The power of full-funnel marketing

In marketing there are many different schools of thought, both inside the marketing profession and the perceptions from other professionals who interact with marketeers on a daily basis on what the role of marketing is, and what the primary function of a marketer is to do. 

Truthfully, it depends on what level you’re considering ‘marketing’ from. From a strategic perspective marketing looks at opportunities in the market and strengths within the company in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage as well as grow market share and sales. 

Tactically, we look at the mix of products (or services) a company offers, how we promote them, price them, package them and position them in order to hit the companies objectives and enhance brand value. (Also called Brand Equity)* 

Operationally, that’s the execution of the day to day activities that support the strategic and tactical decisions to be implemented effectively. 

Even the question ‘what is marketing?’ elicits a variety of responses in reply. 

*this is by no means exhaustive and it is likely and overly simplified view as brand also operates at the strategic level and the strategic level of marketing also considers the companies approach to segmentation, targeting and positioning. 

Marketing as a Brand Awareness Tool: 

One school of thought positions the responsibility of marketing purely at the top of the funnel. These are marketing activities that grow brand awareness and increase the likelihood that a person will consider your business when the need you can help the target audience with arises.

The value that a firm places on these activities depends on the industry you’re in. The luxury market and FMCG place considerable value on these activities as they can directly relate to market share growth and sales for their products. Whereas, as a generalisation, more traditional B2B companies might not see the same value in these activities. However, this could be missing a trick. 

For example, there is a trend in B2B marketing that potential customers and clients are on average 57% of the way through their purchase decision before they are even willing to have conversation with someone from your company (Hughes et al, 2019). What this means is that traditional sales outreach becomes less effective here - in particular with cold sales outreach where an existing relationship doesn’t already exist. This also, may also harm the companies chances of getting that business, when B2B clients and customers are more empowered with information and more independent in terms of finding the information that they need to inform their purchase decision. This can potentially create negative sentiment about your brand. Then again, this also depends on ‘the approach’ that you take to your sales outreach activities.

Where the potential customer or client wants to do their own research through the awareness and consideration aspects of their customer decision journey, marketing, even as ‘a top of the funnel’ activity becomes increasingly important. Providing timely and relevant content and experiences to a potential client or customer right when they are looking for that specific piece of information, positions your business as a likely candidate to solve their problem. 

The power of marketing activities at this stage (top of the funnel) is their ability to improve brand sentiment as well as influencing the potential client or customers initial ‘consideration set’. 

What is a consideration set? 

A consideration set is a short list of companies or brands that a prospect considers when the need for a particular solution arises. That consideration set may remain dormant, not active in the prospects mind, until that prospect recognises they have a problem or a need that they need to address. For example, they need to upgrade or improve their software systems. Whoever they think of first in the moment the need is recognised is actually the company that is most likely to win the business. The goal is to get in your target audiences top 3 consideration set, with a gold star for reaching that coveted ‘number one position’. 

This is the value in the top of the funnel marketing activities - influencing a target audiences consideration set. However, the power of marketing’s ability to influence the decision of a potential client or customer is not limited to the top of the funnel. A prospective client or customer will gain perceptions and thoughts about a company based on the messages it receives about them influenced by the company’s own external communications. Perceptions are also gained by the messages about the company the target audience member hears from peers, plus - powerfully and most importantly - the experience that they have through directly engaging with the company. 

Therefore the power of full funnel marketing comes from the accumulated touch points, or moments of interaction between a potential client or customer and the company they are considering purchasing from. The more that these accumulated interactions leads to positive sentiment is the extent to which a favourable opinion about your company is likely to be formed. 

The Power of Full Funnel Marketing: 

Therefore, the impact of marketing extends right throughout the customer or client lifecycle. (If you don’t agree I’d recommend reading the article I wrote called ‘Marketing is a company-wide function’.) It is the interactions between the different stages of the funnel, how they impact and support each other that drives behaviour in your target audience. 

Every touchpoint you design from a social media post to a customer satisfaction survey has the power to positively or negatively impact your target audience’s perspective of you. Thus, the likelihood that they will do business with you and the likelihood that they will recommend you or speak highly of you when among their peers. This can make or break a business. 

Your business may be missing a valuable opportunity to grow market share by truly optimising the power of your marketing activities right through the lifecycle with your clients and customers. Especially if you’re viewing marketing as a purely top of the funnel activity and not linking it through the full interaction cycle with prospects, clients and customers. 

Therefore, it’s important to develop a unified view of the full customer decision journey through awareness, consideration, decision and advocacy stages of the journey (Ader, et. al., 2021). As well as identifying the role that marketing plays through each of those touchpoints. This requires joined up thinking across a company and cross-functional collaboration between marketing and a diverse range of departments including delivery or customer service, which may be difficult to achieve in some companies that aren’t structurally set up to accommodate this. 

The important thing to consider here, that while it may be challenging to achieve a cross functional unique view of the customer decision journey and considering the marketing impact at every stage… the question that you really can’t afford to ignore here, is what money are you leaving on the table by not joining the dots across departments and across touchpoints?

What’s more involving marketing at a strategic level of a company is being ALREADY used as a tool in many organisations including companies that traditionally haven’t seen the value in marketing activities, to gain and sustain a competitive advantage in their market. Companies that gauge marketing input into creating a competitive advantage at the moment, are at an advantage over companies that don’t (Qualtrics, 2024).

As I spoke about in my article 5 Trends in B2B marketing in 2024, companies that invest highly in marketing efforts even in the face of economic turndown were found to outperform competitors over the next 10 year period. 

If that evidence isn’t enough to convince you that marketing needs a voice at the table at every level of the organisation, I’m not sure what is. Ultimately, you’re in the business of making money and whatever approach that is true to your company values, best for your customers or clients, and going to continue to grow your revenue, sales and profitability is important to consider. 

It’s my job, to show you the role that marketing plays in that equation and hopefully help you activate your marketing activities more effectively. Because nothing makes me happier than an objective achieved or seeing a business fulfil it’s true potential in the market. 

Kind Regards, Melanie O’Connor, 3.2.24

 References:

Hughes, T., Gray. A., and Whicher, H., 2019. Smarketing: How to achieve competitive advantage through blended sales and marketing. Kogan Page Limited, London, UK.

Ader, J., Boudet, J., Brodherson, M., and Robinson, K., 2021. Why every business needs a full funnel marketing strategy. McKinsey. Available via: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/why-every-business-needs-a-full-funnel-marketing-strategy (accessed: 3.2.24).

Qualtrics, 2024. How to gain a sustainable competitive advantage for business. Available via: https://www.qualtrics.com/uk/experience-management/customer/sustainable-competitive-advantage/ (accessed: 3.2.24)