behaviour ESOOKO’s abandoned cart conversion now sits at an outstanding 63%. That’s how effective a comms strategy can be!

It’s time to get planning. We call it event mapping, which is basically putting a customer journey in place.

So you now have a purpose! This is awesome because without a purpose you benefit no one. Have you guessed how we’re filling the gaps in our strategy? It’s the other two pillars…

Time for tools

We love amazing tech at Favoured, but we don’t just shoehorn our favourites into comms. All decisions should be based on the needs of your individual business and be in line with your strategy. However, we do have a few broad categories of tech you should look into…

  • Email marketing tools 
  • CRM tools (sneaky tip; HubSpot does both email marketing and CRM)! 
  • Push/in-app notification tools
  • Web tools or plugins
  • Analytics tools – we are loving Autopilot as it allowed us to identify that our client MindBreaks is smashing its in-app conversion target! On average this is usually set at 5%, we put a high target of 10% based on other apps and are currently achieving 16%! 

Strategy – we got this. Tools – you’re good to go! What could be next?

The fun bit

It’s time for the final pillar… creatives. Take a look at your strategy and design your creatives to suit. You’re a clever bean though, you know by now that you need to take certain things into consideration…

First up; be real. Authenticity is so important if you want to make a connection with your audience. This is all about communicating your personality and what you stand for. If you show you’re not just the usual corporate business (whilst staying professional and an expert in your field), you’ll build trust and a real relationship with your customer. 

Validation is also key! Make sure in your creatives you show real people, benefits and results. Sorry to break it to you but “Award-winning” without context means nothing. 

We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again – you need to have value. Do not send anything without value, it will not connect. This includes email, push notifications, ads – any comms from your brand. You may even cause frustration, which could negatively impact your relationship with the customer. We do have a handy little test to make sure you’re doing this called the “Grunt Test”. All you need to do is answer these three questions…

  • Who are we?
  • What do we do?
  • How can we help you?

Many people miss the last question but this is the best way to make sure you’re adding value to a customer journey. Be as selfless as possible and your customers will love you for it.

Finally, variation is also important. Performance marketing is all about testing, so having variations of your creatives is key and can pay off massively. A great example of this is copy. Our client SMASH, with some of their marketing specifically targets under 25s. So after having an open rate of 18% with their original email, we injected a new subject line and saw an increase to 23.5%. It’s all about finding what resonates with your audience, in this case that was Gen Z. Sometimes what they actually connect with may not be what you first expect!

You Ready?

Middle of Funnel marketing cannot be overlooked. It usually takes more than one ad to make a purchase, we often need some nurturing. So now you have the tools, set up your comms plan and just watch the improvements!