It's almost embarrassing how easy and obvious some of these points are. However, as someone who started with zero experience in advertising and learned by spending my own money, these ideas weren't always apparent. Now, with the benefit of experience, I can recognize the obvious path and hope to help others navigate where to spend their own money.
"The Bottom-Up Funnel" is a marketing strategy that challenges the traditional top-down approach of most sales funnels. It aims to help clients make the most of their advertising budget by utilizing the strengths of each platform.
In a traditional sales funnel, the process starts broad at the top and tapers down as customers move through the stages of awareness, consideration, evaluation, and purchase. However, in advertising this approach can be costly and time-consuming, as it takes both to move users through the funnel.
The Bottom-Up Funnel suggests that you start at the bottom of the funnel (the lowest hanging fruit), where the money is made, and work their way up as you gain insights and learn valuable lessons about your audience.
In this article, I have ranked the path that makes sense for most businesses. We will work our way up the funnel, starting from the bottom and slowly getting in front of users one step earlier with each time.
Let's dive into the five steps of the Bottom-Up Funnel and explore how each step can help you optimize your advertising budget and drive growth for your business.
Retargeting - Meta Ads
For every business, there is a percentage of the audience that will come to the website, search around, and not buy anything. Retargeting is a way of getting back in front of those users to convince them that your product or service is the right fit for them.
You can technically accomplish this on most ad platforms but Meta Ads is the easiest to recommend as their audience is large, their CPMs are reasonable, and you have the ability to use image & video assets to your advantage.Google Ads - Branded
It continues to blow my mind that companies allow competitors to bid on their brand name. It took years to build your business and even more to acquire the market share you have. Don’t let competitors steal your traffic over $2 clicks (or even less).
Your customers are looking for you. Make it easy for them to find you, it’s part of their user experience.
Bonus #1: You can control the messaging in these ads. Update these with seasonal promotions, new features, benefits, and control where the user lands.
Bonus #2: This teaches Google your top conversion path. Allowing it to identify your core audience sooner. Which, in turn, makes moving to the next step easier and more effective.Google Ads - High Intent Campaign
Okay, this is where the real growth starts to happen. Google Ads has the highest indicator of commercial intent as it’s keyword-driven. A user has to physically go to Google, type something into the box, and search for something they are interested in learning more about.
This is the perfect place to throw out your metal detector and see what you can find. You’ll quickly get data back, learn about competitors, and adapt your business to optimize it for your audience. Extrapolate that over a few months or years and you’ll be lightyears ahead of where you were at.Interest Targeting - Meta Ads
After you’re rocking and rolling on your Google Ads campaigns you’ll notice that eventually you’ll hit a glass ceiling. There are only so many people searching each month for your product or service and eventually, you are going to run into a wall, or competitors with bigger budgets will come into play. That’s when I recommend expanding into interest-based advertising on Meta. This option works differently as it goes after users you define by demographics.
Here you can create a full marketing funnel. Drive new users to the site, retarget them, and scale.Interest Targeting - YouTube Ads // Performance Max
At this point your advertising spend is a considerable amount — I've seen businesses do $1M/mo on just the above steps.
YouTube comes second to Meta, as it usually requires a larger budget to see performance. However, like Meta, you can target your ideal demographics or let Google work its magic with Performance Max.Note: We are in the early stages of PMax at the time of this article and performance and attribution have been all over the place. This is still a good option to test but test cautiously.
Of course, you can continue to expand up the funnel. Options such as connected TVs, billboards, local commercials, and more come to mind. However, my experience with these more general advertising networks is limited and tracking becomes increasingly more difficult. Personally, I feel like most businesses can operate in this bottom half of the funnel and be completely viable.