Successful Full Funnel Marketing Strategies for Startups

Successful full-funnel marketing strategies drive awareness, educate your audience and convert them to leads simultaneously using a variety of channels. Mobile devices (yes, your smartphone) make it easier for marketers to connect instantly with their audience. 

How you decide to send the message to them that your startup or business solves the need they’re looking for makes the difference. 

Read more below to discover top full-funnel marketing strategies. 

Full Funnel Marketing Strategies: What Does It Entail?

Firstly, we need to break down what full-funnel marketing is and how that affects your startup. 

HubSpot presented the inbound marketing concept, which attracts customers by creating personal experiences. This approach emphasizes cultivating relationships and focusing on how your audience feels. It takes visitors by what’s called a buyers journey, from the top of your marketing strategies through the bottom to convert to a lead and paying customer. 

The inbound methodology is home to three major components: 

• Attract – You want to catch the right people’s attention by offering value. This establishes you as a trusted authority in your industry.
• Engage – You present insights and solutions that align with your customer’s pain points and provide valuable solutions.
• Delight – You provide support to empower your customers further to find success in their journey. 

You want to create marketing campaigns for each stage to make your efforts as personable as possible. With this approach, you’ll get the opportunity to gain quality leads while evolving as a business to fine-tune your brand image.

Full Funnel Marketing Strategies for Your Startup 

There are many different ways to execute a full-funnel marketing strategy. Here’s how your startup can get the most out of the funnel. 

Top of Funnel: Attract

At the top of the funnel, you want to attract visitors by providing a baseline of education regarding topics they’d care about. You want to make them aware of: 

• Your business and overall brand
• What you offer
• How you stand out from the crowd
• Why they should learn more about your business

Here, you have the opportunity to create value to show them who you are and what challenges you’re solving.  

Most startups work with thin budgets and are on tight timelines to show a positive marketing ROI. As startups experience the market for the first time, they leverage market research to test and discover what strategies, channels and messages will best reach and resonate with their customers. This process takes time, patience and research-backed full funnel marketing strategies to reach your audience. 

Additionally, some great avenues include:

• SEO – Optimizations for search engines are your best bet for optimal success. Optimizing your website and any additional content goes a long way. SEO is how your content appears in front of the right audience at the right time. 
• Social Media – Obtaining a cohesive online presence with strong user engagement is crucial. This is an excellent way to get your brand visible while growing a following organically or for a tiny budget. 
• Video Ads – Video advertising generates awareness through quick and easily digestible bite-sized content. It’s a creative and fun way to get in front of your audience while providing snippets of value. 

Middle of Funnel: Engage

The middle of the funnel helps to convert visitors to leads. Here are some strategies to get the most out of this stage:

• Landing Page Copy – Compelling landing page copy paired with an enticing offer, like a free trial, is excellent for converting visitors into leads. Don’t forget to include a gated form to collect pertinent information for periodic communications, like visitor’s emails. 
• Case Studies – The goal is to nudge your leads toward a purchase decision; typically, a case study will help leads self-qualify.
• Customer Testimonials – Honest feedback helps your business grow. Asking for customer testimonials and leveraging them provides future visitors with information from the actual experiences your customers had with your product. 
• Blogs – Targeted content satisfies a specific consumer’s need while, you guessed it, providing immense value. Truly, blogs can be utilized for any funnel stage, depending on your content and how you pitch the value. 

Bottom of Funnel: Delight

Here is where you want to nurture your leads and keep them around for the long haul. So, here’s how you can achieve that:

• Personalized Email Marketing – This approach is one of the more effective ways to reach out to your leads. From gift cards (who doesn’t like free coffee?) to promotional offers and discounts to testimonial videos and more, you have ample opportunity to provide custom value with email marketing. Research what they are looking for and feed them confidence that you have the answers. 
• Marketing Automation – Utilizing this option drives leads, develops automated workflows, and gains insights into your audience’s engagement with your business.  
• A/B Testing – When selecting distribution channels, startups administer tests before committing to more significant spending. This is where you measure marketing efforts rigorously from day one, tracking data points like lead sources, conversion rates, and costs per lead.

Developing Full-Funnel Marketing Strategies with Lake One

Overall, startups should revisit their marketing funnels and ensure they’re taking advantage of a full-funnel marketing approach to make their small budgets stretch as far as possible. It is essential to understand a startup’s inherent biases to be able to make rational channel decisions and allow a startup marketing team to succeed in the long run.

Interested in starting a full funnel marketing strategy? Lake One can offer assistance. Reach out to our marketing experts today to get started on your full-funnel journey.