How to Create Your Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re an owner/operator for your small business or a manager of a multi-location franchise, every business wants to convert its audience to customers. The best way to do that is by creating a full-funnel marketing strategy. When you leverage the entire sales and marketing funnel, from awareness through to nurture, you’re not just marketing to your audience, you are guiding them through their entire customer journey.

Below are the areas of the marketing funnel that you need in order to create your full-funnel marketing strategy.

Step 1: Generate Awareness

You want your customers to know about you and your services before they ever need you. By creating awareness, you are giving yourself a competitive advantage. You don’t necessarily think about the mechanics you know until you need one – but you have two or three in mind when you do because you’ve passed them on the road, seen an ad, or had a friend see one!

You can create brand awareness through:

• Digital advertisements
• Radio advertisement
• Social media advertisement
• Public relations and community involvement

These efforts will help you build the top of your full-funnel marketing strategy.

Step 2: Show Up for Consideration & Conversion

At this stage of the process, a potential customer is aware of their own need or want and is doing research on what will best suit their needs.

Based on the need, they can be doing this research in a number of ways including:

• Talking to friends and family
• Running general google searches
• Viewing similar products or services
• Checking reviews online

Having the proper SEO and reputation management procedures in place will help your business rank high for these searches. Ways to promote your business in the consideration stage include:

• Running Google advertisements
• Targeting keywords in your online content through blogs and optimization
• Regularly checking and responding to your online reviews
• Abandoned cart emails with promotional offers

Take our work with our client Karrikins Group for example. To build a content strategy that would span the entire sales funnel, we launched a new website focusing on SEO and future content creation, along with a multimedia content distribution model incorporating email marketing, blogging, on and off-page optimization, and social media marketing. You can learn more about that project here.

Once the potential customer has done their due diligence and selected your product, they have now converted into a customer in the marketing funnel. Congrats!

Step 3: Maintain Customer Loyalty & Advocacy

Now that you have the customer, you need to continue to work to keep them and turn them into a loyal customer and peer advocate. Not only will this continue to nurture your current customer relationship, but it will continue to help build your brand through word-of-mouth recommendations to friends and family.

Actively engaging with current customers is more than a monthly newsletter, though that is a great place to start. Other ideas for creating lasting customer relationships that help feed your full-funnel marketing strategy include:

• Targeted digital advertisements to current users or lookalike audiences
• Welcome campaigns for new users
• Creating a loyalty program to reward repeat business
• Email campaigns based on content-type
• Reminders of upcoming product or service needs based on the product lifecycle

It’s important at this stage to nurture your customers to ensure they are getting more from you than just a product or service. They are receiving additional benefits that keep them coming back.

Creating a full-funnel marketing strategy is more than knowing you have a product or service your audience needs. It’s about knowing what they are thinking and feeling before or as they are doing it. Put yourself in their shoes and think through what it looks like to get from start to finish. By allowing yourself to understand their sales journey, you will be able to see how you can show up before they know they need you.

Looking to build your full-funnel marketing strategy but not sure where to start? We’re here to help! Check out our strategy-first approach to marketing and get in touch with us.