How Consumer Intent Is Changing Your Marketing Funnel

Forget everything you know about the marketing funnel. Today, people are no longer following a linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase. They are narrowing and broadening their consideration set in unique and unpredictable moments. 

People turn to their devices to get immediate answers. And every time they do, they are expressing intent and reshaping the traditional marketing funnel along the way.

How Consumers Research Brands

For some people, research is paramount — and their journey widens and narrows as they not only consider multiple brands but entire categories.

Sometimes a person lands on one or a few brands quickly, and the key is to see which one holds up to obsessive rounds of research.

The one brand that is able to stay on the consumer's radar throughout search, ultimately this brand wins the sale.

Consumers Verify The Small Details

For today’s search-savvy consumers, even a more linear path to purchase involves a lot of touchpoints.

Although this may seem like your typical consumer journey, moving from awareness to consideration to purchase, consumers do a lot of research along the way.

How To Win In Today's Consumer-Search World

One: Align Your Marketing

Be there. People now expect to be assisted everywhere. And that means it’s critical that you’re measuring and understanding the impact of your media touchpoints on the consumer journey. Look past impressions, clicks, and online conversions and connect your media to revenue, gross margin, and profits. 

Help your marketing team understand the intent, interactions, and signals that are driving long-term growth.

Two: Rise Above Being Average

Be useful. People respond to brands that understand their needs. So, it’s important to optimize your content for both relevance to the consumer and lifetime value for the brand. Some customers spend more — a lot more — and many customers spend less. 

Understanding that can mean the difference between paying to acquire profitable customers and paying to acquire the customers your competition didn’t want.

Three: Leverage Automation

Be quick. To succeed, brands must deliver experiences that are fast and frictionless. It’s time to invest in mobile experiences as well as a machine learning and automation strategy. Machine learning can help you understand and predict intent in ways that simply aren’t possible manually. 

It can also help you find missed or unexpected connections between business goals and the habits of your key customer segments.