Full Funnel Marketing Strategy Guide: Funnel Stages + Tips

Adaptation is a necessity—in life and in business. For instance, specially tailored marketing efforts prove more effective at addressing customers at each unique stage of the buyer journey.

Online ads make potential customers aware of your brand, while direct email marketing targets customers who already know about your products but are unsure whether to buy. To adopt a holistic strategy that meets consumers where they are for each phase of the buyer journey, consider the full funnel marketing approach.

Learn what full funnel marketing strategies are, why they work, and how to use them to develop effective marketing campaigns.

What are the stages in a full funnel marketing strategy?

• Top of funnel (ToFu)
• Middle of funnel (MoFu)
• Bottom of funnel (BoFu)

Full funnel marketing is how a business follows and motivates a prospective customer, from the point when they learn about a product or service to the moment that they make a purchase. It begins by visualizing a marketing funnel, the route a potential customer travels, and the steps they pass along the way. A marketing funnel breaks down into three main stages:

Top of funnel (ToFu)

This initial awareness stage of a full funnel strategy is where people who’ve just heard about your brand begin to take notice. The goal at this point is to get as much of your target audience as possible to learn about your products or services.

Some of the most common marketing tactics at this stage include social media ads, Google ads, and influencer-led social media posts. This is the point where you’re casting your widest net, trying to nurture leads, but still focusing on the target audience most likely to turn into customers.

Middle of funnel

The middle of the funnel, or the consideration stage, is about developing deeper relationships with the potential customers you attracted in the awareness stage. Those are the potential customers who may want your products or services. They are considering making a purchase and weighing their options. At this stage, you can show them why your products are viable solutions. Content marketing (which may include tutorials and explainer videos) offers an effective strategy at this stage because potential customers often have questions that informative content can answer. Additionally, consider amplifying customer testimonials and success stories that address customer pain points.

Tori Dunlap, the founder of the financial education platform Her First $100K, had early success on TikTok, getting about 100,000 emails from an organic TikTok post in seven days. “I still market to those people,” she says on an episode of Shopify Masters, but she didn’t stop there. “You then have to start thinking, What is the funnel after that?” That’s when she started to move prospects down her funnel by getting them onto a mailing list.

Bottom of funnel

The bottom of the funnel, or the conversion stage, is the final point in a full funnel approach. Your focus here is to engage prospects and convert leads you developed in the earlier stages to get them to make a purchase. At this point, your focus is to remove any last hesitation a potential customer might have and make the path to purchase as easy as possible.

Think of it as a time when you want to reduce any unnecessary friction. A clear landing page and live chat support can both be helpful. You might also want to try some retargeting ads and abandoned cart reminders for those who might still need one final nudge.

In addition to these three main stages, some marketers also include two post-purchase stages: the loyalty stage, where existing customers make repeat purchases, and the advocacy stage, where satisfied customers actively promote the brand through referrals or positive reviews.

Reasons to use a full funnel marketing strategy

Full funnel marketing helps businesses think through the length of their customers’ journey and come up with the most effective tactics for each stage. Different tactics might be more suitable to engage prospects than to convert leads or drive conversions.

Thinking through the length of a marketing funnel lets marketers build a cohesive strategy with differentiated tactics for every stage, improving lead quality and converting potential customers. Seeing the results from key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rates and conversion rates, for different stages can also help marketers know where to focus their efforts.

For example, they might find that running social media ads at the top of the funnel works better than content marketing in the middle funnel, especially if the consideration period for their products is especially short, as is often the case for low-cost purchases like graphic t-shirts, branded tote bags, or other trendy accessories. Having this type of data lets marketers make more informed decisions on where to concentrate their marketing efforts, how to lower their customer acquisition cost (CAC), and how increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

How to develop a full funnel marketing campaign

1. Define your goal
2. Know your audience
3. Choose your channels
4. Monitor performance

To develop a full funnel marketing campaign, you can start by imagining the customer journey. Using the example of VeFuel, a hypothetical plant-based protein shake company, here’s how you might develop a full funnel marketing strategy:

1. Define your goal

Having a clear, concrete goal at the beginning helps you determine the right marketing message, the correct channels, and how to measure performance. In this hypothetical example, VeFuel is trying to increase its online sales of a new flavorless protein shake by 25% during the next 90 days.

2. Know your audience

Learning who your audience is, their spending habits, and the challenges facing them lets you speak persuasively to them. VeFuel’s target audience, in this case, is active, health-conscious women ages 25 to40 who care about clean eating and fitness.

3. Choose your channels

Now that you know what your goals are and who your audience is, you can build a full funnel marketing strategy, selecting the most suitable marketing channels for each stage. Visualizing the full marketing funnel when developing a marketing campaign lets you create a cohesive strategy that is aligned across all three stages of the funnel as follows:

• Top of funnel. In VeFuel’s case, some ToFu channels could be TikTok and Instagram. Paid ads and sponsored content in partnership with fitness influencers can help get the word out on your brand and your new flavor. Your goal at this point is to reach the broadest audience and create awareness of your new flavor and your brand.
• Middle of funnel. As you start to get potential customers moving through the MoFu stage, you can engage them with tutorials and customer testimonials on how your new flavorless protein shake is the right answer for their needs. At this point, you can target your potential customers with relevant content such as protein shake recipes, workout tips, and blog posts that highlight the benefits of a flavorless formula.
• Bottom of funnel. Once customers reach the bottom of the funnel, do anything you can to make the process smoother and increase a sense of urgency to buy. You can send cart abandonment alerts with limited-time offers (e.g., “24 hours to claim your discount”), or use artificial intelligence to set up an AI chatbot to answer customer questions in the checkout flow.

4. Monitor performance

You can track several KPIs to see how your campaign is doing. For some of the top-of-funnel strategies, you can measure online traffic, video views, and impressions. As you move down the funnel, you can keep an eye on email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction through post-purchase surveys. There is a lot of valuable data to gather at every step to help you make data-driven decisions and refine your campaign.

One good indicator to watch is customer lifetime value, which measures how much your business can expect to earn from any one customer throughout your entire relationship with them. In VeFuel’s case, a low conversion rate might be offset by the number of people who subscribe to auto-refills of its protein powder.

Those types of repeat purchases can be particularly valuable for niche businesses like VeFuel, which might rely more on loyal customers and repeat business than on a large number of one-time buyers, who generally come with higher acquisition costs.