Acquiring customers not the only objective of the marketing cycle: Harish Iyer

“Full funnel marketing looks at all aspects of marketing, it means content, media and also the kind of experience you create in the ecosystem, because that is how you move customers closer to your brands,” remarked Harish Iyer, Executive Vice President, Interactive Avenues, in a special fireside chat with Gurmit Singh, General Manger – India, Quora.

According to Iyer, it was about taking care of each these aspects so that brands are able to acquire customers in a much better cost efficient manner. All these aspects also play an important role in creating the kind of customers that brands want to have all across. “It you are only targeting the bottom funnel marketing, you are targeting limited value, the brand needs to stick to the consumer and language that the consumers speak. As far as we will be trying to work in this manner, across all categories and funnels creating 360 degree surround experience, so that it becomes easier for the brands to onboard or acquire consumer in the long journey, what is most important is to track the consumer journey, where you have lost the consumer, how are you planning to get them back, what time and on what platforms you are having the conversation,” Iyer further said.

He added, “I can talk about multiple categories, but recently we launched an apparel brand, what we realised while chasing for bottom funnel access, what we realised is a lot of things need to be fixed before we come live. The first thing that came in mind is do we have the whole experience being setup properly, because buying an apparel online doesn’t have a touch and feel aspect but it should come to customer as ‘this is the product that I want to buy’. The first task that we started up with was fixing the basics on the website itself.”

Continuing further, Iyer said, “Once we were able to fix the basics on the website, we looked for what the communication needs to be. What we realised is, when you are looking for audience, you are looking at different sets of audiences, that is, different age groups and different mind sets. What we realised was that while the existing brand consumers were shopping online from the website, irrespective of challenges they were coming across, we were able acquire to on board new customers and at the same time we were able to build larger funnel. We were collecting data to understand what the consumer is looking for and on the basis of that we were doing allot of market basket analysis.”

Here Singh asked, “If a person is a start-up in education space, what are your suggestions, should he go in for full funnel marketing, specific to education or should he go for only leads?”

Iyer responded by saying, “It depends upon the audience size that is available, to increase the pool you need to do allot of upper funnel marketing and increase the pool size. Full funnel marketing becomes imperative even if you are a start-up.”

In his final message to the audience, Iyer said, “There are multiple objectives that need to be fulfilled in a marketing cycle; acquiring customers should not only be the only objective.”