Reaching Patrons with a Full-Funnel Approach

February 6, 2017 mogoarts

We last looked at Taking a Patron-centric Approach to digital marketing where we discussed how we typically see the highest average ticket revenue coming from a small subset of loyal patrons. It’s important to focus your media spend on engaging and retaining your most profitable patrons while reaching potential new audiences with the most desired profile.

The Full-Funnel Approach

Your digital advertising is likely only one element of your overall arts marketing strategy;and yet your patrons are interacting with your brand online all the time, at every stage of the buying cycle. That means whether your patron is a subscriber or member or a first-time website visitor who won’t buy a ticket for another three months, you can “touch” your patrons and potential patrons with your branded digital marketing.

The “full-funnel” approach, which refers to nurturing both existing patrons and prospective patrons through a conversion process, normally begins with the first touch or exposure to your digital marketing. It then continues  with varying touch-points, and closes with a conversion. However, in most instances, the conversion is not in fact the “end” of the funnel, because you want that patron to come back and transact again.

This is where advanced digital marketing can be not only helpful, but necessary. Without the visibility into which touchpoints are influencing which parts of your patrons’ buying journeys, you cannot optimize that experience for future improvement. What happens at the beginning, the middle, and the “end” of your patrons’ interactions with your digital marketing? And more importantly – what is happening on the individual patron level?

Reporting Attribution and Assists in the Full Funnel

According to Neustar & Econsultancy, “30-40% of media budgets are wasted by duplication and incorrect attribution associated with counting a single purchase across channels as multiple purchases.”  As opposed to using non-unifying or self-serve platforms, advanced digital marketers will use more sophisticated ad-serving platforms such as Doubleclick by Google,that can unify patron-level information, helping them understand 1) assists to purchase and 2) attribution. These two factors are critical to understanding a healthy funnel, as well as how your patron “funnel” even works.

Attribution

What is attribution and why should you care? Although it sounds complex, attribution is merely the process of assigning some sort of value to an interaction with your digital marketing. This can be a click on a social ad, a ticket purchase from a display ad, or even something else.

When this number is disparate from a patron-level interaction, it can get confusing. This is commonly the type of data you’ll see in basic technologies like Facebook’s ad platform or using your Google AdWords account. Seeing that your Facebook ad received 300 clicks or was responsible for 20% of your conversions is nice, but it doesn’t give you the full picture. You don’t know at what point in your patron’s buying cycle they are converting on Facebook or clicking on your AdWords ad, or which one was really responsible for the conversion. You don’t know when in the buying cycle your patrons were touched by all of your other digital marketing efforts. You see a conversion, but you don’t know which channel was truly responsible for it.

Assists to Purchase

In digital marketing an “assist” is some sort of interaction your patrons have with your digital marketing before they complete their final conversion or goal.

Advanced digital marketers will want to factor assists in the “full funnel” approach and consider the following: “Which channels are touching my patrons at which point in their paths to purchase? Which channels are frequently “starting the conversation” as opposed to resulting in a direct conversion or purchase? Which channels are touching my patrons least frequently? Which channels are touching my patrons a lot but seem to have no real value when it comes to generating conversions?”

The full-funnel approach to digital  marketing really breaks down the “walls” of metrics between disparate self-serve platforms and unifies them in a patron-level “journey” across the web on desktop and on mobile devices. From there, things like attribution and assists can be investigated, analyzed, and can help you make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy.