Are your marketing efforts guiding people towards your products and services and no one else's? Some marketing efforts raise the public's awareness of a brand. Other efforts keep customers coming back and buying. But if you want marketing that creates a steady stream of new and repeat customers, you need a full-funnel marketing strategy that combines upper-funnel and lower-funnel marketing.
Think of your customers for a moment. It's not the highest stakes, but each is on a "hero's journey." There aren't enchanted forests to trudge through or intergalactic space princesses to rescue, but it's an epic journey nonetheless.
In all our favorite stories, the hero has a guide that helps push them through the trials and tribulations they face. A full-funnel marketing strategy should function like the Yodas, Merlins, and Gandolfs of Fiction, guiding potential customers safely to you. There's no magic here, though, just expert full-funnel marketing tactics.
Full Funnel Marketing Demystified
If you've never heard of the marketing funnel, it's a concept used to make sense of the customer journey. Each customer is different, but broadly speaking, a customer will first become aware of a brand, become interested in their offerings, consider them against competitors, and then decide to purchase.
The marketing funnel visualizes these stages as Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Purchase. But not every customer follows such a clean-cut journey. Like our mythic heroes, they can get pulled in other directions, enter at strange places, or pass through multiple stages at one time. If your marketing strategy focuses on one stage of the funnel, you'll miss customers or let others fall through the cracks.
A full-funnel marketing strategy utilizes upper-funnel marketing and lower-funnel marketing tactics to pull in customers wherever they are on the journey and bring them all the way through to purchase.
Upper-Funnel Marketing
What is upper-funnel marketing? It's how you raise awareness and get customers interested. People can't buy what they don't know about and if they aren't interested, they won't stick around for long enough to buy.
Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing
Top-of-the-funnel marketing should build awareness by putting your business in front of customers and guiding them further down the funnel. The most successful top-of-the-funnel marketing tactics cast a wide net, hitting broad swaths of your potential customer base with one message and a compelling call to action.
Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing Examples
Channels like linear TV and Radio, Digital out-of-home (DOOH), and Over-the-top (OTT) are great upper-funnel marketing tactics for reaching massive audiences. These channels all take advantage of studies showing that videos and audio engage and stick with audiences better than text.
A top-of-the-funnel video should highlight your company, solution, and a call to action. This CTA should encourage viewers to follow your social media accounts, explore your website, or sign up for a newsletter. Whichever option you select, be sure to track it as a key performance indicator to inform strategy down the funnel.
What makes Linear TV and Radio, DOOH, and OTT incredibly potent is the data and audience behind them. 99% of households pay for at least one streaming service, the average household watches linear TV for over two and a half hours daily, and millions see billboards daily. Even better is the fact that you can precisely target these massive audiences because they sort by station, program, and time.
Middle of the Funnel Marketing
Interest marketing is a bit further down the funnel, just below your top-of-the-funnel marketing. Some customers will enter the funnel here, knowing they have a problem and looking for a solution. Whether we've plucked our hero customer off the couch or they were already seeking adventure, this stage is about heightening interest.
Upper-Funnel Interest Marketing Examples
Potential customers may have seen your video, scanned the code, but got caught up in another task. Or they saw the video but didn't take action. Using the data from the awareness stage—organic searches, web traffic, and social media follows—you can retarget either or both groups.
At this level, some paid and earned marketing strategies come together to guide people further. If you encourage people at the awareness stage to follow your social accounts, you can post there to highlight unique features and re-ignite a customer's interest.
You can even promote that post to people searching for offerings like yours. With over half of product discovery for younger generations coming on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, you can efficiently guide people you've already engaged while still capturing people entering the funnel at the interest level.
Trust: How to go From Consideration to Desire
So far, your potential customer has been intrigued by your solution. But it's possible they're just as interested in your competitors. How do you bring them from the upper funnel to the lower funnel? Build trust.
Trust is crucial at any stage, especially in a world where 56% of Gen Z consumers say brands lie about their products. However, at the consideration stage, trust is how you'll set yourself apart from competitors.
Customer testimonials and influencers drive trust between businesses and customers. If your marketing strategy relies on social media, re-posting reviews on your page and tapping into influencers with any sized audience will help build that bond.
You can also explore email marketing. There are billions of email accounts out there, and if you collect some at the awareness stage, you'll be well positioned for lower-funnel marketing tactics. Emailing testimonials and reviews provides the social proof your customers crave. And with open rates over 35%, you can be confident the message lands.
Lower Funnel Marketing
So, what sets the upper funnel apart from the lower funnel? At the bottom of the funnel, the customer has one last hurdle to clear: doing nothing. At this point, our hero is no longer battling great external forces. Instead, their final boss is the pull to leave the funnel behind.
At this point, they're aware they have a problem, know you're the solution, but might still decide to do nothing about it. It's not you it's them—cart abandonment rates are climbing to new heights at 70% worldwide—but that doesn't mean hope is lost.
Chat with your sales team to see why your potential customers leave their carts in a digital wasteland. They might provide the insights you need to inform your lower-funnel marketing strategy and complete the hero's journey.
Bottom-of-the-Funnel Marketing Tactics
The insights you gleaned from your sales team might include price, a confusing check-out, hesitancy to create an account, or some combination of factors. Whatever the cause, your lower-funnel marketing needs to drive value to overcome them. Value is our hero's reward for pushing through and reaching the bottom of the funnel.
The product or service your business sells has value to your customer only if you create it together. Use lower-funnel marketing to create that value. You can identify the proper marketing channel by learning from their graveyard of abandoned carts. For example, if your customers value convenience, Linear or DOOH can highlight how physically close the viewer is to your solutions.
If they value having the most advanced product, consider an SEO strategy. Optimizing your website will result in more traffic towards content pages that explain how you fit the bill. Blogs and research are powerful converters because they can hone in on value. No surprise then, that companies who optimize content on their websites have conversion rates six times higher than competitors who don't.
If you understand your customer's pain points your bottom-of-the-funnel marketing will resonate and convert. It'll also help you anticipate and head off these challenges at the upper-funnel levels.
Embrace the Full Funnel with CMG
It might be fun to pit top-of-the-funnel vs. bottom-of-the-funnel, but a full funnel marketing approach will always win out.
When you think about the full funnel, you'll be talking about value at the very top of the funnel and using purchases to build awareness to restart the funnel. But crafting compelling messages that speak to the full-funnel is challenging. You have little time no matter what level you're operating at, so the message has to be creative enough to stand out and compelling enough to engage.
Thankfully, you don't have to spend hours stressing over how to pack that perfect marketing punch. With help from CMG Local Solutions, you can build a heroic full-funnel marketing strategy. Our consultants will sit down with you or your team to develop a plan that looks at the complete picture, finds the channels that make the most sense, and creates gripping messages that pull in heroes at every level of the funnel.
Contact us today to get started.
