6 Key Reasons Why Now Is a Critical Time for Marketers To Lean into Full Funnel Marketing

By Kurt Genden
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
TrueVoice Growth Marketing™
LinkedIn Profile

The concept of full funnel marketing has been around for years, but most companies in highly regulated industries have been unable to overcome the organizational and technological barriers to implementing it effectively.  

Full funnel marketing is not just a campaign strategy; it’s a total shift in how marketing works. It is impactful, measurable, and profitable, but it demands unparalleled access to first-party data and aligning a company’s operational model to synchronize people, processes, and technologies. Only then can this close cross-functional collaboration and a single source of data harness the complete range of marketing capabilities to increase the impact of every campaign.*

Full funnel marketing leverages every part of the journey, at every stage of the funnel, in real time to increase and optimize demand; build and convert more qualified leads; and better retain and grow clients. Most importantly, it enables the Chief Marketing Officer to provide the C-suite with a much richer and more complete picture of how exactly marketing is driving growth.

Here are the six key reasons why now is a critical time for marketers to lean into full funnel marketing:

1. Own Your Own Audience. The outsourcing of audiences to ad platforms is no longer a viable option. Paid media returns have recently plateaued or declined, thanks to inflation in digital media costs and customer saturation in some highly targeted ad networks. To improve their marketing efficiency ratio, companies need a strategy to own their own audience.
   

2. First-Party Data Is in Your Future. First-party data is the holy grail in a cookie-less world.  Because cookies will be going away as data concerns mount, marketers need to find other means by which customer access, identification, targeting, and nurturing can happen.
   

3. Transformation Requires Agility. Technology alone does not transform. As part of digital transformation agendas, organizations have invested in MarTech stacks, but have failed to align people and operating models to fully optimize funnel journeys. In the fast-paced digital world, they lack the agility to test, learn, and scale.
   

4. There Is an Urgent Need To Break Down Organizational Silos. Full funnel marketing can’t be done effectively without close collaboration among all stakeholders, including brand managers, sales teams, performance marketers, and analytics and finance teams. Companies need to establish a shared operating model along the customer funnel -- a model where insights are shared from across the funnel and decisions are made jointly on everything, including key performance indicators (KPIs), spending levels, and which audiences to target and when.
   

5. Embrace the Full Funnel. Without the ability to measure and understand full funnel journeys, companies will find it difficult to be where their customers are. Companies looking to substantially improve acquisition marketing need to shift from a focus on touchpoints to assessing the end-to-end buying experience – enabling marketers to immediately fine-tune messaging along the funnel journey.
   

6. Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) Drive Deeper Insights. AI/ML enables deeper analysis of full funnel data. Full funnel marketing inherently generates large amounts of data. Organizations will need to begin to shift the usage away from simple report delivery to leveraging AI and ML technology to uncover insights and provide forecasting and predictive analytics.

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*Source: McKinsey & Company, Marketing & Sales -- Our Insights: Why every business needs a full funnel marketing strategy