Measurable Growth Marketing Success Means Measuring Across the Funnel

By Brock Pernice
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Connect with me on LinkedIn

Marketing and sales campaigns today are spread across channels like paid media, email, and social, creating a fragmented modern customer journey that’s anything but straightforward.  

A potential customer may view a Facebook post, watch a LinkedIn video, click a Google ad, sign up for a newsletter to get an offer, and scroll through thought leadership content — all before taking the plunge and deciding to connect with sales. 

And that’s just one example of the hundreds of journeys taking place at any given moment.

Can your organization accurately credit all the marketing touchpoints involved in an online conversion?

Can you trust the data you have to accurately inform your ongoing marketing investments?

For most organizations, the answer to both of those questions is no. 

In this article, we’ll explore how today’s organization can level up their attribution models and accurately match customer interaction with each channel, all in service of creating the most effective campaigns possible.

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This is the third article in a short series on the five keys to success in full-funnel growth marketing: 

• Know Your Audience
• Align Your Operating Model
• Measure Across the Funnel
• Test and Learn Method
• Manage Change

By the end of this article, you’ll understand what goes into measuring your marketing results across the funnel, and just how within reach that vision of the future is for your organization.

Have any questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to me at brock.pernice@truevoicegrowth.com.

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At TrueVoice Growth Marketing™, we’ve seen multi-touch full-funnel attribution create billions of dollars of value for our clients. In this model, each touchpoint across the entire sales cycle gets assigned an equal value, giving marketers a holistic, high-level look at the performance of their digital marketing mix. 

It’s a complex undertaking, but an achievable one. Here’s a brief look at the five best practices that can help you implement a full-funnel measurement strategy and take your organization from “guessing” to growth. 

1. Pay Attention Across All Your Touchpoints

When you dedicate weeks or months to a sales or digital marketing campaign only to see it struggle to nudge your company’s sales upwards. When you spend half of your budget orchestrating a paid media campaign, affiliate promotion, and email outreach to promote a service or product launch only to hear crickets on the big day. It’s disappointing when creative ideas and strategic plans fail to deliver ROI, isn’t it?

That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to sales and marketing data across all of your touch points. Because we often see companies spend too much time, energy, and resources into one part of the funnel, such as the initial stages of awareness and consideration while neglecting the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, which is equally important in driving conversions. A full-funnel attribution model divides your efforts evenly between each part of the customer’s buying cycle so you can see your impact on the entire buying journey.

2. Nurture Your Prospects and Your Customers 

Full-funnel attribution is occasionally called linear attribution, but that’s a little misleading because customer journeys are never linear with a clearcut start and end. Converting a lead into a customer actually marks the beginning of an exciting new opportunity, not the end. Which is why nurturing your prospects and customers must be a priority. 

If you want to transform your existing customers into loyal followers — a smart move at any time because it’s much easier to remarket to your existing high-quality customers than spend effort chasing new ones — invest in the relationship with content and offers.

Leverage customer analytics to understand who your customers are, what they want, and why they want it, and thank them for supporting your company with just the right mix of incentives. For example, special webinars, exclusive thought leadership content, or gift cards for relevant brands can inspire customers to come back for more. 

3. Harness Advanced Analytics Tools 

Instead of thinking of marketing channels and platforms as weighted opportunities, a full-funnel attribution model asks you to treat them equally — and make sure they work in harmony. You need to choose a comprehensive analytics tech stack that allows you to easily integrate disparate marketing data sources into a singular full funnel view and understand how your touchpoints contribute to the customer journey.

Data has always driven digital. But today, predictive, actionable data is the life blood of marketing. AI and ML are the tools that make it possible to make sense of the campaign generated data and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. The tool should allow you to seamlessly connect data across all marketing platforms, operationalize your business value through more effective marketing ops, and make data accessible to everyone in your organization, even the non-technical stakeholders. 

4. Align Silos and Rally the Team

Every analytics tool you adopt will tell a distinct chapter of a larger narrative. But if your sales or marketing efforts are divided between teams that specialize in social media, organic content, paid media, or inside sales, it will create a data silo where everyone sees their own narrative and can’t grasp the whole story. In fact, Deloitte and Forrester Consulting report that two in five companies say aggregating siloed data and content from multiple systems is a top challenge.

A multi-touch full-funnel approach syncs up every member of your marketing and sales team. Each marketing channel will have equal weight, enabling teams to support each other’s production process and standardize the messaging, and ultimately helping customers form a cohesive impression of a brand no matter where they enter the funnel. 

5. Analyze, Experiment, and Improve

As a marketer, you’re under tremendous pressure to demonstrate ROI and prove to your company’s executives that their marketing dollars are well-spent. But it can be really difficult to pull that whole picture together when you’re confronted with data silos, inaccurate information, and disjointed marketing operations. 

A full-funnel attribution model gives you an informed understanding of how effectively your overall marketing strategy contributes to conversions. And once you’ve strategized, implemented, and analyzed a complete round of full-funnel growth marketing, you can then experiment with new marketing ideas and see if there is any difference in impact with a “test and learn” approach. You have the accurate data and insights you need to understand when it’s time for a resource reallocation if specific channels aren’t working as a touchpoint in attracting high-quality leads or assisting leads down the funnel to drive revenue for your brand. 

Measure Across the Funnel to Understand How Your Funnel Works

Guessing won’t lead to growth. Even if you’re getting acceptable results from your digital marketing mix now, you’re leaving a lot of potential on the table by not implementing a full-funnel measurement strategy. Slow down and look at the big picture of your funnel — we guarantee it will help you speed up your growth. 

Ready to grow by aligning your operating model? Request a discovery session with TrueVoice Growth Marketing™.

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Full funnel growth marketing is the only way to achieve your organization’s full potential. Download our latest white paper to understand the five keys you can use to turn marketing into a revenue center: