Achieving sustainable growth for your business requires more than just isolated marketing efforts that you turn on and off—it demands a long-term strategic approach that considers every stage of the marketing funnel.
It’s probably no surprise that aligning your marketing efforts across the entire funnel—from awareness down to loyalty—takes significant research, planning, testing, and investment. However, designing the right funnel with the proper marketing tactics and customer touchpoints at every stage will win you business and scale your marketing ROI. In fact, full-funnel strategies see up to 45% higher ROI compared to marketing campaigns focused on 1 stage of the funnel.
Let’s explore what a holistic marketing approach can look like for your business, and the first steps you should take to craft the right full-funnel strategy for your business.
The importance of a holistic approach
Each part of the marketing funnel addresses a specific phase of the customer journey, from driving brand awareness at the top to fostering customer loyalty at the bottom.
Understanding how your marketing efforts fit into a holistic funnel allows you to create the right strategy for your business that addresses your customers’ needs and keeps you ahead of your competitors at every stage.
But before you can start designing your holistic marketing strategy, you need to first understand your current marketing problems and how they fit into each stage of the funnel.
Identifying your marketing problems
Every business encounters unique marketing challenges. When we break it down, these can often fit into specific stages in the marketing funnel. This allows you to identify what your primary problem at each stage is, so you can tailor your full-funnel strategy to overcome these obstacles effectively.
It also makes it a lot easier to prioritize your marketing problems and focus on the channels and tactics that will help you overcome them, rather than trying to deploy several disconnected marketing efforts all at once in hope that it will solve your problems.
Here is a look at how you can visualize your marketing problems across the holistic marketing funnel:
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- Awareness: “We’re not getting enough exposure to new potential customers.“
- Consideration: “Visitors don’t stay on our site long enough to engage with our content.“
- Conversion: “We’re getting traffic, but it’s not converting into leads.”
- Loyalty: “We struggle to retain customers or get repeat sales.“
Outside of the funnel, yet an equally important component to marketing challenges, is measurement:
- Analytics: “We’re not sure which marketing activities are driving results.”
By pinpointing where your marketing efforts are falling short, you can zoom in on what you need to focus on first, and how you will begin to layer tactics over time to solve your full-funnel marketing problems.
How a full-funnel strategy solves these problems
Once you understand where your marketing efforts are lacking, the next step is implementing a strategy that addresses these key problems. A full-funnel strategy ensures that you’re not just focusing on one aspect of your customer’s journey, but rather viewing the customer experience and your marketing plan holistically.
The customer journey is far from simple nowadays—60% of consumers take 6 or more actions before they make a purchase. Which is why it’s crucial to understand the marketing funnel and how your specific audience moves through it.
The core areas of the marketing funnel are broken down into the following:
Awareness
Building brand awareness is the first step in any marketing strategy. It’s about awareness through storytelling, ensuring that your potential customers know who you are and what you offer.
Your tactics should revolve around solving this problem: “We’re not getting enough exposure to new potential customers.”
This can be achieved through a variety of “TOFU” or Top of Funnel marketing tactics, including social media, reach-based PPC channels like paid social, programmatic and video, and traditional paid media like radio, print, and event sponsorship.
Consideration
At the consideration stage, your potential customers are evaluating their options. They’ve heard about your brand, have likely seen a display ad, social media post, or video from you. They’ve likely even visited your site at this point. Now it’s time to ensure that your audience finds the information they need and views your business as a viable solution to their problem.
Your tactics should revolve around solving this problem: “Visitors don’t stay on our site long enough to engage with our content.”
Here, you’ll want to use “MOFU” or Middle of Funnel marketing tactics, including SEO, content, digital PR and paid social/video to establish your brand’s topical authority. This ensures website visitors are eager to engage with your content when they land, and see you as a subject matter expert.
Conversion
Converting leads into customers is often the most challenging part of the funnel. Aligning your message with the specific target audience is essential here. You’ll also want to ensure a positive, seamless user experience with your business so that once your potential customers are ready to make a decision, they choose you over your competitors.
Your tactics should revolve around solving this problem: “We’re getting traffic, but it’s not converting into leads.”
Here, you’ll want to use “BOFU” or Bottom of Funnel marketing tactics, including conversion-focused PPC channels like search and social, and UX/CX website design. Targeting qualified users and driving them to conversion-optimized landing pages will be crucial to generating qualified leads at a positive ROI.
Loyalty
The journey doesn’t end with an initial inquiry, or one-time purchase. Building customer loyalty requires ongoing engagement and support to ensure you establish long-term relationships and a strong customer lifetime value for your business.
Your tactics should revolve around solving this problem: “We struggle to retain customers or get repeat sales.”
Here, you’ll want to use “BOFU” or Bottom of Funnel marketing tactics, including remarketing campaigns across search and social, and email marketing. These tactics will ensure your funnel continues to stay active as customers reach the last stage.
What’s missing from the funnel?
Analytics
Throughout all stages of the funnel, it’s important to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By understanding which strategies are working and which aren’t, you can continually improve ROI from your marketing efforts. This starts with understanding the top analytics tools you should be using for your business.
Your measurement tactics should revolve around solving this problem: “We’re not sure which marketing activities are driving results.”
The seoplus+ marketing funnel
If we were to apply this plan to an seoplus+ client, we would work with them to plan out their holistic strategy with these various marketing services in mind:
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Now, where to get started?
In reality, it’s daunting to think about covering every single aspect of the funnel on day 1. We get that, and like all things in marketing, it’s best to start simple and scale once you’ve identified what works.
With our clients, we start by identifying what their #1 marketing problem is. If it’s a MOFU problem like “visitors don’t stay on our site long enough to engage with our content.”, we develop a primary strategy that revolves around solving this problem for them.
For example, our client Trellis faced the problem of generating qualified website traffic. To solve this problem, we focused on a MOFU content, SEO and link-building strategy. As a result, we increased their traffic by 132%, which then resulted in a 23% increase in booked meetings with prospects. Staying focused on their #1 problem allowed us to drive more qualified traffic, which resulted in more appointment bookings lower down in the funnel.
Once the #1 problem is identified and a foundation has been set, we then incorporate other marketing tactics to build our full-funnel marketing strategy. This long-term approach is more flexible, puts your priority marketing challenge first, and builds off initial success so that you can achieve a more profitable ROI.
Holistic marketing ensures long-term success
A full-funnel marketing strategy is a necessity for businesses that want to achieve long-term success and scalable ROI. By addressing the unique challenges at each stage of the funnel and tailoring your approach to your industry and your customers, you can create a holistic marketing strategy that drives real results.
At seoplus+, we specialize in helping businesses implement data-driven marketing strategies that cover every stage of the funnel.
If you’re ready to elevate your marketing efforts and achieve sustainable growth, contact us to discuss how our holistic approach can make a difference for your business.
