5 Pillars of a Paid Growth Marketing Funnel

Everybody wants something for nothing, and when you’re launching a new business (or trying to expand an existing one), growing on the cheap seems like a dream come true. That’s about half right. Discounted digital marketing is a dream, but it rarely happens the way we expect.

Why? A lot of times you get what you pay for. That’s why a paid growth funnel remains the fastest way to jumpstart your demand engine, gain feedback from your audience and verify what content, channels and messaging resonate with your audience.

Are there issues with a paid growth funnel? Sure. It’s not as sustainable as an organic/inbound strategy, but longevity isn’t the only consideration here. Put paid channels into your marketing mix, and you’re setting blaze to a bonfire with an exciting and calculated combination of experiments and tests. Take the resulting marketing insights and roll them into a more sustainable organic funnel to keep the home fires burning.

How do you construct an effective launchpad? Why, build up these five pillars of a paid growth funnel, of course.

1. Paid Digital Advertising Strategy

The great George Michael once said that you’ve gotta have faith, but in the marketing world, nothing is quite as valuable as a smart and sound strategy. When you’re spending money, you’re depleting resources, and you have to make sure those expenditures count.

Gather your experts and invest in a strategy that will form the basis of everything you do for the foreseeable future. You’re bankrolling a major brand boost, and having a blueprint is critical.

2. Web Design & Development Technology

If you’re lucky, you have about 10 seconds to capture someone’s attention before they wander away from your website in search of more interesting pastures. Consumer-facing content like your landing and thank you pages needs to epitomize smart design and capitalize on user-friendly tech that improves everything from appearance to loading speeds. Embrace responsive design and highlight your brand’s value proposition using all the tools at your disposal, and you’ll see conversion rates soar.

3. Marketing Automation

Very few companies have the resources to man phone lines and inboxes 24 hours a day, but marketing automation abandons hurry-up-and-wait mentalities in favor of on-demand interaction and continuous connections. Welcome emails, onboarding/account creation series, chatbots, social media post scheduling, ordering and shipping confirmations, push notifications — all these things help nurture customers through the buying cycle, buttress consumer trust and emphasize the authority you’ve worked so hard to establish.

4. Content Strategy/Development

Establishing a content strategy is like raising a child: the stakes are high, every choice you make has serious impact, your audience is always watching and there are no real do-overs. When you’re responsible for precious cargo, there’s no excuse for not taking the time to consider how you want things to go not just today but also tomorrow, next week, next year and so on.

Far too often, brands throw together a so-called “content strategy” in a day. Sometimes there’s no strategy at all, just a collection of off-the-cuff blogs, social media posts and Facebook Live videos that ramble on with no cohesion in sight. Real talk: nobody cares unless you give them a reason to.

Develop a clever, methodical content strategy that uses your brand messaging as a compass. Take plenty of detours when you need to, and don’t be afraid to take chances; the beauty of an agile approach to a paid growth marketing funnel is that your content strategy is a clearly defined skeleton but each piece is remarkably flexible.

5. Reporting and Analytics

How do you evaluate the success of your marketing initiatives? Analytics are the quantitative devices with which we measure the efficacy of every change we make during the planning, construction and execution of a paid growth marketing funnel. Chasing down maximum ROI is a fruitless exercise without benchmarks and feedback, and growth hacking in particular requires constant temperature taking so tweaks are made with intention rather than on the back of guesswork.

The best analytic reports include not just a snapshot of a single channel but a broad overview of every channel so you can see the big picture as close to real-time as possible. That way, you can appreciate what’s working, what isn’t and what has to be done without wasting resources on sub-par strategies and fruitless campaigns.

Prime Examples of Paid Funnel Tactics

• Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Marketing: PPC and SEM turn platforms and utilities like AdWords, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn into money-making, conversion-rich machines.
• Paid Placement: Partner up with industry influencers and brands ripe for comarketing for email plugs and sponsored content that expose your brand to a new audience.
• Direct Mail: The written equivalent of cold calling, direct mail introduces your brand to prospective customers who may just find a product or service they didn’t even know they were looking for.
• Influencer Marketing: As celebrities, reality stars and YouTube sensations gain record followings and a corresponding amount of authority, they’ve learned to leverage their popularity into a money-making opportunity by plugging brands who have paid for the support and exposure.
• Remarketing/Retargeting: The classic Rule of Seven says consumers need to see something seven times before they decide to purchase it. Remarketing and retargeting both go after customers who have browsed your website but failed to buy; the former uses email to reconnect while the latter relies on cookies to drop digital hints.
• Google Shopping: When AdWords and Google Merchant collide, you get a Google-friendly sales platform that covers feed creation, bidding strategies, performance monitoring and strategy optimization. It’s a powerhouse part of paid growth marketing funnels for e-commerce brands who want to be a part of the larger e-shopping playing field.
• Landing/Thank You Pages: Say hello, bid users goodbye and reward purchases with user-friendly pages that nurture leads and convert consumers at every stage of the sales funnel.
• Auto-Responders: Use marketing automation to interact with consumers as they take action instead of when it’s convenient for you or encourage action when consumers might otherwise drift away or hem and haw.
• Content/Blogs: Establish and reinforce your brand messaging, share relevant information, tell your story, entertain, make recommendations, build your authority — smart content can do all of this and more.
• Email Nurture: Use emails and subscription-based newsletters to develop relationships with current and potential buyers, ushering the further down the sales funnel.
• Analytics/Reporting: Arm yourself with real, usable data that can help you better understand your customers’ motivation, gain confidence in your marketing strategies and drive your decision-making process in a positive, increasingly beneficial direction.

Constructing a paid growth funnel is a complicated process. flux+flow honors user experience as well as your budgetary concerns with lean, experiment-driven strategies that encourage growth without sacrificing experience or squandering resources. Find out more when you schedule a free discovery session with our team.