Looking ahead to 2023, we have to ask ourselves if the concept of funnels is applicable in the digital age. While this is a simple analogy or system for classifying or organizing the traditional buying process, we see that buyers do not exist linearly, but rather in a "cloud". People start to interact and engage, but essentially the momentum builds up until they are ready to make a purchase.
Consumers are increasingly doing their own research on their own terms; A brand (and perhaps its competitors) presents itself on multiple platforms or channels of its choice, which is why the traditional conceptual stages of a marketing funnel are oversimplified in today's world. At the same time, this process is likely to affect retail. An industry where many brands traditionally have short decision cycles.
sales funnel problem
Increasingly, there is no single size. Terms like "sales funnel" are meant to simply explain a complex process, or to confuse an audience, depending on their level of cynicism. In today's environment, it is important to earn the right to communicate with our audience.
The sales funnel idea has gone too far. It is widely considered the first formal theory of marketing and as a concept predates the invention of television, cinema, the Internet, and mobile phones, which expanded the range of choices available to marketers and consumers on the Internet. . . .
And while most versions of the funnel are built around three main stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion, people's decisions over and over again show that they are mostly emotional, even irrational, and often unreasonable. ; necessary throughout the entire buying process, not just at the beginning. The so-called "top" of the funnel.
Use important text data without cookies in the future
In addition, in truth, many advertisements are ignored and the path to purchase is rarely predictable, especially in the rapidly changing e-commerce market. With that in mind, and as consumers are bombarded with brand messages, exposure and engagement are key. To complicate matters further, marketers may soon lose access to third-party audience cookie data. This is not a bad thing, as many have begun to rely more on first-hand data to build an audience for better marketing performance.
New technologies can be used to streamline the marketing process, reduce manual and labor-intensive tasks, and streamline and inform all stages of the so-called journey.
For example, it can help take advantage of the vast amounts of unstructured text data that retailers use, from call decoding to open surveys, surveys and social data. Accessing and using this really important data can help compare a business to its competitors and gain insights that can lead to more targeted and resonant messaging.
The new cookie-free reality is driving innovation in the use of first-hand data, for example, customer success teams have a lot of valuable information at their fingertips, but they don't always use it. In fact, most companies have large amounts of textual data that they don't use, in part because it's harder to organize and analyze than quantitative data.
However, "why?" this data This question has the potential to answer the most important business intelligence question. Therefore, we hope that with the disappearance of third-party cookies, retailers will begin to recognize the possibilities of mining unstructured text data and move beyond basic word cloud analysis.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence and machine learning mean that companies can analyze and digitize any textual data they need to capture information and value quickly and at scale. Part of the inner strength and potential of all of this lies in the ability to compare and focus on differences in how people talk about competing brands, for example.
Until now, most companies have done little or nothing with text data, or the most common solutions have only used text analytics as a core feature. If the death of third party cookies changes this, it's not so bad. After all, necessity is the mother of innovation, as many retailers and e-commerce companies have realized during the pandemic.
James Cuthbertson - Chief Revenue Officer Relative Insight is a text analytics innovator used by companies such as Sky, Nespresso and Formula 1 to understand the "why" of consumer behavior by extracting the full value from text data.
