Part One: The 4A Funnel for Marketing Online

Metro Atlanta has more than its fair share of highway traffic. My personal commute to the office is currently 65 miles one way; some days I spend two hours in the car going and coming, and other days its five, all of which depends on how bad I-285 is going around the city.

My windshield time is spent mixed between Sports Talk radio and phone calls. The one glaring fact from all of the hours I have spent on the Perimeter is how little recollection I have of any billboards on that stretch of road.

For Atlanta locals like me, we’ve all seen the 411-HELP or Superior Plumbing billboards due to saturation more than anything else; even so, I cannot remember one specific interchange where I have seen any one specific billboard.

Online Marketing is Stronger than Billboard Marketing

Businesses of all shapes and sizes are still leveraging billboard marketing with substantial budgets and soft calls-to-action. How many of the people passing by these billboards are having the same friction that I am? I am aware that these businesses exist but I am not drawn to take any other action.

Online marketing empowers businesses to raise the awareness about their products or services while targeting exactly which travelers will see the content and then enables them to take action with a simple click of a mouse. No scrambling to write down a phone number or an exit number is involved; besides, how many drivers are texting or talking when passing billboards anyways?

1A of the 4A Funnel for Marketing Online is Awareness

By using online marketing to raise awareness for your business, you immediately create a trackable relationship with a lead. Whether they came through I-Eighty-Facebook or I-Sixty-Google, online marketing informs you of the why behind their interest (i.e. they were a social lead or a search lead) and provides the structured information you need to properly follow up.

Once the relationship has been initiated, improving your audience IQ will educate you on what follow up actions you could potentially take specific to where the relationships came from and the demographic or socio-graphic information you now have on the lead.

Some examples of follow ups are:

• Retargeting via the Google Display network
• Re-marketing using a platform like InfusionSoft if the click resulted in an email capture
• Directly replying to a Facebook message or comment with a blog article to provide more information

Awareness is The Top of the Funnel in Online Marketing

Regardless of the type of the follow up option you choose, the important concept to keep in mind is the active pursuit of moving the lead from Awareness and into Attraction–the second level of the 4A funnel.

Making your marketing sticky will help to naturally move leads from one level of the funnel to the next. Don’t get alarmed though if your the gap between the number of leads in the Awareness tier is quite larger than the ones that move through Attraction.

The largest percentage of your leads are going to come through the top of the funnel so you will have your smallest close rate here.

The next article in this series will continue to expand on the Attraction tier of the 4A Funnel; until then, start modeling what online freeways you need to be positioning your digital billboards on and act.