Anyone who’s been in business for any extended period has likely heard about some variation of the sales funnel, the marketing funnel, or the conversion funnel. This funnel represents the entire customer journey, from the first awareness to the final act of making a purchase or converting in another way. Understanding the different elements of this funnel and how to apply the best marketing strategies in each piece is essential for businesses that want to see increased leads and conversions. Typically, this funnel is divided into three main areas: upper, middle, and lower funnel marketing. Sometimes it may be broken down even further to include the various stages that take place in the buying journey. These stages include awareness, interest, desire, and action. Those who are still in the upper funnel will find themselves in the awareness and interest stages and require a different approach than leads who have reached the action stages of the consumer journey. More extensive efforts should be focused on encouraging new leads to enter the funnel, along with those that guide action-oriented users in the lower part of the funnel to make final purchasing decisions. Having the most targeted marketing tactics for each part of the funnel will ensure the best lead generation and converting the most sales.
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Upper Funnel vs. Lower Funnel
NEXUS® is USIM’s proprietary reporting and analytics platform, ingesting real-time client sales data, customer actions via the website, CRM platforms, and detailed media performance data. The platform enriches the data with high-level analytics and forecasting to create real-time, sales-based optimizations and deliver improved results. NEXUS® tracks daily sales, year-on-year same-store sales, and granular sales details like channel purchased and the entrée mix at the national and local market levels. NEXUS® MMM ingests average checks, weather/seasonality impacts, new store openings, and other market forces to uncover insights into customer purchasing behavior at the national and local levels to highlight each market’s driving forces and marketing return on investment (ROAS). The following case study illustrates the power of NEXUS® and what it can do for you.
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NEXUS® Machine Learning Algorithm Enables Daily Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Channel Optimization to Increase In-Store Sales: Case Study
The conversion funnel (or sales, marketing funnel) visualizes critical stages in a buyer’s journey. Optimizing the funnel requires understanding how stages of the funnel all work together to create the most effective conversion strategy to guide your approach at each stage. The upper funnel is where leads are developed, and ad awareness (positive perception and top-of-mind recall) turns into interest to entice consumers to move forward. Its where good leads are separated from dead ends and simple changes can be made to the media strategy to get significant results. The lower funnel is the closing point where we convert intent to action, changing the consumer into a customer (increasing market share). And while a strong media strategy is developed to deliver on the balance of upper and lower funnel metrics, often optimization and reporting functions can be focused exclusively on lower-funnel metrics (immediate customer conversion or sales). To ensure this is not the case in your efforts, the following is a comprehensive guide to measuring lower and upper funnel media.
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A Comprehensive Guide to Measuring Lower- and Upper-Funnel Media
Today’s hospitals face a fundamental challenge: how to differentiate themselves and effectively market their services to attract patients in an increasingly competitive environment. Put another way, the issue is choice, and the challenge is ensuring that when someone needs to go to the hospital, they choose your hospital. To address this challenge, hospitals must explore new marketing strategies and create more compelling marketing plans capable of addressing the fundamental concern of patient choice. This will include optimizing the unique opportunities digital marketing presents with unsurpassed access to data, more finite targeted audiences, and stronger engagement potential. By better understanding the dynamics influencing patient decision-making, hospitals can implement targeted marketing approaches to enhance their brand reputation, engage with their target audience, and ultimately increase patient volume.
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Hospital Marketing Strategies: Addressing the Fundamental Issue of Choice
With the economy continuing to teeter between growth and recession amidst an extremely volatile cultural/social marketplace, it’s a time of uncertainty for many brands and businesses. Ensuring marketers can reach their audience and drive to conversion, without breaking the bank, will be a challenging proposition as 2023 continues to unfold. Marketing strategies will face unprecedented pressure points. This can lead to mis-targeting, underperformance, and overspending. The following topics and subjects will explore economic pressure points and impacts to consider to recession-proof your marketing strategies.
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Economic Impacts Brands Should Expect in 2023
The job market is ever-changing—as the world evolves, the careers and specialties that are most prominent evolve, too. Over the past few decades, the technology and digital marketing atmosphere have grown exponentially, and will only continue to grow as media becomes more prominent. For those seeking jobs in digital marketing, the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic need to be paired with new and innovative skills to remain competitive. One of the most sought-after employee roles by high-ranking tech companies is that of a Digital Specialist. Digital Specialists, often called digital marketers, are a special niche of tech with particular skills.
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Honing the Necessary Skills to Become a Digital Specialist
This question is one for the ages, and it’s one that businesses have been trying to answer since the day the ‘first competitor’ arrived. In today’s world where there is so much variety for almost every product or service, the competition is stronger than ever. To maintain a successful business, it’s crucial to keep up and stay ahead of the competition Some questions you should be asking yourself: When is the last time that you ran a competitive analysis? Have you ever taken the time to do an in-depth analysis? Do you know how to perform a thorough, efficient analysis of your competition? If you’re not sure about any of these, USIM has you covered. Understanding your competition can give you powerful insights and intelligence to help your brand outpace them at every opportunity.
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How Do I Know What My Competitors Are Doing?
As a brand marketer, Linear Television has been a staple across media budgets and advertising strategies. With the emergence of Programmatic and Addressable TV, there are new developments where traditional advertising meets digital innovation with capabilities of more strategic targeting to deliver your brand message. In this article, USIM explains why it is necessary and crucial to be pairing both linear and programmatic marketing strategies to work in unison. We’ll explore how they go together and what to consider when planning your campaigns.
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Linear and Programmatic TV are Meant to Go Together
Your business has marketing needs. Digital media is the focus and marketing has so many variables to consider. Considering whether or not it is beneficial to use a digital media agency can be overwhelming. In this article we outline the benefits and how it can save your business or brand time and money to use a media agency for your marketing needs.
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Exploring the Cost-Benefits of Using a Digital Media Agency
It is automatically assumed that an economic downturn means a marketing slowdown, but the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, with a well thought out strategy under the right conditions can adapt
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What Kind of Marketing is the Most Cost Effective During an Economic Downturn?
How to Reduce Media Spend Waste & Optimize Your Advertising Spend When implementing a digital advertising strategy, it’s crucial advertising spend is effective, efficient, and not wasted on blind
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How to Reduce Media Spend Waste & Optimize Your Advertising Spend
USIM Explains Programmatic Versus Linear Television and What You Need to Know! Programmatic versus Linear refers to two different methods of purchasing linear television – Traditional Daypart/Program
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USIM Explains Programmatic versus Linear Television and What You Need to Know