How to Create a Stellar Digital Marketing Strategy

• Mybusiness Filings
• 16 Sep 2222
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• Digital Marketing

The average customer journey is not linear. 

Let’s say you run a restaurant for example. A prospect might typically start by searching for ‘Restaurants Near Me’ on search engines and find your business. Another prospect might get a referral from your existing customers in their network to try out your meals. Meanwhile, a new lead has stumbled on one of your social media posts and is trying to know more about your brand. 

At each of these touchpoints, they might also be in different stages of their user journey. Perhaps the prospect getting the referral is now considering your business because they’ve previously seen your ad. The prospect with the search query might also just be ready to place that order immediately. 

This is why it’s important to create an all-around digital marketing strategy. Your digital marketing should drive awareness and demand across multiple channels simultaneously. 

In this article, we’ll look at how you can create a stellar digital marketing strategy by accounting for each stage of the customer journey funnel. 

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What Does it Mean to Create a Full-Funnel Strategy?

A full-funnel marketing strategy is simply tailoring all your marketing efforts to every stage of the user journey to help you reach prospects across more potential purchase paths.

At the moment, there are three stages of the user funnel:

1. Top, 
2. Middle, and 
3. Bottom. 

Top of the Funnel – This is also referred to as the awareness stage. It is where you gather as many leads as possible and grow their interest in your brand. 

Middle of the Funnel – Popularly called the consideration stage is where your prospects are already aware of your offerings. Your marketing efforts here are geared towards showing what distinguishes you from the competition.

Bottom of the Funnel – which is the conversion stage is where the prospect is ready to take an action by either purchasing your product or paying for your service. 

Now since your customers require different messaging, creativity, and approach in each stage, you’d have to reach them wherever they are with the right marketing tactic. The entire process is what we call a full-funnel marketing approach. 

Creating Top Funnel Strategies

When a user is on top of the sales funnel. You’re simply putting your brand out there to increase your visibility. The prospects at this stage are gathering information about their needs and looking out for companies that exist to fill that needs. So by making these prospects aware of your brand, they can then add you to their list. 

While many businesses focus on putting their marketing efforts at the other stages of the funnel because they convert, the top of the funnel allows you to build trust. You should also prioritize marketing at this stage because;

• You establish a quality connection with your prospects
• It helps solidify your business branding
• You’d always be on the top of their mind for your niche
• You will bring in more qualified leads
• It helps ease the marketing efforts across other stages
• There’s lesser competition at this stage compared to other funnel stages

Top of the Funnel Marketing Strategies

1. Content Marketing

People tend to go to search engines when they need to find an answer to their problems. And so when they find helpful blog articles that answer these questions, they keep turning to that blog for future answers in that niche. 

This is why content marketing is an effective marketing channel to use for generating awareness. It helps you target a wider audience and make them aware of your brand.

Here’s an example of businesses helping users who are looking for alternatives to solar roof panels. As you’d see, these brands are in the renewable energy sector.

Spend some time, researching problems your product or service can solve and write about them. Find these questions from Google search suggest, People also ask, and related search queries. You can also conduct keyword research to help you identify common problems. 

You should also subtly position your brand as inbound links and CTAs that’ll help them engage with your brand further. Also if you’re spending 80% of your article addressing the problems and offering solutions, use the remaining 20% to present your brand. 

Pro Tips Ask your staff what questions they get asked all the time and curate topics for them.  For videos, you post on your website, add a transcription so search engines can index it too.

2. Social Media Marketing

Many social media marketing strategies are usually geared towards awareness and engagement. It’s where potential leads can first find out about your brand. You can start by repurposing your blog posts into helpful content. These can be in form of carousels or just simple bullet points. 

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By answering these questions here, you can prompt them into visiting your website for more detailed content. Not only will your social media posts be valuable, but they’d be engaging enough to look through your other offerings. 

Another way is to tap into the power of influencer marketing. Collaborate with popular influencers in your niche so that their followers can be aware of your brand and its offerings. If you’re just starting a business, you can work on a pre-rollout video that’ll pique interest in what you do. 

Here’s how Survey Monkey drives awareness of its brand in this 6-second pre-roll-out video. 

There’s also the option of boosted posts and social media ads. This helps you reach thousands of people who have never heard about your brand before. The great thing about social media ads is that you can target the exact demographic you want to see your brand. Starting from $1 you can launch a paid ad across Instagram and Facebook.

Pro Tips  Pick the right social media business name so it’s catchy and memorable.  Use social media scheduling tools to help maintain a level of consistency across your brands.

3. Online Display

Online display ads are a great way to reach your target audience. By using behavioral targeting as well as other data like demographic, geographic, and intent data you can reach the individual segments of your target audience. 

They are clickable ads you can place on third-party websites, apps, and even social media to build awareness. You can use video display ads to give more insights or choose to use images. When a user clicks on the ad, it usually redirects leads to your website or landing page. Putting the ad in front of your target audience helps familiarize themselves with your business. 

In this example, Lexus uses a human eye to draw attention to the ad. For a car brand, talking about ideas is quite new and so it’ll spark curiosity. They know this and that’s why the CTA prompts you to learn more about the ad. 

Pro Tips  Optimize your images, content, and video for awareness. Try to capture their attention with compelling text.  We recommend providing a relevant landing page to capture their contact information.

4. Referral Marketing

Letting your existing customers advocate for your product is an excellent way to spread brand awareness. Referral marketing helps give your products an identity and stand out from the competition.

And while it’s also an excellent bottom-of-the-funnel strategy, people become aware of your product even if they don’t purchase it immediately. Plus, referrals bring in the most high-intent leads than any other marketing strategy. 

In our example, Floyd Home, a furniture store set up a referral program that offers a two-way discount for both the referrer and referee. They also add a brief form so they can track the referrals they get by providing a custom URL for each referrer. 

Start by understanding the current referral structure your business has. Then think about implementing a structure to better track the referrals you get. So for example, you might want to generate unique links for your customers to share. Incentivize the process so they can be motivated to refer your brand. 

Pro Tips  There will still be a word-of-mouth referral. So ensure you have a good brand name that’ll stick.  Follow up with your referrals immediately so they don’t lose interest in your brand.

When conducting top-of-the-funnel marketing strategies, it’s important to track your results for future optimization. You can start by measuring the changes in your impressions and reach.

Creating Middle of the Funnel Marketing Strategies

As earlier stated, the middle of the funnel is the consideration stage. This is where prospects are aware of your brand but not convinced enough to convert into actual customers. That’s why you focus on nurturing these leads at this stage. This includes persuasive marketing messages and strategies.

At this stage,  your leads will also get to learn more about your brand, figure out what separates you from the competition, and opt for your business as the solution to their problems. 

However, unlike the top of the funnel, leads in this segment usually need personalized and highly targeted messaging. So we recommend segmenting them based on their behavior, interests, channels they interact with the most, and other segmentation classes before launching your marketing. Because the different segments will respond differently to the same marketing message. 

Some middle-of-the-funnel marketing strategies you should explore include;

1. Case Studies

If you offer a very expensive product/service or one that needs a lot of deliberation, your customers need to see what you’ve worked on in the past. This is the fastest way to not only show off your clientele but how effective your offering has been in the past as well. 

So spend time interviewing any of your existing clients. Let them share problems they’ve encountered before using your offering and how it has helped them achieve their goals. When writing this case study tell a story. Talk about your clients and other elements of their business or needs. You should add relevant data needed to show extra proof.

Amp marketing agency does this excellently by showing their interested leads, and the work they’ve done for other brands. They provide the option to filter by industry and service. There’s also a separate section for case studies on the navigation bar so it’s one of the first things you see when you interact with your brand.

Craft the user story and then create a section on your website for it. You can then redirect some of your leads to this page by adding them to your newsletter and other marketing messages at this stage. 

Pro Tips   Don’t make your case study all about yourself. Let it be focused on your customers.  Be choosy when possible – not all your customers will convince someone else to try out your offerings.

2. Webinars

Webinars also help improve your brand authority by showing prospects more information about you. If you’re a B2B or SaaS business, this is an excellent way to show off your software. Think about it as a demo. 

When you handle topics that establish you as a thought leader and expert in the subject, people can trust your business to handle their needs. If your webinar is more focused on helping people solve specific problems with your software, they can see first-hand, the benefits of your offering. This can increase the interest they already have in your brand. 

Here’s an example of a webinar that focuses on nurturing leads by solving the problems associated with copywriters and creators which is profit.

When hosting your event, ensure you have a recording of this webinar posted on your Youtube channel or other video hosting platform. This way you can always refer your leads in the future to anyone they’d resonate with better. 

Pro Tips  Pick a topic that will engage both your current users and your prospects.  Document your webinar process so it’s easier next time.

3. Email Campaigns and Newsletters

Being at the top of your mind for your audience is highly important in the consideration phase. This is why sending highly targeted and personalized emails is an excellent strategy to help you convert more users. 

However, before launching your email marketing, spend time segmenting your subscriber list. This could be based on their previous interaction with your website. 

For example, if you run an eCommerce store, the messages you’d send someone looking at women’s shoes would be different from someone who only visited your Homepage once.  For the former, you’d want to share shoe tips, shoes in trends, and those on sale. While for the latter, it’ll be a broader catalog. 

You can get these contacts from those who fill your lead capture form at the awareness stage. Ensure you send these emails regularly frequently. We recommend automating the process by sending triggered emails. 

So once they hit a milestone, they can immediately start receiving another set of emails that’ll better suit where they are in your funnel. This will also ensure that they are always engaged while reading your messaging.

Pro Tips  Always receive consent from your prospects before mailing them.  Your CTAs should lead to helpful and informative resources.

4. Product and Resources Page

When leads try to find out more about your product/service, they tend to look through your website and read your FAQs or other resource materials you might have available. Make it easy for them to get their questions answered by creating a detailed resource page. 

This should contain guides and tips, your frequently asked questions, valuable features and so much more. Here’s how status brew achieves this through detailed guides for social media.

This is also your chance to build the narrative instead of leaving them to hear the thoughts or comparisons your competitors might make. So spend time linking this resource page to your other content, blog posts, and webinar slides. Also, optimize it for Google Search engines so your leads can find it faster. 

Pro Tips  Create a live link to the resource page.  Regularly verify the links on this page so that it doesn’t redirect your leads elsewhere.

Some other ideas you can explore include using Chatbots, social media, and even product reviews. Whatever option you opt for, ensure that you score your leads so that you can know which prospect to pass on to the sales team, especially since about 79% of leads are never nurtured to customers.

Track your email opens and click rates, the number of subscribers you get and retain, as well as the percentage of prospects that make it to the bottom of your funnel. 

Creating Bottom of the Funnel Marketing Strategies

At the bottom of the funnel, you’re marketing to a very small segment of prospects who are aware of your brand, interact with your product, and just need that one last nudge that’ll convince them into converting. For some prospects, it might be a price factor stopping them. For others, it could be trusted and so they need that final reassurance. 

Typically, in a B2B business, this is where the sales team would interact with them to close the deal. For smaller eCommerce and B2C companies, they’d be needing a messaging prompt to nudge them towards a transaction. 

Here are strategies you should consider implementing in your bottom-of-the-funnel marketing for conversions

1. Retargeting

If you have the finances, the best way to influence the bottom of your funnel is by remarketing and retargeting. This is highly effective for B2C and eCommerce stores because the user can directly see what they’d be missing out on the display ad. You typically want to use items they’ve abandoned in their cart to nudge them back. You can also add the fear of missing out by either implying the item is running out of stock.

In this example, Bestbuy targets leads who abandoned carts. There’s also a free shipping offer and free pickup to make it extra appealing.

Your retargeting doesn’t have to be display ads alone. Use this across social media, notifications, and other online messaging. Not only will this strategy drive the immediate demand, but purchase as well. 

Pro Tips  Use dynamic creative ads if you’re using Facebook for more conversions.  Ensure your ads are well branded and not overbearing.

2. Discount Campaigns

Sometimes, your prospects might just be looking for a cheaper alternative. Especially when they are on a budget. Running discount campaigns not only helps drive demand but also the fear of missing out on such an incredible deal. The key to running your discounts is to make them appealing and within a limited period. 

While these discounts might hurt your margin in the short term, they are guaranteed to convert leads into long-term paying users. When running your discounts, give unique promo codes and use other marketing channels to push this campaign. 

For example, you can send an email about the discount, use a pop-up on your site or even announce it on your social media. 

Here’s an example of how KGaccesory announced its flash sale across its social media channels. 

If there’s a holiday season coming up, you can make it a holiday-based campaign too. There’s also the option of creating bundles to offer more value for less. 

Pro Tips  For newer products, you can launch an early bird discount.  Target users who have abandoned their carts by showing images and price anchors of the products.

3. Clear Pricing Page and Breakdown

This is especially useful for B2B companies because it tells your leads that there’s something to compare on your website. When you constantly refer your leads to a quotation form, it increases the sales process and causes your team to even register low-intent leads. 

However, with transparent pricing, you can easily qualify high-intent leads from low-intent ones.

So spend time crafting out a pricing page that breaks down the features and benefits of each plan. That way, leads who land on this page, immediately know what option is better suited for them and you can further remarket to them. 

In our example, Zendesk clearly states every pricing package they have. There’s the pricing for individuals and enterprises. So regardless of what your use case is, there’s a clear plan suitable for your needs.

Pro Tips  Add trust symbols on your pricing page to make it more trustworthy and welcoming.  Provide three options and highlight the average package so users can be more inclined to start from that level.

Conclusion

Creating an effective digital marketing strategy means considering all stages of the user funnel. And so marketing to users who are at the top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel. Your digital marketing should drive awareness and demand across multiple channels and stages. 
A great way to keep your brand fresh in the mind of your audience irrespective of where they fall in the user journey is by getting a memorable and catchy business name. Generate business name ideas to begin with here.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can create a stellar digital marketing strategy by accounting for each stage of the customer journey funnel.