What is Full Funnel Marketing? Insights, Data and Tips
The concept of full funnel marketing “FFM”, has begun to earn a lot of attention lately. Full funnel marketing strategy is being discussed more frequently amongst brands and agencies.
For years, studies have shown us that up to 96% of the customers that land on a website aren’t ready to make a purchase. Yet despite this, companies don’t always invest enough effort into proactively persuading their customers to buy products and services.
They might invest in social media strategies to increase brand awareness, run campaigns capture contact information, and use targeted paid ads to increase conversions. However, they often fail to connect the dots between all of these strategies in a full funnel strategy.
Now that consumer journeys are becoming even more complex, and old-fashioned marketing strategies are growing less effective, a holistic approach is becoming increasingly crucial.
Here’s your guide to full funnel marketing and why your business needs a full funnel approach.
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What is Full Funnel Marketing?
Full funnel marketing is a promotional strategy that considers and aligns every stage of the customer journey. It’s based around the concept of the “marketing funnel”, which represents the various phases customers move through when making a purchase. These stages include:
- Top of the Funnel (Awareness): When your company is focused on boosting the visibility of your brand, and attracting the attention of relevant consumers.
- Middle of the funnel (Consideration): This is where customers begin learning more about your products, services, and brand, and consider becoming a customer.
- Bottom of the funnel (Conversion): Here, customers are persuaded to convert and (usually) purchase something from your company.
- Post funnel (Retention/Advocacy): At this stage, brands focus on keeping customers happy to encourage repeat purchases, and inspire word-of-mouth promotion.
The idea behind full-funnel marketing is ensuring you consider shoppers at all levels of their interactions with your company. Used correctly, this strategy not only helps to increase conversion rates, but it can also reduce customer acquisition costs, and improve brand loyalty.
How Full Funnel Marketing Works
Although the concept of full funnel marketing isn’t entirely new, many companies are still confused about how it works, and how they can build their own full funnel strategies. To help you understand how the various stages of a full funnel marketing strategy work together, here’s a quick rundown.
Top of the Funnel: Attracting Customers
The top of the funnel is one of the most important points to focus on if you want to ensure long-term success. Although increasing brand awareness might not seem to have a direct impact on your bottom line, it’s crucial to earning leads, and trust. In fact, Fospha found that companies who regularly invest in brand awareness achieve a 42% higher return on ad spend.
At the top of the funnel, the focus isn’t on “selling” products. Instead, companies focus on showing customers they understand their goals and pain points, and begin building thought leadership. They may use various strategies to do this, such as search engine optimization and content marketing, social media marketing, native advertising, and influencer marketing.
The key to success is a targeted approach to capturing attention from the right customers. For instance, when we built a top of the funnel paid social campaign for the Lick company, we used extensive customer research to identify the ideal target audience for our client.
Throughout your top of funnel campaigns, you’ll be focusing on metrics like impressions, website traffic, and click through rates, as well as SEO rankings. This will help you understand what’s working to drive potential customers to your company.
Middle of the Funnel: Nurturing Customers
When leads reach the middle of the funnel, they should be familiar with your brand, and they’re actively considering the options they have to achieve their goals, or address pain points. Here, your focus needs to be on guiding your audience towards choosing your company.
Since customers aren’t ready to convert yet, you won’t bombard them with offers and deals at this stage in your full funnel marketing strategy. Instead, you focus on educating your buyers, and earning their trust. For instance, you might use eBooks and how-to guides to position your business as an authority in your niche.
You could educate potential customers with webinars and compelling, informative email campaigns. Or you might consider creating videos that showcase the functionality and benefits of your solutions, and compare them to available alternatives.
Even if your customers aren’t ready to buy straight away, your campaigns should be encouraging some form of action. This could mean asking customers to sign up for a newsletter, download a guide, or simply check out your website. Remember, personalized calls to actions convert 202% more leads, so make sure your CTAs are relevant to each customer segment.
In the middle of the funnel, you’ll be focusing on new metrics, such as how much it costs to acquire a lead (cost per lead), the quality of the leads you collect, and engagement rates (such as how many customers open your emails).
Bottom of the Funnel: Increasing Conversions
If you’ve invested enough time and effort into top and middle-of-the-funnel marketing campaigns, by the time your leads enter the bottom of the funnel, they’ll be just about ready to make a purchase. All you need to do is convince them to take that final step.
This is when you can go all-in with highly personalized email marketing offers, social media paid ads, paid campaigns on Google, and retargeting strategies. You might even share special deals with customers that arrive on your website after clicking on a specific link.
Alternatively, you can experiment with psychological strategies to increase full funnel marketing conversions. For instance, using stock counters or limited-time deals can increase urgency among consumers.
The bottom of the funnel is often where the most experimentation takes place from a marketing perspective. You’ll need to explore various conversion rate optimization techniques, and constantly adapt your strategy to changing customer preferences and audiences.
Again, the metrics you’ll monitor at the bottom of the funnel vary too. Here’s when you start focusing on conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition costs. These metrics will give you insights into which final touchpoints in the customer journey are really boosting sales and growth.
Post Funnel: Retaining your Audience and Increasing Advocacy
A full funnel marketing strategy shouldn’t end when you eventually convert a customer. Every company should already know it’s cheaper and easier to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Putting the right amount of effort into your retention strategies, and building relationships with customers will maximize your revenue.
Those relationships won’t just boost customer lifetime values either – they’ll also help encourage your existing customers to promote your businesses through referrals.
After you acquire a customer, you can begin strengthening relationships with personalized offers, incentives, or loyalty programs to make them feel special and appreciated. You could design full referral programs to incentivize word of mouth marketing, or ask customers to become affiliates.
You should also be gathering more direct data from customers at this stage. Your existing customers are treasure troves of valuable insights. Use their feedback to learn more about the products they want to see, their goals, and their pain points. This is particularly crucial now that third-party data on customers is less accessible, following the phase-out of cookies.
Monitor retention rates, customer satisfaction scores, and net promoter scores for clear views into how effective your company is at convincing buyers to stick around.
3 Essential Elements of Full Funnel Marketing
As you can see above, there are plenty of different methods you can use throughout each stage of a full funnel marketing campaign. Often, we recommend a combination of different tactics encompassing social media, paid advertising, and organic content, based on each client we serve.
However, while the elements of your full funnel strategy might vary, there are three crucial things every company needs to make full funnel marketing work:
- Customer insights: You’ll collect more data about your customers throughout your marketing journey. However, to begin with, you need at least a basic understanding of which touchpoints your customers use to interact with your brand, their pain points, goals, and expectations. The more data you can collect, the more you can personalize your marketing campaigns, and make the most of your marketing budget.
- The right measurement strategy: Full funnel marketing requires a new approach to measuring and testing. You’ll need to focus on a range of different metrics and KPIs throughout the marketing journey- going beyond just conversion rates. We also recommend a strong focus on incremental testing, for more granular insights into how different aspects of your strategy are driving your company towards its goals.
- A commitment to experimentation: Optimizing a full funnel strategy takes work. That’s why we have our own data matrixes, tools, and approaches to comprehensive A/B testing to ensure we’re constantly improving ROI for our clients. You need to be willing to experiment, and patient enough to give your strategy time to pay dividends.
Why is Full Funnel Marketing Important? Why Now?
At this point, you’re probably wondering why full funnel marketing is so crucial in the first place. Clearly, it takes a lot more time, effort, and potential investment than the average marketing plan.
The reality is that full funnel marketing is crucial to ensuring you can compete in today’s world. Consumer behaviors have changed on a massive scale, particularly since the pandemic. People move seamlessly between various offline and online channels to connect with companies and find what they need. The path to purchase is complex, and multi-faceted.
Shoppers can enter the “marketing funnel” at any stage, which means if you’re focusing all of your attention on just one area, you’re not going to get the right results. Focusing all of your attention on the top of the funnel will help boost brand awareness, but your conversion rates won’t always grow.
Concentrating exclusively on the bottom of the funnel might increase conversions for customers already aware of your brand, but you’ll struggle to attract new leads.
A full funnel marketing strategy is a good way to ensure you’re engaging customers equally, wherever they are in the purchasing journey. It ensures customers will be familiar with your brand, more likely to convert, and even more inclined to support your growth with referrals.
Additionally, full funnel marketing campaigns address numerous complex marketing issues in today’s landscape. They allow you to gather and build on data about customers and their journeys without relying on third-party cookies. Plus, they can help you make the most of your marketing budget at a time when customer acquisition costs are rising.
Google found that full funnel strategies can deliver up to 45% higher returns on investment for advertising and marketing campaigns.
The Top Benefits of Full Funnel Marketing
As experts in performance marketing, brand building, and digital advertising, we recommend full funnel approaches to our clients at the Graygency. Our case studies show just how well this approach pays off for our clients.
Full funnel strategies help prepare companies to appeal to customers exploring a wide range of buyer journeys. Plus, you don’t necessarily need an elaborate full funnel strategy to see amazing results. Simply combining display ads with the right social media campaigns can make a huge difference.
Overall, the main benefits of a full funnel strategy include:
- Increased audience reach: Continued focus on building brand awareness and engaging new, relevant audiences helps to drive consistent traffic to your website. At the same time, post-funnel techniques helps to activate your existing customers and turn them into advocates for your company, opening the door to new acquisition routes.
- Greater consideration: Today’s budget-conscious customers often need a lot of convincing to actually purchase a product. You need to educate and inform them through a range of different strategies to earn their trust, and push them towards a conversion. A full funnel marketing strategy helps you occupy a larger space in your customer’s mind.
- Boosted sales: Again, customers need more than just a quick nudge to consider buying your products. A full funnel marketing strategy helps you proactively engage and nurture new customers, gently pushing them towards conversions. The right strategy can even help to increase average order values, and boost repeat purchases.
- Greater loyalty: As mentioned above, your loyal customers are some of your most valuable assets. With a full funnel strategy that focuses on building relationships between buyers and your brands, you’re more likely to retain crucial customers and boost customer lifetime values. Plus, you’ll be able to turn those customers into advocates for your company.
How to Get Started with Full Funnel Marketing
Full funnel marketing is powerful, but it can be difficult to implement, particularly for newer brands. In some cases, you won’t necessarily want to divide all of your resources between each stage of the funnel evenly. If you’re in the early stages of growing your brand, investing more time and effort into top of the funnel marketing strategies and thought leadership might be more beneficial.
If you’re an established brand facing a lot of competition, you might need to increase focus on both top of the funnel and middle-of-the-funnel strategies. Beyond that, you’ll also need to think about which channels you’re going to use to reach audiences, how you’re going to measure success, and which methods you’ll be experimenting with.
The easiest way to boost your chances of success, is to work with a full funnel marketing agency that can guide you through the process. The Graygency has years of experience developing bespoke, comprehensive, and data-driven full funnel marketing methods for clients from numerous industries.
We can help you understand the stages of the funnel that matter most to your goals, and give you the insights you need to allocate your marketing budget effectively.
Reach out to The Graygency today to learn more about our approach to full funnel marketing, and how we can help you develop the ultimate strategy.
FAQs
What is a full-funnel campaign structure?
A full-funnel marketing strategy involves creating a comprehensive marketing plan that encompasses every stage of the customer purchasing journey. Rather than focusing on conversions or sales, you look at the entire relationship you have with your customer, from the point they become aware of a need or goal, to the stage after they make a purchase.
What is a funnel in marketing?
The funnel concept in marketing encompasses the various stages that customers move through as they engage with a company and make purchasing decisions. It starts with “awareness” at the top of the funnel, followed by consideration at the middle of the funnel, conversion at the bottom of the funnel, and loyalty in the “post-funnel” stage.
What is full funnel optimization?
Full funnel optimization is the process of examining each step of the marketing funnel in a data-driven, incremental way, to understand their impact on your marketing goals. It focuses on identifying key points in the marketing funnel that need to be enhanced to increase your return on investment and improve your marketing ROI.
Want to learn more about full funnel paid media ? Try these articles below:
Full Funnel Paid Media: Everything you Need to Know
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Full Funnel Paid Media: How Long Does It Take To Work ?
