Today I am going to talk about activating and engaging consumers to your digital strategy.
You may have heard pieces of this referred to as “The Sales Funnel” or “Engaging Consumers”. While these trendy marketing phrases are absolute staples of any online campaign, they need to exist inside of a larger strategic framework.
To represent this I have created the “Strategic Funnel”. The reality is that online marketing is a multi-stage, multi-layered approach to guiding consumers through your strategic plan utilizing a host of tactics to drive to your core brand objective.
Lets take a closer look at my “Strategic Funnel”. The overall concept is to guide users through the three stages into your defined objective (purchase, data acquisition, etc…).
The first stage (outer ring) consists of the Consumer Touchpoints. This is where you will reach out to your defined audience and develop touchpoints enabling you to reach these consumers where they are active online. Some examples are: brand website, banner ad, email campaign, print, social media.
The second stage (middle ring) is Consumer Engagement. Now that you have connected with your target audience through the first stage, it is now time to engage them in a relevant way. This means aligning content, value propositions, messaging, etc., with both the consumer touchpoint utilized, the brand objective, and the consumer. Some examples are: tell-a-friend, online couponing, facebook posts, tweets, seasonal content.
The final stage (inner circle) is the Brand Objective. Now that you have found your target, identified an engagement channel, and utilized that channel to create a consumer-brand engagement, its time to seal the deal. This is the critical point where your brand objective needs to fit logically into the path you have defined and aligns with the path you have created for your consumer.
The number of elements within each circle can certainly vary, however, you should be able to logically create a path and then drive your consumers through your “Strategic Funnel” into your brand
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Matthew Kapusta is an experienced Digital Strategist and online marketer, he creates multi-channel digital strategies and tactical execution plans that produce measurable results and maintain a favorable ROI across multiple channels.
