How Is Your Brand Showing Up In Your Marketing Funnel?

Don’t overlook the need for consumers to understand what your brand stands for.

When businesses reinforce branding at each level of the funnel, they create an emotional connection that leads to stronger and lasting brand devotion over time. (This is important for quite a few reasons. But first, funnels.)

Funnels offer a simple mental framework of a business or organization’s sales journey, and what the intended outcome is as the consumer travels further down the channel. Not only does it map out what success looks like and how to get there, it sets expectations and informs messaging at every level, while getting consumers to take notice of products and services, and ultimately lead to a sale.

We get that, and we know you get that too.

But this got us wondering—how can businesses apply their brand attributes at each level to leave a bigger impact on consumers, and more importantly, is this even something they’ve considered? The good news is, it’s never too late to start, and the more you do it, consumers will come to understand your brand better and feel a stronger connection to it.

This is something well-known national brands have done for years, and do quite well. Sure, they have great advertising campaigns with huge budgets, but their brand doesn’t solely exist in advertising. They continue to build momentum at every touchpoint, all the way down the funnel, reinforcing the brand, what it stands for and offering a benefit to the consumer that goes beyond the product itself. At that point, they’re not just selling a product, they’re building a belief, a way of thinking and an emotional offering people can latch on to.

So, if it wasn’t yet obvious, we think it’s important to consider reinforcing your funnel with branding, and for a number of reasons. To start, maintaining a consistent brand message, voice and promise on every level of the consumer journey creates recognition, recall and reach—all the things that equate to sales. It also gives you more chances to deliver your company values and character. This not only differentiates your products and services from competitors, it reinforces your brand’s values to consumers at every level of the marketing journey. Finally, and this is an important one, consumers don’t have to go to the next level of the funnel if they don’t want to. They have to be led. Get them believing in your brand, not just your product, and they’ll be with you all the way to the end.

Which leads us to the big, important questions:

Are you reinforcing your brand throughout the funnel? If so, are you maintaining consistency from one level to the next? Are your customers left with an impression that goes beyond your product or service so that they understand what the brand stands for at any level of the funnel? Lastly, what are you doing to wow your customers before and after the final transaction? This doesn’t just have to be offers and discounts—it could simply be how you show up in the world and what you have to say.