In a world of internet, smart phones, and AI marketing, the buyer’s journey is no longer linear. Marketers have had to adjust their digital marketing game to capture the attention of potential buyers as they’re bombarded with information from multiple channels.

The process of driving leads is no longer as straightforward as it once was. We’ll show you what’s changed and how adopting a full-funnel marketing strategy is essential for success.

What is the Marketing Funnel?

The marketing funnel is a visual representation of the most straightforward path a buyer can take to purchase. Think of it like an inverted pyramid, with the widest part being the “awareness” stage and the most narrow the “retention” stage.

• Awareness: This is where you build brand recognition and grab the attention of potential customers with engaging content.
• Consideration: Marketing strategy at this point is focused on wowing target customers with more detail about your brand. Stand out from the crowd of competitors with important educational information about your product or service.
• Conversion: At this stage, the consumer is ready to buy. Your focus is on giving them the extra push they need to choose your brand over the competition.
• Retention: This is the smallest group in the funnel—previous buyers. Strategy for this phase should focus on retargeting and encouraging customers to choose your product or service again.

The Full-Funnel Approach

In this digital age, the buyer journey spans across multiple channels—often simultaneously. Traditional single channel advertising is becoming less effective as consumers’ attention is increasingly divided.

A full-funnel approach that engages potential buyers through multiple touchpoints and builds brand awareness, interest and purchasing at the same time is much more effective.

A full-funnel marketing strategy helps you nurture new leads end-to-end while also creating a more meaningful experience for existing customers. It helps you better track the journey your customers take before converting, giving you a clear picture of which strategies work and which ones fall flat.

Understanding your customers’ motivations and intent helps you carve out an approach that captures customers across all stages of the funnel by creating strategic brand visibility in the right time and the right place to drive digital action.

Track impressions and reach to find out who is getting your messages. Measure clickthrough rates and website clicks to determine whether your content is engaging consumers. And finally, track your total conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion and ROI to decide which marketing channels are most effective and give the most bang for your buck.

The Full Funnel in Action

The full-funnel approach isn’t just a smarter way to market—it drives better results as well. When Oodle took over the UC Online account, for the University of Cincinnati, we launched a full-funnel strategy with touchpoints at each stage across multiple platforms. And not only did we increase first-time visitor traffic, but we also produced increases across marketing periods on leads generated through digital form completions.

An effective full-funnel strategy like ours focuses on reaching consumers in each stage of the journey through different tactics and messaging. Here’s what works at each level:

1. Awareness: Content Marketing to Build Brand Recognition
   Brand awareness isn’t only about generating new leads—it’s also about growing a relationship with those who’ve already shown an interest in your brand. Social media ads, blog posts, video and programmatic prospecting banners can engage your audience and entice them to take the next step.
   For UC Online, we launched a brand awareness campaign with messaging that shared the depth of the brand and carved out the online university as its own entity.
2. Consideration: Help Consumers Choose You
   Much of your audience already knows who you are, but what sets you apart from the competition? Strengthen your brand’s visibility and win over consumers with tactics like paid search advertising, direct email marketing and social media marketing.
   Oodle was handed 36 individual programs with their own lead goals for UC Online. To reinforce the UC Online brand, we focused on retargeting, lookalike, interest and demographic-based targeting. With program-specific campaigns, we created multiple touchpoints across the entire digital ecosystem.
3. Conversion: Encourage Action
   The buyer journey isn’t complete until your lead clicks “purchase” or completes that form. Utilizing paid ads and retargeting campaigns can help push leads into action.
   Using multi-platform ads, Oodle drove traffic to specific program landing pages with a clear user experience pathway for users qualified and ready to convert. This reduced browsing time and increased form conversions.

Oodle’s full-funnel marketing strategy for UC Online achieved some stunning results. In just one year, we saw:

• 430 million viewed impressions on awareness ads
• An 809% increase in traffic
• Over 800 first-time visitors to the site

Not to brag, but… whoa! Want to learn more about our UC Online campaign and how we kicked full-funnel butt? We’d love to walk you through our approach and chat about how we can help improve your digital marketing strategy, too.