Boosting your conversion funnel through branding

Building an effective brand is about creating lasting relationships with people. This connection, as with all sentimental ties, evolves over time. The advantage is that branding can rely on a tool that clarifies the steps to achieve a love affair and a love that lasts over time: the conversion funnel.

Using the brand as a driving tool and authenticity as a flag, any organization can guide its potential customers on a journey that begins with being known and ends in recommendation and loyalty.

In a saturated market, where competition is fierce and brand activation options are abundant, branding is not just a guide; it's a strategic necessity to seize the present and connect with the future.

The brand platform's theoretical tools, which encapsulate its essence to clear doubts and reduce uncertainty, make it easy to define an action plan to fulfil the purpose and achieve business goals. And that action plan must consider all the stages of the funnel.

In the awareness phase, brand personas—a broader tool than user personas—hear about you for the first time. It is the most challenging, because control is minimal. After all, until now, there has been no opportunity to create a connection. At this point, visibility across multiple channels is key. Reach their eyes and launch a first message, but not at any price. Avoid FOMO and work the most relevant channels where there is a real opportunity for the relationship to grow and consolidate. Thanks to the brand pillars, we will be able to generate attractive content ideas.

The second step is consideration. At this stage, the public already knows you and is evaluating your proposal. Thus, it is important to clearly communicate your positioning and competitive advantage. If the content resonates with the values and needs of your audience, a full bond will develop that will differentiate you from the competition.

Then arrives the decision. After evaluating different options, the person opts for your value proposition, and clearly conveying the purpose can be a springboard to create the perfect match.

Although it may seem that you have already achieved this, you must maintain a consistent and positive brand experience at the moment of conversion, the fourth phase. If a person has decided to buy a product but the digital experience is not positive, all the previous work is brushed aside. We are talking about technical issues, such as the interface of your website, and also related to branding: you have to stay in the territory, that plot in which your brand is fully displayed.

Once a user has become a customer, the goal is to become an ambassador. At this point, the brand's personality and pillars play a crucial role in fostering loyalty and recommendations. The goal is to get them to identify and remember, in a simple way, the organization's innumerable benefits.

Going through the different stages is not something that happens spontaneously, of course. You need to design effective actions at each stage of the funnel, and understanding what brands think, feel and do is critical to this.

For example, in the awareness period, you might recognize that the information interests you and resonates with you: "This information interests me and speaks to me, but I've never seen this page before". You might also have doubts and question the company's reliability. So take action and investigate.

Considering these three variables at every stage and analyzing them through the brand's filter ensures congruent and effective actions. Strong steps.

The alternatives to activating a brand are almost endless: publishing content on Social Media, white papers, landing pages, launch campaigns, events organization... However, resources are limited, and although the brand acts as a first sieve, some tactics help plan the most interesting initiatives.

• Prioritize channels. Differentiate between priority channels (necessary to cover the entire funnel) and secondary channels, which can contribute but are not decisive). It is important to limit channels in the advanced stages of the funnel to avoid dispersion.
• Define the intent of the actions. Use Robert Cialdini's principles of persuasion (reciprocity, commitment, consistency, social approval, sympathy, authority and unity) as a basis for labeling actions, choosing only those that reflect your values.
• Importance vs. complexity. Assign a level of relevance and difficulty to each action to identify quick wins and those options that are and have a high impact.
• Zoom out/Zoom in. Maintain a yearly, quarterly and monthly vision with big goals and milestones without losing flexibility to make adjustments.
• Effort scoring. Calculate the resources you allocate to each action based on the workload and time required. This way, you can be realistic in planning and execution.

In the digital ecosystem, the most common tactic after deploying each action is measuring its performance to iterate and optimize. Here arises the big question, one that we have already reflected on: Is it possible to measure branding throughout the funnel?

The simple answer is that we cannot directly evaluate the direct return in euros that our work will have, but we can measure the impact through some relevant KPIs, such as the number of leads generated—how many new contacts have been obtained through the campaigns—or recommendations and mentions—how many times you are mentioned in social networks and other media, and in what context—,for example.

Approaching the funnel from the brand means giving a hand to the brand people at all points of contact. Making it easier for them to understand what is being offered and reducing doubts. It also shines in contexts where capturing attention is as difficult as it is necessary to consolidate and scale in an authentic and sustainable way. Enjoy, in short, a springboard to relevance and transcendence.