Full funnel marketing is a term used to describe looking at your marketing from the beginning interaction with your company to the last and/or ongoing interactions with your business.  

Marketing is in the business of having constant conversations about your business and educating buyers both future and current about the capabilities that you have.

Full funnel marketing first recognizes that there is a funnel and uses different types of marketing in order to engage. 

Types of marketing in the funnel

Some types of digital marketing drive the delusion that a funnel doesn’t exist in the buyer’s journey such as paid search ads.  In this form of marketing, people are already directly searching for what they want and so they are at the end of the funnel. Because of this many business owners want to only do paid search ads so they can show direct results from the marketing. 

The problem with this is it is the most expensive place to play because everyone only wants to be at the end of the marketing funnel.  Had businesses been marketing upstream when someone got to the paid search phrase they would have been more likely to choose them.  This can make this type of marketing less expensive. 

Other forms of marketing can make it hard to show value such as organic social media in the marketing funnel because it cannot be directly tied to a consumer making the final decision.  At this stage of the marketing funnel many often just coming aware of your product or service. This means that they are not ready to buy.

Consumers are all over the marketing funnel

The funnel is not always in a funnel shape and the user can move up down and across in many different ways. Consumers today are influenced by many sources of information online.  For instance, someone can start off in the research phase and jump back to the end of the funnel only to discover they have more questions. 

This is yet another reason why doing many forms of marketing is necessary to affect someone at all stages of the buying process.  Multi-channel marketing allows you to mix multiple forms of marketing to move someone down a funnel.

The argument can be made that marketing is linear but the buyer’s journey is not.  This notion attempts to explain that all marketing fits neatly into a part of the funnel. We would disagree as we have shown how different types of marketing can be used and different stages of the marketing funnel. 

When we attempt to make the entire funnel of marketing linear we are only attempting to make it easier to explain and defy logic. The real truth is that no one goes through the same path to purchase a product or service.  

Some forms of marketing even attempt to keep you on one platform in order to create the funnel. But this also denies the fact that consumers move all over the internet. 

Not marketing within the full funnel is a fail

It’s also a mistake to not be working at all stages of the funnel at all times.  There are a certain amount of people at the top of the funnel who will never make it to the bottom. This means that you need to always be adding more reach to your funnel by adding more brand awareness marketing.  This can be seen with the website with on average only 2.5% of people converting for the first time to a website. 

How long is the marketing funnel?

Your sales cycle also plays an important your in your marketing funnel. The longer your typical buyers funnel is the longer the marketing funnel will be. This can present its own challenge with tracking tools and most not being able to go out past 6 months of data. With longer types of funnels, you need to break up the KPIs that you track to show the value of the marketing that you are doing. Tracking is about to get more complex with the removal of third-party tracking. Third-party tracking was able to add pixels to one’s website and understand where someone has been before in the funnel of marketing. 

Simple marketing funnels

Let’s look at the AIDA model which was invented in 1898. 

• Awareness- The consumer is aware that they have a problem and possible solutions.
• Interest- The consumer shows interest in products or services.
• Desire- The product begins to evaluate a certain brand.
• Action- The consumer decides where to purchase. 

The explanation is simple to explain the process but if we take today’s consumer we can quickly see where the process is not as simple. I could become that “aware” I have a problem and do a quick search and already be at the “desire” stage but their own budget stops the consumer to go back to the interest stage. We can talk about many of these scenarios that happen. 

Why full-funnel marketing?

Once we have recognized that there is a funnel that takes place then it’s easier to see the why. You can see that marketing needs to be created for all parts of the funnel and at all times.  Full-funnel marketing is something you should take seriously so you can ensure that you are able to get great marketing messages out to someone no matter where they are in the funnel.