Full Funnel Marketing Strategy for Lead Generation

A full-funnel marketing strategy may sound complicated. However, you should consider how it can help you generate leads to help your business grow and succeed.

The full-funnel marketing strategy focuses on each step of the funnel, from awareness to retention. It involves advertising in a way that works for people at various stages. As people move through the funnel, it will remain relevant, and followers can become buyers.

Read on to learn more about the full-funnel marketing approach and how it can help you.

What Is Full Funnel Marketing Strategy?

Full-funnel marketing is a type of marketing that involves attracting shoppers at all stages of the customer journey. A good full-funnel marketing strategy will help you build awareness of your business, but it can also help increase sales.

You can show your ideal clients that various solutions exist for their problems. Then, you can get them into your marketing funnel to move them through each step.

While other strategies may work, using a funnel is crucial. You can use it to make sure your audience doesn’t miss any of the steps. And you’ll be able to control the content that you use to market your business throughout the various stages of the funnel.

A comprehensive marketing funnel can also help you attract more people. You can market on various platforms and websites to get your ads and posts in front of more shoppers. Then, you’ll be able to increase conversions and sales.

By using your funnel to guide the rest of your marketing efforts, you can make those efforts more efficient. Then, you won’t waste as much time or money promoting your business to people who will never buy from you.

How to Create Full-Funnel Marketing Strategies

Creating a good full-funnel marketing strategy may seem overwhelming, especially at first. You need to know where to find prospective customers, and you have to come up with good marketing campaigns.

Fortunately, you can follow a series of steps to develop a full-funnel approach to marketing. Then, you’ll be able to combine organic and paid advertising to create a successful sales funnel.

Whether you’re creating your first full-funnel strategy or adopting a current strategy, you should consider all of the things you should do. That way, you can prepare the funnel to start attracting people and moving them through to the last stage.

The following steps can work for most businesses. So consider how you can develop a successful funnel.

Know Your Customers

If you don’t know your target audience, your entire funnel won’t work right. You need to understand your customer’s perspectives and what would make them join your funnel.

Start with your current customers, if you have any. Think about what products are the most popular and how those customers found you or your products. You can send a survey to each paying customer to get those answers.

That way, you’ll be able to understand the customer journey. Now, customer journeys may vary from person to person based on their background. But knowing the journey that most people take to buy from you can help.

For example, maybe most people find you through social media. So you decide to set up your funnel on various social networks to get in front of more of your audience. Or maybe SEO works well, so you focus on using the right keywords on your site.

When you get new customers to enter your funnel, you can help them through. That way, you can get more of your target audience to complete more steps within the funnel.

Consider Your Budget

The next step in building out your marketing funnel is to determine your business budget. This will help you decide how much you can put toward paid advertising, such as Facebook ads, and other paid marketing channels.

You may be able to use the full-funnel approach organically. However, you can limit yourself if your full-funnel strategy only uses organic marketing. In some cases, a prospective customer may only find you due to an ad.

By diversifying how you get people to find you, you can be more successful. Then, your funnel may get more leads and conversions.

Fortunately, you don’t need a huge budget to start paying for ads. You can even start with performance marketing, so you only pay when you get results.

However, you should set a budget that you can keep up with over time. That way, you won’t run out of funds before your funnel can start to attract leads.

Understand the Sales and Marketing Funnel

Another vital part of creating a successful full-funnel approach is to understand what it involves. First, you have the awareness stage, which is where you want to generate awareness about who you are and what your business does. This is at the top of the funnel, and it will have more people than in subsequent stages.

Next is the consideration stage, in which people already know you. They may like and trust you as well, so selling to these people isn’t as difficult. However, they may not be totally on board with buying what you have to offer.

After considering your product or service, some clients will move to the conversion stage. This funnel stage is where you actually make a sale and earn revenue. Many marketers treat this as the last stage, but you can use another stage.

The retention stage is where you turn a customer into a life-long fan. You can sell to them over and over, and they can keep coming back to you for new products or services.

Understanding the different stages of the funnel can help you create a good marketing system. You’ll know what content and ad types to use to attract people at each step.

Use the Right Tools

Even if you know how to develop the perfect marketing funnel, you can benefit from using a set of tools and programs. You should use a content management system (CMS) to house and organize all of your content.

A marketing automation tool can also come in handy. The tool can help you manage and monitor social shares and email responses. That way, marketing teams don’t have to spend as much time on certain tasks.

You may also want to use a customer relationship manager (CRM). CRMs can track client activity, and you can collect data on the people who request free trials or who join your email list.

And as you use all of those programs, you may want to use another tool to track the results of your full-funnel marketing strategies. You may find that you have some gaps, and you can decide how to fill them and increase leads and conversions.

Using a variety of tools can make running a funnel a lot easier. Then, you’ll have more time to review data and focus on how to improve your efforts for future campaigns.

Hire Great People

You may have the perfect strategy. However, it can be hard to run your sales funnel alone or with your current team. If possible, consider hiring new people to work on your marketing approach.

A marketing department doesn’t need a ton of people. But hiring people occasionally can help you work on various marketing channels. And you can get fresh ideas from your new hires regarding your strategies.

For example, maybe you hire an expert on social media ads. They help you figure out the right ad spend budget to get the best results. Or perhaps you hire a video marketer to help you create engaging video advertisements.

Either way, you should vet all potential employees. Make sure they have the experience you’re looking for and that they can help you reach your goals. Good employees will be able to show up to work and be able to work together as a team.

Don’t be afraid to keep looking for the perfect person to work for you. If an applicant doesn’t fit all of your requirements, you can find someone who does and who can help you build a good marketing funnel.

Combine Marketing With Sales

You should have your marketing and sales teams work together. The marketing team will be able to find leads and get their information. Then, the sales team will take those leads and speak with prospects about their problems.

If the teams work separately, they may focus only on their roles. However, a successful sales and marketing funnel involves both teams. Many marketers on your team should understand the basics of sales and vice versa.

That way, you can make sure your full-funnel advertising strategy works. If you find that customers drop out of the funnel at a specific stage, you can adjust that stage. Then, you can focus on keeping people in and get them ready to buy.

Make sure your marketing and sales employees are able to communicate. They may even choose to meet together once a week to review what each team has done. Either way, everyone should know what is going on and how they can make the most of your funnel.

Diversify Across Stages

When building out your full-funnel approach, you should think about the buyer’s journey through each step. Think about how you can reach your target audience from the top to the bottom of your marketing funnel.

For example, you might choose to build awareness with ads on social media and TV. You might then focus on retargeting customers to get them into the consideration stage. To get people to move to the conversion step, you could choose to send them emails if you have their address.

Think about how you’ve gotten website traffic and sales in the past and how successful various strategies are. Then, you can use those same strategies. But you can figure out ways to experiment so that you can still make sales when one strategy stops working.

If you only use one strategy for each stage, you can limit your potential reach. You may still get people through the funnel, but you probably won’t grow your business as quickly. While you don’t want to overwhelm yourself or your team, you should use a few marketing tactics.

Use Inbound and Outbound Marketing Strategies

Inbound marketing can be an excellent way to attract potential customers. They can use branded search terms or generic terms to find a blog post you wrote. Or they might find your landing page through search results.

But also using outbound strategies can help you get more traffic to your funnel. Reaching out to people can help round out your full-funnel marketing approach. You don’t have to rely on prospects finding you, so you can get more leads more quickly.

Be sure to create good marketing content to draw people in. However, don’t neglect contacting leads and other potential buyers. Then, you can grow your funnel to increase the chances of making sales.

Prepare Your Products

As you build out your funnel, you should prepare your products and services for sale. The last thing you want is for potential customers to go through your sales process with nothing to purchase.

Think about exactly what you plan to sell. Then, you can make sure your funnel content leads into that paid offer. For example, if you sell dog grooming services, it wouldn’t make sense to focus on the benefits of dog toys.

Knowing what you will pitch to people at the bottom of the funnel can help you build each step. That way, you can make sure every ad you purchase, post you publish, or email you send focuses on that end offer. If you have multiple very different offers, you can create content for multiple funnels.

Each step of the funnel should target the particular offer it will lead to. That’s especially important if your offers are quite different. But even if you sell similar offers, you may have existing buyers who already own the first offer.

Creating a new full-funnel can help you target the people interested in that one item. Then, you can have a better chance of making sales.

Target the Right Customers

As you build a funnel to capture potential customers, you need to make sure they’re the right people. Ideally, you will know a lot of details about your target buyer, such as their age, location, income, and interests.

However, within that, you need to think about purchase intent. Someone may love your business and the products you offer, but the chances of them buying something could be low, such as because of their income.

Be sure to focus your marketing activities on leads who are more likely to buy in the short term. Look for people who are farther along in the customer journey. Then, you can create content or ads that encourage them to move down your funnel.

While you should also target cold leads to build awareness, you don’t want to focus too much on the top of the funnel. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to get people to the buying stage.

Set Yourself Apart

If you want to stand out in today’s competitive market, you should know what your competitors are doing. Then, you can come up with a marketing approach that will help you reach more new customers than other businesses.

For example, maybe your biggest competitor isn’t using display advertising. So you decide to incorporate that into your marketing activities. You may then see results because you’re advertising somewhere that your competition isn’t.

You can also work on creating the perfect targeted ads to encourage clicks and sales. If you find your competitors are only using generic ads, targeting your ads to specific types of people in your audience can help people remember you.

They may purchase something immediately. Or they might decide to wait, but they’ll think of your business first when they’re ready to buy what you sell.

Grow Your Reach

Even if your customers use certain methods, you may want to use them, too. Of course, you need to make sure you can reach your ideal buyer. But you can look for different ways to promote your marketing funnels.

For example, maybe you find that a big portion of your audience uses their mobile devices more than a computer. You know that a lot of them also use social media, so you decide to promote your business with Facebook ads.

As you set up the campaign, you should make sure to focus on purchase intent. So you focus on marketing to people who follow you or who have visited your website before.

While you should aim to stand out, you can do so even when using the same platforms as your competitors. Instead, you may choose to use bright colors to capture someone’s attention and get them to click on your ad.

While you don’t need to use every possible platform, you should try a few. You can always stop using them if they don’t provide the results you desire. But you’ll never know what might work until you try it.

Use Different Tactics

As you aim to grow your reach with your funnel strategy, you should think about the marketing tactics you want to use. What works for attracting potential customers may not work to convert them into buyers.

At the top of the funnel, you may choose to use search ads to show up in front of more people. Paid search can help you show up first without waiting for organic SEO to work. Then, you can get results more quickly.

Later in the funnel, your marketing plan may focus on retargeting people in your audience. That way, you can focus on people who have already interacted with you. No matter what you do, consider a few things to try for each stage of the process.

Create Video Ads

TV ads can be an excellent tool to build brand awareness and get people to the top of the funnel. Video advertising is great because people don’t need to read something or put as much effort into learning about your business.

Plus, a good video ad can be catchy and get you thinking. For example, think about a McDonald’s commercial. The ads almost always include the “I’m lovin’ it” jingle at the end. When you think of that phrase, you probably think of McDonald’s.

You can do the same thing with your video ads to help people remember you. However, make sure that any videos you use to advertise fit into your full-funnel marketing approach. That way, you can lead people to the next stage easily.

Focus on Engagement

At the consideration stage, your customers are actively seeking a solution. They know who you are, and they may want to buy from you. But something is keeping them from buying and moving to the next stage in the funnel.

Be sure to go through your customer journeys. Look at successful sales to figure out what makes people move from consideration to conversion.

You might find that engaging with people helps convince them to buy. Whether you engage by commenting, messaging, or something else, you may find it helps convert people.

Along with remarketing ads, engagement shows people you care and that you know about them and they know about you. If you take the time to answer their questions and relieve their fears about your offer, they may be more likely to convert.

Get Personal

Your full-funnel marketing strategy should also focus on existing customers. These customers have gone through your whole funnel, and they’re ready to buy.

The more personal you can get at this particular stage, the better. You can take some of the engagement strategies you used and continue to use them. For example, maybe someone clicked on your previous remarketing ads but didn’t buy.

So you decide to show them the same ad again. Sometimes, people need to see something multiple times before they take an action.

Don’t be afraid to target ads based on the specific customer as well. Many platforms let you track someone’s activity, so you can create different ad copies or images. Then, you can show the copy and image that you think will do the best.

Prioritize Current Customers

When it comes to your full-funnel strategy, you should give plenty of energy to your existing customers. These are qualified leads that can help your sales team get more sales.

You already know these people like you enough to buy something. Before you let them exit your funnel, consider how you can retain them as buyers.

For example, maybe you offer various products that provide different solutions. You might have one customer who bought your lowest-level offer to solve a part of their problem. Now, you can move them into a funnel for a product that offers a bit more help.

Keep doing this with each new product or service you launch. Then, you’ll be able to increase sales and revenue, but it won’t take as much work as attracting leads from scratch.

Review Your Data

After you’ve been marketing your business for a while, take a look at your funnel. See how well the system is doing and if you can improve anything.

Take a look at your analytics for your website, email list, and social media accounts. Then, you can figure out which strategies are getting you more results. You’ll be able to put more energy into the high-performing strategies.

And you can get rid of things that are a waste of your time or money. Make any changes necessary to your funnel so that you can improve it in the future. Be sure to review your data every month or so to make sure the funnel is working properly and fix any problems.

Conclusion

Generating leads can be difficult, but a good full-funnel marketing strategy makes that process easier. By attracting people who don’t know you to those who know and love you, you can encourage people to move through the funnel and become a customer and life-long fans.

FAQs

If you still have questions about a good marketing funnel, here are your answers.