The top of the funnel: Awareness and

consideration

Hello again. Earlier in the course,

we went over the concepts of
the customer journey and the marketing funnel.
Now, let's explore the funnel in a little more detail,
starting at the top with
the awareness and consideration stages.
We'll consider some of the things
teams can do to get attention
from potential customers
and drive engagement effectively.
First, awareness.
You already know that awareness is when
a potential customer encounters
your brand for the first time.
This may seem like a simple idea,
but how do you make sure your brand
gets in front of the right audience?
The first step is research.
Finding out who your customers
are and where they are online
can help you focus your marketing efforts
in the right places.
Getting to know your particular audience allows you to
pick the channels that have
the best chance of reaching them.
There are a lot of different tactics
a business can use to reach customers.
One way is to improve
their rankings and search engine results.
They can do this by optimizing website content around
specific search terms or paying
to place digital ads on websites,
social media, email, or video platforms.
Forming promotional partnerships with other brands
or influencers can also help raise awareness.
You'll learn more about each of
these tactics later in the program.
For now, just remember that
a strong top of funnel marketing strategy takes
advantage of multiple channels and creates
a consistent experience across all of them.
It's also important to keep in mind
that awareness isn't a one-time event.
Once someone knows about your business,
it can take days,
weeks, or even longer for them
to get to the consideration stage.
Once you've reached a potential customer,
the goal is to get them to remember you.
For Example your company sells refrigerators.
That's a big purchase and
not one that you make every day.
Even if a potential customer knows about your business,
they might wait until their old fridge
breaks to start thinking about a new one.
Maintaining a consistent online presence can
remind them that you exist when the time is right.
That way, they'll think of
your business when they do need your services.
Now let's move on to consideration.
You know that consideration
is the getting-to-know-you stage.
It's when people start exploring your business and
finding out what makes you
different from the competition.
During this stage, the goal is to increase the chances
that a potential customer
will eventually make a purchase.
They might be reading online reviews or
actively browsing your website by now,
so you need to give them reasons to stick
around or to come back if they've already left.
At this stage, some potential customers
will become leads.
A lead is a potential customer who has interacted with
the brand and shared
personal information, like an email address.
Let's take that refrigerator example again.
Imagine that customer goes to
your website and checks out a few different models,
but they don't make a decision right away.
Maybe they need more time to think about
it or want to compare different brands,
or they could have just gotten distracted.
You can engage that person again by serving them
ads based on the products and pages they visited.
That makes it more likely
they'll return to make a purchase.
Once a potential customer is on your site,
you should aim to educate them
about your offerings and explain
how specific products or
services address their pain points.
That can mean offering engaging,
useful content like blog posts, newsletters, or webinars.
Free samples, tools, or trial memberships can let
potential customers test out
your services before committing.
The goal is to start building trust in the quality of
your products and give customers
what they need to make an informed choice.
To recap, the top of
the funnel boosts awareness and customer engagement.
At the awareness stage,
marketers use a variety of tools and channels to
connect with potential customers
and stay fresh in their minds.
During the consideration stage,
they should make it clear what they're offering
and how they can meet customers' needs.
When executed carefully, awareness and consideration
tactics can lead to
more people eventually becoming customers.
Coming up, you'll learn more
about marketing funnels and discover
some ways to measure awareness and consideration success.

Case study: How MERSEA structures its marketing funnel

Previously, you learned about the different stages of the
marketing funnel. In this case study, you’ll learn the marketing
strategies that the Lenexa, Kansas based e-commerce company,
MERSEA, uses to attract potential customers, turn them into
paying customers, and eventually repeat customers. This process
represents MERSEA’s approach to the marketing funnel.
There is no standard approach to building a marketing funnel. The
various marketing funnel models often share similar strategies
and structures, but vary based on the needs of the business.
Company background

In 2013, Lina Dickinson and Melanie Bolin founded MERSEA, a

lifestyle brand located in Lenexa, Kansas, offering clothing,
accessories, and home fragrances. MERSEA’s products are
rooted in the joy of travel and the tranquility of seaside escapes.
Initially, Lina and Melanie focused on selling through retail
partners, placing MERSEA in over 1,200 stores.
The challenge
After having a solid presence in retail stores, MERSEA’s founders
wanted to increase their e-commerce sales. The challenge
MERSEA faced is like many other e-commerce businesses:
acquiring new customers online and turning them into repeat
customers. This is the core of its marketing funnel.
Imagine the perspective of a business owner. You have a
functional online store. But, how can you get potential customers
to visit the online store? And, after attracting customers, how can
you encourage those customers to revisit the store and become
repeat customers?

The approach
To get the MERSEA brand and product offering in front of its ideal
customers, Lina and Melanie used a mix of marketing strategies
such as online paid advertising, email marketing, social media
marketing, and text messaging.
It’s important to note that MERSEA is not implementing all these
strategies with its own employees. They hired an outside
marketing company to assist with Google Ads. Working with a
marketing company outside of the business allows the founders
and its employees to focus on what they’re best at, creating
outstanding products.
For busy business owners, it may be beneficial to hire outside of
the company to complete tasks, particularly for marketing
strategies that require more technical skills. For example, Google
Ads requires a knowledge of its platform and how to interpret its
metrics.
Organized by marketing funnel stages, here are some marketing
strategies MERSEA uses:
Awareness
For the awareness stage, MERSEA uses online ads including
Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
There are several types of Google Ads MERSEA uses. For
example, the company uses Search ads for brand name and
product searches. It also uses Shopping ads for specific types of
products, such as “kimono sweater.” For the Facebook Ads,
MERSEA advertises to potential customers from lifestyle-based
targeting.
Both of these ads help get the MERSEA brand and products in
front of those searching and interested in their type of products.
Consideration
During the consideration marketing funnel stage, MERSEA
continues to apply online advertising, and also uses social media
marketing and email marketing.
For online advertising, a marketing strategy MERSEA uses is
delivering ads to people who previously visited their website. This
is called remarketing. After the customer visits the website, they
then receive ads specifically for the products they viewed. This
type of advertising is in the consideration stage because the
remarketing ads build interest in the potential customer.
For social media marketing and email marketing, MERSEA tells
stories about products and introduces potential customers to the
brand.

Conversion
MERSEA is continually working to improve the conversion stage
of its marketing funnel. One strategy it uses is following up with
customers who have abandoned their carts. An abandoned cart is
when a customer adds an item to their cart in an online store but
does not make a purchase. If the customer enters their email
during the checkout process, but doesn’t make a purchase,
MERSEA automatically sends follow up emails reminding the
customer about the product in their cart. This follow-up leads to
an increase in the conversion rate.

Loyalty
During the loyalty stage, MERSEA turns its paying customers into
repeat customers.
After making a purchase, the customer receives emails about
additional and newly released products they may be interested in.
These emails are typically sent twice a week: one during the week
and another during the weekend.
In addition, one unique strategy MERSEA uses to build loyalty is
through text messaging. It has success with sending text
messages for order delivery confirmation and updates. When
done well, this texting strategy creates a more personal
relationship with customers.

The results
While MERSEA’s success starts with its quality and fashionable
products, its well-functioning marketing funnel approach
contributes to its success. Within two years of focusing on e-
commerce and building an online marketing funnel, MERSEA
increased its online sales from 10% to 45%.
Additionally, because of the satisfied customers and the well-
developed loyalty stage of its marketing funnel, around 50% of
MERSEA’s customers are returning customers.

Conclusion
There is no correct way to structure a marketing funnel. A key to a
successful funnel is trying and testing new ideas. MERSEA has
been successful with its online marketing efforts because it didn’t
simply set up an e-commerce store. MERSEA built a marketing
funnel to complement it.
A well-made product is important, but a well-rounded marketing
approach helps sell the product. A mix of the right marketing
strategies drives customers through the funnel. The customers go
from unaware of the brand to interested to first-time customers to
repeat customers.
Measuring success at the top of the funnel

So far, you've learned about some ways to raise

awareness and engage with potential customers.
You know that selecting
the right channels to reach a target audience is one of
the most important things businesses
can do to market products online.
But we haven't gotten to the most important part:
how do you know if the tactics you've chosen are working?
Are there ways to improve on what you're already
doing or do you need
to start again with a whole new plan?
To answer all of these questions is measurement.
The fact is, no matter how much research you
do or how carefully you plan a marketing strategy,
none of it matters unless you can measure your success.
Measuring outcomes at each stage of
the funnel allows you to
find out what you're doing right,
what you're doing wrong,
and where you can improve.
In this lecture, we'll discuss some of
the metrics companies use to
measure success at the top of the funnel.
A metric is a quantifiable measurement used to
track and assess progress toward an objective.
Marketing metrics can gauge
different aspects of campaign
performance and effectiveness,
which can help businesses make
improvements for the future.
For example, to measure awareness of their ads,
marketers use tools to track things like
impressions, reach, and frequency.
Impressions are the total number of
times an ad appears on people's screens.
That number includes users who
encountered the ad more than once.
If an ad is encountered 200 times by 100 people,
the number of impressions is
200, since it's been shown 200 times.
In contrast, reach is the total number of
unique individuals who encounter
an ad across their different devices.
No matter how many times a person gets that ad,
they're only counted once.
The reach of an ad that's encountered 200
times by 100 people would be 100.
Frequency refers to how many times
each individual encounters the ad in a given timeframe.
So if each of those 100 people gets the ad twice in a week,
their frequency would be two.
These are just a few of the metrics
you can use to gauge awareness.
You'll learn more about tracking and analyzing
awareness measurements later on in the program.
The goal of the awareness stage is usually to get
ads in front of the right people at the right times.
By analyzing impressions, reach, and frequency,
marketers can find out how
big of an impact their ads are having.
If the numbers are below
the company's goal for awareness,
they may decide to re-evaluate their ad strategy.
But businesses can also have
more specific awareness goals like getting
a certain amount of visitors to a page on a website.
Exactly what you choose to measure
depends on what you're trying to achieve.
That's why it's important to set
goals for each stage of the funnel.
At the consideration stage,
there are different ways to measure success,
but they all come down to one idea:
Engagement. How much, how often,
and for how long are
potential customers engaging with your content.
Analytics tools can track things like how
often customers search for your business online,
the number of first-time visitors to a site,
the number of pages per visitor,
and how long visitors spend on a page.
Signing up for emails or
newsletters is another good measurement of engagement,
and getting customer contact information
will make it easier to
remind them you exist, and
demonstrate your value later on.
It may seem like more engagement is better,
but that isn't always the case.
If the goal is for customers to find what they need
quickly but customers spend
a long time completing tasks,
it may mean you need to
re-evaluate the layout of your website.
Measuring website interactions can
give you a lot of insights.
So knowing which numbers are important and what
they mean for your goals is crucial.
Even with clear goals and accurate information,
measuring awareness and engagement is often more
challenging than measuring
bottom-of-the-funnel concerns, like sales.
Later in the program,
you'll learn how to interpret this kind of
information and how businesses use it
to improve their tactics for moving
leads from consideration to conversion.
Let's review. Measuring awareness and engagement is
the most important things brands can do to
ensure success at the top of the funnel.
Marketing teams use analytics tools to measure awareness
through numbers of impressions, reach, and frequency.
Consideration can be measured through website engagement,
including page visits,
detailed views, and email sign-ups.
Knowing what to measure in order to reach
our goals is an important part of marketing success.
Coming up, you'll learn more about the funnel and what
to do at the conversion and loyalty stages.