Full-funnel marketing represents a fundamental shift in how marketing strategies are developed and executed, moving beyond just a campaign approach to a comprehensive, integrated process.

Marketing often operates in two distinct domains: traditional brand building, typically led by broad-reach channels like TV, and performance marketing, which focuses on measurable online activities and data-driven strategies. These two approaches often conflict, with performance marketers emphasizing short-term gains through targeted actions, while brand builders argue for the long-term value of customer engagement. However, this divide often leads to inefficiencies, as companies struggle to reconcile these two strategies.

A key challenge in traditional brand-building efforts is the difficulty in measuring impact. Without clear metrics, it’s challenging to demonstrate the value of brand awareness campaigns, which can lead to a disproportionate focus on performance marketing. This imbalance overlooks the long-term benefits that brand-building investments bring, such as customer loyalty and higher lifetime value. Research shows that customers who feel an emotional connection to a brand tend to be more loyal and valuable over time, compared to those who are attracted by short-term digital ads or keyword searches.

To address these challenges, leading organizations are adopting full-funnel marketing, which combines brand-building efforts with performance marketing strategies. This approach integrates various marketing functions—such as media spending, customer targeting, and performance measurement—into a cohesive strategy. By linking brand-building and performance activities, companies can optimize their marketing efforts across all stages of the customer journey. For example, investing in personalized email campaigns or addressable TV can amplify the effectiveness of other marketing activities, such as social media ads, leading to higher overall engagement and conversion rates.

A data-driven full-funnel marketing approach can significantly enhance marketing return on investment (ROI). By reallocating media spend to higher-return areas and continuously optimizing campaigns, marketers can achieve a 15 to 20 percent lift in ROI. Moreover, campaigns that integrate both brand-building and performance marketing elements tend to yield a higher overall return on ad spend compared to focusing solely on performance channels.

In conclusion, full-funnel marketing is essential for businesses aiming to drive sustainable growth. By integrating brand-building with performance marketing, companies can create more meaningful connections with customers, improve measurement accuracy, and increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Although the concept of full-funnel marketing has existed for some time, many companies have struggled to overcome organizational and technological barriers that prevent effective implementation. However, there are several key reasons why now is the ideal time for marketers to fully embrace this strategy.

First, the returns from performance marketing have recently plateaued or even declined. This decline is largely due to rising digital media costs and customer saturation in highly targeted ad markets. Additionally, the widespread availability of automation tools has led to the commoditization of performance marketing execution, making it increasingly difficult to achieve a competitive edge in this space.

The need for full-funnel marketing has become even more pressing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly altered consumer behavior. In the past year, over 60% of consumers reported trying new shopping behaviors, driven by economic pressures, store closures, or shifting priorities. Of this group, one-third experimented with different brands. This shift in consumer behavior, coupled with the increased emphasis on a brand’s purpose as a key purchase driver, highlights how customer expectations are changing. With this new data, marketers now have a valuable opportunity to better understand customer preferences and decision-making patterns across the entire funnel, making it easier to attract new customers and foster loyalty among existing ones.

Four Essentials of Full-Funnel Marketing

While the structure of a full-funnel marketing program will vary depending on the marketer's goals—whether launching a new product, repositioning a brand, or driving in-quarter sales—there are four essential elements that all successful full-funnel marketing strategies should incorporate:

1. Brand-Building Measurement

Traditional TV ads, which have long been central to brand-building campaigns, have struggled with tracking challenges. While they offer the potential to reach large audiences and elicit emotional responses, their limited flexibility makes it difficult for marketers to gather detailed insights into how these campaigns influence consumer behavior.

However, this is beginning to change. Consumers are increasingly migrating toward internet TV and digital streaming services, including audio platforms, which provide marketers with far greater visibility into who is viewing or listening to their ads. These platforms also allow for the customization of ads for different households watching or listening to the same program. This shift has been accelerated by the pandemic, with 33% of consumers in Europe and 41% in the United States reporting increased usage of online streaming services.

Moreover, new measurement techniques for brand campaigns have emerged, allowing marketers to move beyond outdated methods like brand trackers and basic reach/frequency metrics:

• Addressable TV and Audio: Even with traditional TV viewing, technologies like set-top boxes and smart TVs provide insights into who has viewed specific ads. Content-recognition technology, linked to unique IP addresses, enables a more direct connection between ad exposure and consumer actions.

• Digital ‘Brand Lift’ Surveys: Unlike traditional brand trackers, these mobile-based surveys measure upper-funnel metrics such as brand awareness and favorability in near-real time. They can be tied directly to specific ad exposures and can distinguish between groups exposed to ads and those who have not.

• Attribution Tools: Using ad logs, these tools track when and where a specific group of consumers views an ad and the actions they take afterwards. For example, they can measure whether search queries, website visits, or social media mentions increase following a TV spot airing in a particular area or demographic. These tools offer more reliable data than qualitative surveys by correlating real-world actions with ad exposure.

By leveraging these new measurement approaches, marketers can gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of their brand-building efforts and better connect upper-funnel activities with consumer behavior.

2. A Unified Set of KPIs

Linking key performance indicators (KPIs) across channels and stages of the funnel to actual business outcomes, such as conversions or leads, allows companies to gain a clearer understanding of the real impact of their marketing efforts. This helps them craft more effective messaging that elicits optimal responses. For instance, if unaided brand awareness is on the rise, marketers can assess whether this increase is leading to higher website traffic or digital purchases. Additionally, it’s important to analyze whether brand-building efforts are encouraging more consumers to conduct branded searches, which typically have a lower cost-per-click compared to generic product-category searches.

Having a unified set of KPIs also enables marketers to determine how different touchpoints across the funnel influence one another and identify the metrics that are most critical to business success. If brand-building campaigns are leading to more website conversions or branded search queries, this provides clear evidence that further investment in brand-building could be highly beneficial. By linking KPIs across the funnel, marketers can identify the most impactful interactions and make informed decisions about how to adjust or reallocate marketing spend to maximize results.

3. An Updated Media Mix Model for Integrated Spending

Media mix models (MMMs) have long been used by marketers to assess campaign performance and allocate marketing budgets effectively. While MMMs have proven valuable in guiding allocation decisions, they have limitations. These models often rely on long look-back periods to evaluate the impact of various types of spending, which makes them less responsive to short-term changes, such as shifts in campaign performance or consumer behavior influenced by external factors. Moreover, MMMs can lack granularity in their recommendations, sometimes overlooking nuances in channel behavior. For example, a model might recommend increasing paid search spending on branded search terms even when a brand already appears in nearly all search results.

Furthermore, MMMs typically don't provide detailed insights into which channels or platforms should be credited for customer conversions. Approximately 30% of marketers report that these challenges hinder their ability to effectively measure and optimize campaign performance, particularly those with large budgets.

To make MMMs more accurate and better aligned with a full-funnel marketing strategy, organizations should enhance them with additional inputs, such as incrementality tests and multitouch attribution (MTA) models. Regular incrementality tests, which involve running structured experiments with a control group of consumers who aren’t shown ads, offer more granular and near-real-time insights into the effectiveness of specific channels. These tests help marketers better assess the true impact of their campaigns and adjust attribution accordingly. Advances in technology and analytics have made incrementality tests easier and more affordable to implement, although they can still be time-consuming to scale across multiple channels.

Additionally, improvements in MTA models, combined with audience propensity scoring, enable more precise attribution. This helps determine the value of different channels or tactics. For instance, if a campaign on a particular social media platform converts consumers with a high propensity to purchase, that channel would be assigned a lower "incrementality multiplier," reflecting its lesser contribution to driving new demand.

4. A Full-Funnel Operating Model

Implementing full-funnel marketing requires a comprehensive, top-to-bottom integration across the entire marketing function. It cannot simply be added as a supplementary task to existing processes. The transformation of the operating model necessitates changes in multiple aspects of marketing, but four key areas must be prioritized to ensure success:

Incentives for Full-Funnel Performance
To establish measurement rigor as a core aspect of the marketing culture, marketers should be held accountable and rewarded for achieving clearly defined engagement or revenue goals. These goals should be grounded in a unified set of KPIs that reflect full-funnel performance, such as overall brand awareness and total website traffic. Additionally, KPIs should measure incremental value, like additional traffic resulting from A/B testing or increased revenue driven by brand campaigns, according to the media mix model.

Cross-Functional Collaboration
Full-funnel marketing requires seamless collaboration across all stakeholders, including brand managers, performance marketing leaders, analytics teams, and finance. For productive interaction, many organizations have implemented weekly meetings or huddles where insights from all stages of the funnel are shared, and joint decisions are made regarding KPIs, budget allocations, and target audiences.

Deeper Collaboration Between Media Agencies and Partners
Marketers often have an incomplete understanding of their agencies' roles and the value they are accountable for. This gap can be addressed through closer collaboration, ensuring that marketers maintain ownership of their user-level data and engage in rapid testing and iteration. Media agencies should be pushed to create integrated ad buys that leverage both brand-building and performance marketing channels, providing a unified approach to campaign execution.

Adoption of Test-and-Learn Capabilities by Brand Marketers
The rapid test-and-learn methodologies common to performance marketing teams should be extended to mid- and upper-funnel marketing efforts. Brand marketers can use these techniques to quickly test personalized creative content and optimize videos or ads shown to consumers. This approach, which has been shown to be highly effective, helps ensure that brand campaigns are continually refined to maximize their impact.

Conclusion

Full-funnel marketing is more than just a campaign strategy; it represents a fundamental shift in the way marketing operates. It requires seamless collaboration across teams to leverage the full spectrum of marketing capabilities, enhancing the effectiveness of all campaigns. By integrating brand-building efforts with performance-driven tactics, companies can create a more cohesive customer journey, fostering long-term loyalty and immediate conversions. Most importantly, it empowers the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to offer the C-suite a comprehensive and detailed view of how marketing directly contributes to business growth. This unified approach not only helps marketers optimize their strategies in real-time but also strengthens their ability to measure, track, and demonstrate the tangible value of their efforts, aligning marketing initiatives with overall business objectives. In a rapidly evolving landscape, adopting a full-funnel marketing model is essential for driving sustained success and staying ahead of the competition.