Marketing has come a long way over the years, and with the rise of digital channels and advanced analytics, marketers have access to more data than ever before. However, with all this data comes the need for a comprehensive strategy that can guide marketers through the entire customer journey – which is where a full-funnel marketing strategy comes into play.
A full-funnel marketing strategy is a holistic approach to marketing that takes into account the entire customer journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond. The funnel is divided into three stages: top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
Understanding Marketing Funnel Stages
TOFU: The Awareness Stage
The awareness stage is where you introduce your brand to potential customers and start to generate familiarity and interest in your product or service. At this stage, you should focus on creating content that is informative, educational, and engaging. This could include blog posts, social media posts, infographics, videos, and more. Video ads are a great format for cultivating awareness with your target audience as they help to showcase your brand’s personality, making it easier for customers to connect with your brand.
MOFU: The Consideration Stage
The consideration stage is where you nurture leads and move them closer to making a purchase. This is where you provide more targeted content that speaks to the needs and pain points of your potential customers. This could include whitepapers, case studies, webinars, and more. Having a comprehensive content strategy in place before you kick off your campaigns is critical, but we’ll touch on that more below.
BOFU: The Conversion (or Decision) Stage
The conversion stage is where you convert leads into customers. This is where you provide content that is highly targeted and focuses on the benefits of your product or service – think product demos, free trials, testimonials, and more. Retargeting campaigns are frequently used at this stage of the funnel, to make sure you’re targeting an audience that has an appropriate level of knowledge about your brand or service already. Remember, it can take between 7-13 touchpoints with your brand before a user is ready to convert to becoming a customer! A robust full-funnel marketing strategy should bear this in mind and take the appropriate time to cultivate awareness with users before making the big asks. Which takes time, and patience.
Steps for Building a Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy
- Understand the Customer Journey
When building a full-funnel marketing strategy, you must have a deep understanding of the customer journey. This means understanding the needs and pain points of your potential customers and creating content that speaks directly to them. Persona work comes in handy here, if this is something you haven’t already put together for your business.
- Create a Content Strategy
A content strategy is the foundation of a full-funnel marketing strategy, and cannot be underestimated. It should be based on the needs and pain points of your potential customers and should be designed to move them through the funnel. This means creating content that is informative, educational, and engaging at the top of the funnel (think blogs and infographics) more targeted at the middle of the funnel (whitepapers and webinars) and highly targeted at the bottom of the funnel (case studies, solutions briefs, etc).
- Leverage Data and Analytics
Data and analytics are critical to a full-funnel marketing strategy. They allow you to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions. This means using tools like Google Analytics, marketing automation platforms, and CRM systems to track your marketing efforts and optimize your strategy based on the data.
- Collaborate with Other Departments
Marketing is not an isolated function within an organization! To build a successful full-funnel marketing strategy, you must collaborate with other departments such as sales, customer success, and product development. This means working together to create a seamless customer experience and ensuring that all departments are aligned on the customer journey. This can be a tricky nut to crack. In our experience, regular sales and marketing ops alignment meetings provide invaluable. - Be patient!
Building a full-funnel marketing strategy requires a deep understanding of the customer journey, a comprehensive content strategy, data and analytics, and collaboration with other departments. By thoughtfully tackling each of these, you can create a successful full-funnel marketing strategy that drives results for your organization.
…or, you can let us do it for you 👇
PPC Specialists 