What is full-funnel marketing? Discover how to boost your conversions, engagement, and ROI with our expert-backed strategy guide.

You are on a mountain overlooking a large landscape covered with green evergreen trees, and at the bottom, a flowing river rapidly pushes the water towards its overall destination; the ocean.

This remarkable view is your marketing funnel, a carefully curated ecosystem that leads potential customers and drives revenue for your business.

At the top of the mountain, you see storm clouds and feel rain falling. These raindrops are your awareness leads flowing from the infinite sky into your overall lead funnel.

You also see these droplets dripping off surrounding tree branches to the ground, flowing into a larger stream. This is your mid-funnel, a place to nurture leads into customers on their schedule.

At the bottom of the mountain, you also see the faster-moving stream meeting the rapidly-moving river. This is the bottom of the funnel, the end of the marketing funnel. Here, you pass leads to the sales team for a warm reach out that leads to revenue.

These seemingly simple stages are how 32% of businesses gain revenue. However, companies that utilize full-funnel strategies see up to 45% higher ROI and 7% increases in offline sales compared to marketing campaigns across a single purchase stage.

Whether you’re a B2B company navigating a vast forest or a B2C firm climbing a small hill of sales and marketing funnels, every customer will depart on a journey. And to gain sales efficiently, you need to ensure they have a clear path to their destination.

What Is Full-Funnel Marketing?

Full-funnel marketing is a carefully created ecosystem that captures, nurtures, educates, and entices users to become customers over time. It curates messaging based on the customer’s intent and exposure to your brand. It also utilizes a 360-degree of the entire customer journey to categorize behavior instead of focusing solely on sales messaging.

Why Is Full-Funnel Marketing Important?

Full-funnel marketing is important because it considers the entire customer journey. It identifies the path from initial brand or product awareness to consideration, decision, and purchase. Here’s why it’s critical:

  • Better Customer Understanding: Full-funnel marketing helps businesses understand their customers better by tracking their journey. This allows your business to create personalized marketing strategies that resonate more effectively with your target audience.
  • Increased Sales: By addressing each customer journey stage, your business can guide potential customers more effectively toward purchasing.
  • Higher Retention: Post-purchase engagement in full-funnel marketing helps to maintain customer relationships, promote loyalty, and encourage repeat business.
  • Greater Efficiency: Full-funnel marketing helps identify which strategies work at each customer journey stage. This allows your business to optimize efforts and resources for maximum impact.
  • Improved ROI: With more efficient use of resources and higher sales, full-funnel marketing typically leads to a better return on investment.

Full-funnel marketing is the foundational structure that leads businesses to drive consistent revenue and scale over time. According to Think with Google:

  • Additional investment in upper- or lower-funnel tactics with Google Ads drives 52% more incremental sales than investing in mid-funnel tactics alone.
  • ​​A full-funnel marketing strategy can boost your ROI by 45% and offline sales by 7%.

The Marketing Funnel Stages (That Drive Leads)

The marketing funnel encompasses the overall customer journey and is usually referred to in three steps.

AIDA Marketing Funnel

 

1. Awareness Stage

This is usually the first interaction a potential customer has with your brand. Ways potential customers discover your brand, product, or service include:

  • Paid social media ads
  • Organic social media posts that appear natively on their feed
  • YouTube video based on their previous watch history, or an influencer campaign.

The goal of these campaigns is to draw attention and gain brand recognition for your ideal customer.

2. Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, users are typically looking for educational and informational content. Having this helpful content leads them to a better understanding of your product or service.

It can also help them achieve their overarching goals or point out a potential problem a customer has, then shows them how your product or service solves it. This can be done in a multitude of ways but varies drastically depending on the industry your business is in.

For example, in the B2B space, helpful content like ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, infographics, or other types of long-form content reign king. Whereas, in the B2C space less nurturing is usually required. Here, educational visuals and videos on how the product works can lead people further down the funnel faster.

3. Conversion Stage

When a potential customer, finally reaches the conversion stage they are ready to become a customer and either need to pull out their credit card or contact your sales team for the next steps.

B2B Conversion Stage

At this stage customer testimonials, ROI statistics, highlighting the benefits of your software, and CTAs like “Get a Demo” or “Contact Us” usually do the trick.

In addition, you can run collaborative and complementary Paid Search ads leading qualified users to search for your site when they are ready to purchase. Users in this industry may also look up your business on BBB, G2Crowd, or other relevant publications to check on the reputation of your brand.

B2C Conversion Stage

Usually, you can bring users to a sale with a really good UGC influencer video, a well-done shopping, or a carousel ad that will bring people to the conversion stage.

Users will often purchase directly from the ad in this sector. However, others may google your brand to check your overall site and check your Google reviews depending on whether you work in the e-commerce industry or the brick-and-mortar sector.


Recommended Reading


How to Create a Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy

Now that you have learned about what a full-funnel strategy looks like, let’s get started on building one for your business.

Digital Marketing Funnel Stages

Top of Funnel Marketing Tactics (TOFU)

Now, we are back to the top of the mountain in the awareness stage trying to gain the interest of potential prospects. The key here is to interrupt the feed, the scroll, and bring attention to your brand. This can be done through multiple channels. The most popular are:

Paid Social

  • Traffic and Engagement objective campaigns focus on bringing qualified traffic to your site and engaging the right audience with highly engaging content

Paid Search

  • Utilizing broad outreach channels like Google’s Performance Max, Display Network, and YouTube ads to bring more traffic to the site

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Focusing on valuable, informational, and highly searched non-gated content which links to gated content further down on the page could help the site improve its Google ranking

Middle of Funnel Marketing Tactics(MOFU)

Moving down the funnel, our middle-of-the-funnel tactics, your strategy should depend on which industry you reside in. For this blog, we will mainly separate these categories based on whether or not you sell directly to consumers.

  • If your product or service is directly to an individual consumer, you would be considered B2C
  • If you sell your product or services to other businesses instead of an individual consumer, you will be considered B2B

Paid Social

  • B2B: LinkedIn ads sharing educational content like reports, statistics, infographics, books, and webinars posing your organization as an industry expert and nurturing them for a longer period to get them to a sale
  • B2C: Meta ads focusing on your product or service in a video or carousel format educating users on the overall product to help lead them closer to a sale

Paid Search

  • B2B: Non-branded campaigns, branded campaigns, remarketing campaigns, and keyword broad match campaigns
  • B2C: Branded campaigns, remarketing campaigns, and industry-specific broad match campaigns with a competitive bid strategy

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Gated educational content focused on thought leadership in their perspective industry, vertical, or the benefits of the overall product’s reputation and quality

Organic Social Media 

  • B2B: Sharing industry-related educational content on sites like LinkedIn to better establish your brand’s authority as an industry thought leader
  • B2C: Sharing fun and aesthetic content to engage customers and potential customers on what the brand offers and the quality of the products presented

Email Marketing

  • Remarketing current customers and recent leads to become a customer over time and keep your brand top of mind

Bottom of Funnel Marketing Tactics (BOFU)

At the bottom of the funnel, your prospective customers have finally gained enough knowledge to reach a conclusion.

They either want to try and test your product or want something like your product. They’re also shopping around at your competitors to find a solution to their problem within their price point.

To bring these people into the sales funnel, there are a few ways to reach them per tactic.

Paid Social

  • B2B: LinkedIn campaigns with a demo or Free Trial start CTA
  • B2C: Facebook campaigns leading to a shop now or order now CTA

Paid Search

  • B2B: Remarketing-focused Google campaigns to customer testimonials and high conversion landing pages to keep users engaged through the longer marketing & sales cycle
  • B2C: Remarketing focused on high conversion landing pages for a quicker buying cycle

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Creating high-converting content specific to the audience and industry
  • Competitive landing pages lead people to compare you to your competition
  • Pricing pages

Organic Social Media

  • B2B: Organically sharing special deals and events to get people engaged to reach the sales stage of their engagement potentially
  • B2C: Share new special deals, products, and sales going on to help your returning customers to continue driving revenue for your brand

Email Marketing

  • Remarketing current customers and recent leads with a higher-CRM score or level of intent to convert with a special sale or deal

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

  • Auditing, experimenting, and optimizing your site for customer acquisition and retention

Start Your Profitable Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy

Full-Funnel Marketing Results

Looking from that mountain top, the journey to acquiring customers and consistent revenue can seem as vast and overwhelming as overlooking an evergreen forest.

However, you can acquire an agency partner who knows the trail and can help you reach your finish line.

If you don’t adopt a full-funnel approach to marketing it’s like dropping your customers off at the top of that mountain and telling them to find their own way down. Some may make it, but many may get lost.

Gain customers, gain revenue, and grow your business with Gravitate. Ready to accelerate your business growth?

Yes, Boost My Business Growth