Why full funnel

Companies can become more relevant to their customers, establish a fuller and more accurate view of marketing and sales' overall efficacy, and generate more value using full-funnel approach.

The full funnel approach facilitates close team collaboration between the various marketing and sales functions to increase collective impact.

It also enables the CRO to provide his colleagues with a much richer and more complete picture of how exactly marketing and sales are driving growth.

Silos suffocate growth

Despite much sophisticated technology, most organizations are still struggling with the collaboration between marketing and sales. This often inhibits growth ambitions. Another gap exacerbates the problem: the division within the marketing function between traditional long-term brand building and digital performance marketing that generates measurable clicks and leads.

In the traditional model, the various marketing and sales functions work relatively independent, each focusing on a particular stage of the funnel from generating awareness to lead generation to lead closing - without the need for much interaction. This model is outdated, because nowadays purchasing is becoming increasingly self-directed. That means that most buyers prefer to do their research online and don't want to talk to a sales representative until very late in the buying process. Therefore, marketing and sales must be fully aligned to provide holistic and contextual support to prospects during their full buying cycle.

Brand purpose and CSR drive growth

Incorporating both brand-building and performance elements into campaigns has always increased ROI, but this is much more the case these days, with customers holding brands accountable for their wider social and ecological impact. The purpose of a brand is increasingly becoming an important reason to buy or remain loyal. This requires that all messages in the funnel are fully aligned - from corporate PR highlighting broader responsibility initiatives to the final sales stage highlighting specific user benefits.

Technology is all about integration

The modern digital landscape offers an abundance of tools to manage marketing and sales activities.

The purpose of your tech stack is to ensure that you are reaching the right prospect at the right time with the right message in the right place. Your funnel should be designed for how your customers buy, not how you sell. This requires an integrated tech stack. The easiest way to achieve integration is to rely on a single platform,.

This also makes it much easier to keep up-to-date with the latest developments.

For example, HubSpot started off with the traditional conversion funnel structure, supporting marketing efforts at the top of the funnel. Leads were then passed further down the funnel to the sales team.

Nowadays, they have moved to the next the level of integration: sales, marketing and services all facilitated through the flywheel model. The Flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience. With the flywheel model, the momentum of your happy customers is used to drive referrals and repeat sales. It's not a linear beginning and end, but rather a continuous cycle to better services customers and grow the business.

When it comes to your CRM and marketing automation platforms, make sure you have plenty of room to try out new features. For example, small experiments on how you can use integrated data from email and social channels an make a bif difference to strengthen your lead generation engine.

An often-overlooked aspect is mobile optimization. In light of Google's decision to use mobile rankings as a ranking factor, it's become critical for businesses to make sure their website is responsive, or at least mobile friendly. Google considers speed as one of its top search ranking factors; if your site takes too long to load on a mobile device, you risk losing users (and potential customers) due to slow page loads.

Chatbots need knowledge management

Providing personalized experiences through web sites is very hard to achieve. Through advances in Artificial Intelligence this is now possible to use messaging apps at scale to communicate on a 1:1 basis with prospects and customers.

While previously restricted to simple chatbots it is now possible to enter conversations with consumers or business customers the way they engage with their friends - through natural language in their preferred messaging channels such as WhatsApp or WeChat.

Conversational AI platforms such as LivePerson, facilitate the creation of meaningful, personalized connections through bots and human agents.

This can significantly reduce your customer care cost as well as optimizes your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) increasing your conversion rate by 50% or more. Obviously, this can only be achieved by giving the bot and the human agents access to the knowledge base of the company.

Knowledge management software such as eGain allows you to leverage or reuse existing content from a wide range of sources, such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, legacy content systems and CRM systems. Tight integration lowers the cost of maintaining the knowledge base.

Content and audience engagement

Relevant onsite content is still the best way to generate traffic and drive funnel growth.

Onsite content must speak to your ideal client and solve their biggest problems. They will come for that information.

Build an audience of loyal customers through great content is only the first step.

Enabling engaged users to share content on our channels is the logical follow up.

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PPC advertising and retargeting

Platforms like Google AdWords allow you to quickly target your ideal customer and reach them at their point of need. In exchange for access to gated content, they will provide their identity in the form of an email address.

Alternatively, through add retargeting capabilities (Google Display Network) you will be able to leverage your advertising budget by getting in front of these same prospects again when they're in need of more products or services. It's an effortless way to advertise to customers at every stage of their funnel growth, turning your customer base into repeat buyers and profit engine.

Off-site link building

Google loves authoritative links that point to your site. That's why offsite link building is so important, and why it's helpful to think of it as an offstage activity-something you do in parallel with your onsite optimization. While you're optimizing for keywords and making sure each page has its onsite SEO ducks in a row, work hard to create high-quality content that others will want to link to.

KPIs

Organizations can effectively understand the true impact of their marketing by linking KPIs between channels and stages of the funnel to actual business results, such as conversions or leads, and then create messages that will elicit the best responses by linking KPIs between channels and stages of the funnel to actual business results, such as conversions or leads. For example, if unaided brand awareness rises, what effect does this have on website traffic or digital transactions, if any? Are customers using branded search queries, which have a lower cost per click than generic product-category searches, as a result of brand-building efforts?

A unified view also aids marketers in determining how different touchpoints throughout the funnel interact with one another and identifying the most important indicators. If brand-building activities, for example, result in more website conversions or branded search searches, it's evident that investing in more branding will pay off. Only by linking KPIs can marketers find the interactions that are most closely linked to business value and begin making sensible decisions about how to adjust or rebalance their marketing expenditure.

Analytics

A full funnel approach aligns marketing and sales around common goals by creating a continuous feedback loop between sales data and marketing data.

Thanks to advances in analytics, the process of determining where credit for a customer conversion should go in Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) models has also been improved. When this is combined with audience-propensity scoring, it becomes easier to determine how beneficial a specific channel or technique is. If, for example, a campaign on a particular social-media platform converts customers who already have a strong propensity to buy, that channel is given a lower "incrementality multiplier."

Operating model

Full-funnel marketing requires a complete top-to-bottom integration of the marketing and sales function.

It can't just be added on to existing routines. It begins with a reconsideration of how work is done across departments. While changing an operating model necessitates adjustments in practically every aspect of the marketing function, there are four key areas to focus on:

• Collaboration amongst departments. Without strong collaboration among all stakeholders, including brand managers, performance-marketing executives, analytics marketers, and finance, full-funnel marketing will fail. Some succesful businesses have formed weekly huddles where data from across the funnel are exchanged and decisions are made collectively on everything, including KPIs, expenditure levels, and which audiences to target, in order to ensure fruitful interaction.
• A closer partnership between the marketing agency and the partner. Marketers frequently have a misunderstanding of what their agencies do and how much value they are responsible for. Not only does this require more active agency management, but it also necessitates closer coordination. This includes requiring marketers to own their user-level data rather than the agency, demanding on collaboration for rapid testing and iteration, and pressuring media providers to establish integrated ad buys that combine their brand-building and performance-marketing channels.
• Adoption of test-and-learn capabilities by brand marketers. The dynamic, rapid test-and-learn capabilities common to performance-marketing teams need to be extended to mid- and upper-funnel teams. Brand marketers can use these methodologies to rapidly test personalized creative and to optimize the videos or other consumer content ads that are delivered alongside, a tactic shown to be highly effective.

Incentives

To help make measurement rigor a core part of marketing's culture, marketers should be held accountable and rewarded for their ability to deliver on well-defined engagement or revenue goals. These should be based on both a unified set of KPIs tied to full-funnel performance, such as total brand awareness and total visitor traffic, and KPIs that measure incremental value, such as extra traffic coming from A/B testing or additional revenue driven by brand campaigns according to the MMM.

Marketers should be held accountable and rewarded for their ability to meet well-defined engagement or revenue goals, in order to help make measurement rigor a key element of marketing's culture. Rewards should be based on a unified set of KPIs tied to revenue generated.

Conclusion

The concept of full-funnel marketing and sales has been around for years, but most companies have not yet been able to implement it in a balanced way due to organizational and technological barriers.

At the top of the funnel there is the brand building's measurement problem which has triggered many CMOs to move their budget to lower parts of the funnel, because it is easier to justify. However, it is well-known that prospects that arrive at a site because of a keyword search or a social media ad, will be easier to convert if they are already aware of a brand and feel a connection with it.

A data-driven full-funnel marketing & sales strategy is a real growth engine.

For this strategy it is not necessary to spend more money at each point of the funnel. It's all about figuring out how each stage affects the others for a seamless customer experience. For example, how positive corporate publicity raising awareness can improve the impact of nurturing through e-mail marketing in the lower parts of the funnel.

About Growth Engine

At Growth Engine we believe that great ideas and products can only reach their potential through integrated marketing and sales.

We support business leaders with strategic advice and hands-on implementation in brand awareness building, lead generation, lead nurturing, consultative sales and we help build partner ecosystems to accelerate your growth.