The forgotten power of the marketing mid-funnel

Was your path to purchase direct from browsing, to cart, to buying? Probably not. Real-world buying is far from the idealized linear journey prioritized in the marketing war-room. In fact, something much more dynamic takes place: we ponder, plan, and pause. We seek advice, weigh our options, hesitate, and then circle back, driven by a mixture of logic, whimsy, and fear of missing out. 

Yet, as marketers, we often frame generating demand as a simple resource trade-off between brand and performance marketing. Between building upper funnel familiarity versus converting lower funnel sales. This misses the “messy middle,” where people spend most of their time listening and researching, not ready to purchase but wanting to better understand their choices. 

That’s the mid-funnel. While it lacks the glamour of campaigns or the hard cash of sales, it’s a critical enabler of engagement on the path to purchase. 

Mid-funnel is a mix of owned content, third-party authoritative sources, and general social chatter. Even much of the owned content is outside a marketer’s direct control. The result is a complex ecosystem that’s challenging to map, let alone manage. 

But, while there isn’t a map to follow, there is a philosophy that can help you win.  At the heart of this idea is engagement; and every brand that captures hearts, minds and wallets knows how to use it. 

There are many ways for your brand to create the engagement it needs. Sales conferences. The check-out aisle. Reddit. The list is endless. But where is the one often overlooked place for big engagement moves? Search. 

In today’s competitive marketing environment it’s essential for a brand to be present in search, either directly or through other content providers. While marketers can invest in SEM to sponsor a place on the ranking, that’s expensive and increasingly sophisticated readers recognize the pay to play versus the relevance that comes from organic authority.

So, how do you nail organic rankings? 

The mindset for the marketer needs to shift. This isn’t campaign development and media buying, it’s brand building through experience. It means marketers need to think like game designers AND storytellers, experience strategists and communicators, innovators and marketers to claw their way to the top of search results.  It means delivering, as we like to say, “Connection & Progress” when it matters most—when customers come calling (searching) for you and the topics that represent your brand.

To be competitive on those topics takes great content expressed through an engaging user experience. These handy five ‘C’s will help build organic ranking on your chosen topics:

Start with your own digital properties. You need thought-leading content that addresses unbranded search terms related to your topic. That content needs to engage the reader, hold their attention and preferably leads them onto a next click, demonstrating to Google that you’re addressing their search request. Yet, for many brands, their website is primarily a sales tool, prioritizing product descriptions and ecommerce. Generating topic authority will rarely be considered across the breadth of content that a company creates for external consumption. Where an SEO expert exists, they are likely focused tactically on functional website mechanics and ensuring that popular search terms are embedded. That’s necessary, but not sufficient to win higher order topic authority. That takes development of thought leadership content and a need to encourage and coach content creators from across the organization beyond the immediate control of marketing.

People don’t just want to hear from the “authority,” they want to hear from people like themselves. While encouraging conversation within your own digital ecosystem is a step, most conversation will happen through social channels like Reddit. Your role as a marketer is to encourage conversation in the topic areas that you’re building authority. You can’t swim against the tide, so your products and services need to perform. If they don’t, you’ll get insight on what needs addressing. Assuming they do, the next step is to give your customers stories to share. It’s in our DNA to converse, and the easier we make it, the more conversations there will be. Get involved but do so in an authentic way. People love to be heard, and they love to learn new things. While many social managers seek to correct misinformation or address complaints, there’s also the opportunity to inform and inspire. We saw this directly with a client whose customer base was primarily 50 year-old white men. What we found was an untapped audience of younger, more diverse prospects. While they valued the brand, they felt it wasn’t for them because, while they valued hearing from the brand, they wanted that authority validated by people like themselves.  By introducing that conversation within the direct digital experience and through encouragement in external social channels, they broadened their appeal.

Google is looking for ecosystems of authority, and content benefits from linking to other authoritative sources and generating traffic that moves between those sources. That can be through strategic partnerships, but more likely it’s the natural curiosity of your teams and that of like-minded experts at other companies referencing each other’s thinking and providing pathways for people to explore. A great analogy is the scientific method, where each published paper references the previous papers that have informed this latest development. The most ‘trusted’ papers are those that are referenced more often. Seek out other authorities (as defined by Google) and find opportunities to connect either one-sided or more beneficially through collaboration. Another source of collaboration is the production of content for media. Just as we seek topic authority with Google, on a smaller scale we benefit from building that same authority with relevant media and influencers. That’s primarily built from personal relationships and being intentional and consistent in the content for which you want to be go-to. 

We’re tribal by nature and customers rarely buy based purely on functional performance. They bring their values and prefer brands that share those values. Consider John Deere and their passion for the land and those that farm the land; the brand is authentically connected to the culture of its customers, giving it a competitive advantage. The strongest brands immerse themselves in their customers’ worlds and become authentic participants that recognize the trials, tribulations and opportunities. While this builds your organic footprint, it also enables active listening and a faster response to changing customer needs.  

Think like a media company. Your content needs to stay fresh and adapt to a continually changing market if it is to remain relevant. This doesn’t mean you need to hire an expensive editorial staff, but it does mean encouraging the broader organization to engage and having the courage to deal with the inevitable mistakes that will result. Being overly controlling or rules-based risks narrowing who will contribute and losing the signal for the noise in a crowded and vocal marketplace. 

The traditional model isn’t well designed to deliver on the five ‘C’s. While companies have people for SEO, social media, influencer and content marketing, these roles are likely siloed and delivering tactics, not strategy. Think about search as a strategic topic that should be addressed during your annual planning. In the many cases where company digital assets are outside marketing’s direct control, make the case and develop creative tools that align and make it easy for how others in the organization can create thought leadership content in support of your chosen topic areas. 

To get started:

• Which topics are the ones to win for organic search?

• Am I clear on how each of the five ‘C’s are being applied and working together to win those topics?

• Is my Marketing Operating model optimized to support the five ‘C’s?

Building authority requires patient investment, but the reward once delivered through organic search will amplify your other marketing investments and win the competition for engagement during that messy middle on the path to purchase. While this takes time, the patient marketer will benefit from a strong competitive advantage that will be challenging for others to replicate and will only increase in efficacy over time.