The New Upper Funnel
The purchase funnel has evolved to being more consumer driven. As marketers, we seek to influence our brand’s awareness, but for high-involvement product categories, prior awareness is probably less of an entry to purchase consideration than the consumer’s own research and discovery process. Marketing can influence that research and discovery process, and analytics can identify the most influenceable points of it.
Customer Journey Analytics
While marketing mix focuses on the drivers of purchases, Customer Journey Analytics uses a similar methodology to more directly understand the drivers of traditionally upper funnel activity. The best upper funnel metric to use depends on the industry and available data. We can often get useful upper funnel data such as inbound calls and emails, visits to your website, information requests, social media actions, visits to retail or dealership websites, visits to product review sites, and aggregate search activity. By modeling the impact of a marketer’s actions on these upper funnel activities, the most important and most influenceable parts of the journey can be understood so that precious marketing dollars can be appropriately allocated toward them.