If you’re looking to run an advertising campaign but not sure what your main objective(s) should be, let’s first talk about The Marketing Funnel.
What is the Marketing Funnel?
The purpose of the Marketing Funnel is to easily categorize major milestones along the consumer journey, from Awareness, to Consideration, then Conversion, and ultimately turning those consumers into loyal fans.
Marketers tend to look at the Funnel as a strictly linear concept, but the present-day digital journey is anything but linear as people are entering, exiting, and moving around the stages. For example, loyal fans don’t always have to be hit with Conversion ads. To drive lasting loyalty, they should also be included in the Awareness and Consideration stages.
From an advertising point of view, the Marketing Funnel can help guide you in choosing campaign objectives.
Aligning Your Ad Campaign Objective to the Marketing Funnel
Selecting the right campaign objective is key to pushing users down the funnel.
Awareness Stage
At this stage, the target audience is typically unaware of the product.
- For example, they have not heard about a new single from their favorite artist dropping next week. A reach campaign would hit a wide audience to spread mass awareness (maximize reach) of the new single.
- Another example would be a surprise music video release that would benefit from a video views campaign that extends to loyal fans and other potential users who haven’t yet been exposed to the artist, but are likely to become new fans based on similar interests or online behaviors.
Consideration Stage
In this stage, the audience is showing interest in the product, before actually becoming a converted consumer.
- Once the audience is aware, an engagement campaign could push them to like or comment on a post, showing their shift into the consideration stage.
- A traffic campaign could be used to drive users to the artist’s profile, whether on socials or preferred DSPs, to get them to check out more of their material.
Conversion Stage
Finally, a user completes their journey down the marketing funnel when they hit the conversion stage.
- A conversion campaign would optimize towards a specified action such as a click on a DSP button to go stream, pushing the user down to the final stage.
- And if you’re interested in growing your artist’s newsletter list audience, a lead generation campaign can help with that by collecting fan emails and optimizing towards a submitted sign-up form.
- Audience data is key in driving users down the funnel. As awareness and consideration campaigns run, creating retargeting audiences is important. This way the same users that saw ads tied to the awareness and consideration campaigns see ads from the conversion campaign as well.
Not all users make it all the way down, which is why they call it a funnel. However, starting from top to bottom allows for a holistic campaign and a positive user experience, more easily turning an unaware user into a loyal consumer.
Best Platforms to Leverage per Marketing Funnel Stage
For each stage, some ad platforms are more well-suited than others for achieving goals. Meta and YouTube can usually be used across all stages due to those platforms’ versatility in campaign objective types and more robust targeting capabilities. Other platforms, like TikTok, are more suited for awareness purposes due to user behavior as people tend to want to stay in the app versus leave it.
If you’re interested in getting more information on each platform within each stage, each icon hyperlinks out to an additional resource.
To see an example of how we put the Marketing Funnel to use, check out this campaign that our team ran to drive Spotify Playlist followers and streams.
