The modern marketing funnel: Full-funnel video can increase media effectiveness. Zanele Matlala, a YouTube lead for Africa, plans and optimizes end-to-end video solutions for African marketing teams. Eunice Worifah is a principal analytical lead at Google. She is based in New York City. Through data-driven marketing strategies and advanced measurement solutions, she partners with leading brands to unlock growth. She recently shared her insights around improving media effectiveness and measurement maturity with some of sub-Saharan Africa’s brands and marketing executives at an event in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The traditional marketing funnel is one-dimensional. Marketers strive to guide customers through the stages of awareness, consideration, and eventual purchase. However, the new set of consumer journey behaviors—streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping—that make video the core of any successful full-funnel marketing strategy cannot be adequately accounted for by this procedure. These video-centric behaviours are fundamentally changing how consumers shop and digest digital content. Video is so powerful that 76% of South Africans say YouTube helps them decide what to buy.1
In the era of media effectiveness, full-funnel video marketing is now more educated, strategic, and trainable. Despite this, there has historically been a lack of awareness regarding what makes a profitable full-funnel strategy, which is in part attributable to the rapid evolution of technology and consumer behavior. Here’s how top marketers implement media effectiveness and full-funnel video marketing into a blended strategy:
Why video is a marketer's full-funnel hero, CMOs: Seventy-eight percent of South Africans say YouTube is TV,2 showing how penetrable video is across media and marketing consumption. This knowledge is extremely useful for marketers. It presents brands with the opportunity to meet them where they are and develop platform-specific content instead of shooting in the dark with mass dissemination.
Makro, a grocery store in sub-Saharan Africa, took advantage of this opportunity by launching a full-funnel video campaign that utilized YouTube Shorts to increase consideration and Demand Gen to raise awareness. Makro improved across the funnel, including a 41% increase in video watch-time, 8% higher conversions, and a 20% increase in revenue value; meaning it brought in more profitable conversions.
Video marketing also presents CMOs and their teams with the ability to measure how ads and broader campaigns are contributing to their marketing objectives. The platform is built with performance in mind at every stage of the marketing funnel. In fact, YouTube extends reach by fueling 18% more search demand.3
This allows businesses to move consumers down the funnel towards conversions, without the fog that has previously dimmed marketing’s contribution to growth and profit.
Baking media effectiveness into your full-funnel video strategy
The effectiveness of your video marketing strategy is only as strong as your maturity in media effectiveness. Quantity, quality, and outcomes are the three pillars that make up effective brand measurement. Quantity: This is all about reach and efficiency. Is your message getting to a large enough number of people who might buy from you? This is about creating ads, such as in a Video Reach Campaign, that reach enough of the right people.
Quality: The quality of your message affects the performance of your campaign. Are you improving brand recall and brand awareness? Are consumers moving down the funnel? You can increase brand recall and consideration by remarketing to individuals who have already engaged with your content. Outcomes: Do your marketing efforts meet your business goals? To put it another way, is the conversion metric you've chosen, such as sales or leads, being met? Travelstart, a platform for booking flights and vacations in sub-Saharan Africa, set an example by linking their marketing goals to their business goals. Their marketing saw a 50 percent increase in revenue per booking as a result of refocusing on performance. Quantity benchmarks may include views, on-target reach, and frequency. Video completion rate, brand lift, and search lift are examples of quality benchmarks. Lastly, outcomes involve business drivers such as leads, cost-per acquisition (CPA), or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
Measurement tools to optimise your video marketing strategy
Measurement tools and features are included in each funnel step to help implement the three pillars. For the upper and mid-funnel stages: Awareness and consideration
Testing for incrementality: Search Lift studies tell you how many more people searched for your brand or product after seeing your ad. This is key to understanding the influence of an ad. It gives a static metric like reach, which only tells you how many people saw your ad and not how they acted after, three-dimensional value. Experimentation: Video experiments determine which version of an advertisement resonated with your intended audience the most. This takes the guesswork out of deciding which creative went furthest to achieve your marketing objective.
Remarketing lists: By tracking interactions from engaged users who have already watched your video ad, you can create remarketing lists to retarget them. By keeping your brand front and center, this maximizes the effectiveness of each ad and increases brand recall. Conversion is the lower-funnel stage. Data-driven attribution: When customers travel long distances to make a purchase, it is difficult to determine which advertisement contributed to the purchase. This makes your media effectiveness strategy less effective. Data-driven attribution looks at every interaction along a singular shopper’s journey to tell you which keyword, platform, interaction, or type of creative led to a sale. When combined with Google Analytics, data-driven attribution gains an advantage. Testing for incrementality: Conversion Lift studies are a type of incrementality testing that look at how many conversions, like online sales, came from your ad directly. This helps optimise budgets to campaigns that are leading to conversions over ones that aren’t. Consider using Conversion Lift when users are closer to your primary conversion action such as in the lower-consideration or conversion stages through Demand Gen and Performance Max campaigns.
Conversion Tracking Tags: This is a tracking tool that helps capture the revenue value of each conversion — not just the fact that it happened. It also helps with cross-channel attribution. For example, if a person saw your video ad on YouTube but converted through a Search ad, Floodlight captures this information. This allows you to measure which ad led to meeting your business goals.
Mastering full-funnel video starts with testing and learning
It’s clear that media effectiveness does not have to be a murky concept shrouded in confusion. And the key to this success is a culture of testing: advertisers who experiment at least 15 times a year saw a 30% increase in performance that year, followed by a 45% increase the next.4 Start your full-funnel video journey by mixing and matching creatives with different audiences in a cyclical fashion to foster improved marketing and measurement maturity.