How to Take a Full-Funnel Approach When it Comes to Marketing

How to Take a Full-Funnel Approach When it Comes to Marketing

How to Take a Full-Funnel Approach When it Comes to Marketing

Businesses these days are under sheer pressure to meet quarterly revenue goals with a thinning budget.

And thanks to the unpredictable sales cycle, the B2B marketing funnel takes longer these days and has more touchpoints than the straightforward B2C funnel. Often businesses try to skip far down the funnel or do it all with a limited campaign.

For example, as a startup, new brands might skip over upper funnel activities like building brand awareness, which could be detrimental to the business. Additionally, some companies may neglect the mid-funnel touchpoints, where the consumer is trying to establish buying criteria and compare various brands to get the right product. 

A B2B marketing funnel involves awareness, interest, action, consideration, intent, review, and purchase. Full-funnel marketing allows holistic data collection and attribution models to be applied. That’s why every business must take a full-funnel marketing approach to be successful.

Understanding your target audience and where they fit in the funnel is the key to figuring out how to reach them. Here are the steps to set up a full-funnel marketing strategy for your business.

Understand Various Stages Within the Funnel

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Typically there are three main parts of any marketing funnel - upper, middle, and lower. The upper funnel denotes the first stages of the buyer’s journey. Here the brand takes the opportunity to introduce prospective consumers to its offerings and services. 

Moving down the funnel, we enter the middle stage, where it’s time to turn leads into potential customers. The prospective customers scoped in the upper funnel are now in the consideration phase and are exploring your brands, products, and competitors. In the middle funnel, it’s key to identify and nurture those who express interest to ensure they have a memorable brand experience.

The last stage is the lower funnel, where the prospects have done their due diligence and are ready to make a purchase. At this stage, brands want them to pick them. Ensure to nurture prospective customers down the funnel to define who the true customers are. 

Know Your Target Audience

Notably, an effective and optimal full-funnel approach starts with the knowledge of who the target audience is and where they fit in the funnel. The ideal target audience can be defined by the 5 W’s - who, what, when, where, and what. It will also help businesses weed out any niche of users within the funnel that is not the right fit.

It can be done by creating exclusions based on criteria like conversion completed or satisfying a predetermined parameter that is crucial to the business. This way, companies can spend the ad budget on customers that matter and have online behavior of the most desired customers for a business.

Figure Out Where and How to Reach the Audience

Once you have figured out your target audience, it’s time to reach them. For this, businesses need to research and figure out the best places to reach these people, whether it will be effective to reach them via social media platforms, TV, or other such platforms.

For example, social media consumption grew during the pandemic, and it will continue to grow as per reports. Therefore, it’s one of the most important platforms to reach out to potential customers. Additionally, there are mediums like TV, OTT platforms, music streaming platforms, and more.

Before deciding where to reach your ideal target audience, figure out where they typically find brands, how much time they spend on various channels, what kind of content appeals to them, and so on. Once you have decided which channels to leverage, figure out where they fit within the funnel. Bear in mind that the full-funnel marketing tactics you employ should align with the decision-making criteria of your target audience.

Be Realistic While Setting Goals

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After you have determined which channels you will include and where they fit in the funnel, set realistic goals for each channel. It will outline the purpose of the campaign and channel clearly. For example, if you use an audio ad in the upper funnel, you can introduce the brand and its benefits. Whereas in the lower funnel, audio ads can encourage buyers to purchase with a discount coupon available on the website. 

Now that we know how important it is to take a full-funnel approach and how to do so, you can try testing out these steps in your next marketing strategy. Make sure that the purchasing experience for the consumer is seamless and convenient for the point of sale to take place.

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Nitish Mathur

Digital Marketing Expert

Nitish is the CEO of 3Cans. A food blogger turned Growth Marketer, with a knack for tongue-in-cheek content and co-author of "The Growth Hacking Book 1 & 2", he helps companies hone their brands through everything digital. 

   
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