The Searchies

A typical marketer’s gut reaction when asked about its marketing objectives is to scream emphatically “MORE SALES”. As we saw in my previous post, driving sales is only one aspect of well run paid search campaigns. Paid search campaigns can also build awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads. After all, no one is going to buy your product if they don’t know it’s there or why it’s worthwhile. Best in class paid search marketers utilize paid search for all four objectives, reverse the sales funnel to think like their customers, and use apples to apples metrics to assess the performance of their campaigns. This post addresses reversing the sales funnel.

One can think of these four objectives as pertaining to the different stages of a simplified sales funnel. Your customer has a nagging problem, researches solutions (awareness), refines her search (traffic), tries your product (lead generation), then purchases (sales). A marketer’s ultimate goal is to drive potential customers through this funnel as soon as and as profitably as possible. Most times marketers view the sales funnel through this lens. They do them self a disservice by taking this approach, though. Good marketers step into their customers shoes and learn how they make decisions. Thus, a better approach is to think about the sales funnel as a “decision-making” funnel.

I call it a “decision-making” funnel because each stage requires a potential customer to make an intrinsic decision before passing to the next stage. Generally, I think of these stages as: first learn, research, narrow choices, and buy. Potential customers increase their level of commitment to a company’s brand and product offering as they navigate through each stage. A consumer’s time, money, and energy are precious, constrained resources. As such, potential customers are right now navigating the sales funnels of multiple companies at the same time. Before they commit to the next stage with one company, they will wrestle with these decisions and ultimately have to abandon some sales funnels (hopefully not yours!) due to these constraints.

Also, the analogy of a funnel still holds. There are more potential customers in the ether, then there are prospects, more prospects than toe-dippers, and more toe-dippers than buyers. Every buyer passes through each stage of this funnel in some form or another. However, not all potential customers will become buyers. As discussed, many will abandon the funnel along the way. Moreover, times and pathways can vary for each buyer. Reversing the funnel doesn’t obviate the need for marketers to shepherd potential customers through the “decision-making” funnel.

The next post will discuss aligning your messaging to the different stages of the “decision-making” funnel.