How does full-funnel marketing work?

For many customers, research and discovery occur simultaneously across multiple channels. You are not alone if you have ever scanned product reviews on your phone while shopping in a store or switched between a brand’s website and social media feed while watching a TV commercial.71% of Americans use a second screen to look up content related to the content they are watching on television, and 69% of in-store shoppers research reviews on their phones as they browse the aisles.

Due to the widespread use of mobile devices and social media, online and offline shopping journeys are becoming increasingly dispersed. As a result, it is crucial to implement a full-funnel strategy that simultaneously drives awareness and demand across multiple channels.

How crucial is full-funnel marketing?

Linear marketing funnels exist; Journeys for customers are not.
When we talk about a “funnel”, we’re referring to the marketing funnel, which lays out the simplest path a customer can take to make a purchase. Customers in the awareness stage are represented at the top of the marketing funnel, while customers in the purchasing stage are represented at the bottom.

Strategies for increasing brand recognition are referred to as upper-funnel marketing. For instance, many television commercials aim to raise awareness among viewers who may not yet require the product. Typically, mid-funnel marketing strategies concentrate on gaining respect and standing out from the competition. Blog posts, for instance, can help set a product apart from others in its category. Lower-funnel marketing encourages customers with the potential to buy to make a purchase. Remarketing ads that include calls to action like “Buy now” can, for instance, bring customers closer to the point of purchase. A full-funnel marketing strategy simultaneously increases awareness, consideration, and purchase.
The showcasing channel is a useful structure for connecting with crowds. However, the terms “customer journey” and “funnel” are not interchangeable. Customer journeys rarely move directly from awareness to consideration to purchase, despite funnels being linear.
Every customer journey is unique.

In three respects, this customer’s path to purchase is indicative of the buying process of today.
It’s quick. They are unaware of Suds at the beginning of the commercial. They are a regular customer by the end of the commercial, assuming they continue their subscription.
It has several channels. It almost seems as though the customer is simultaneously in the awareness and consideration stages when they pick up their phone to watch the commercial.
It’s not direct. When they choose to subscribe, they skip certain stages of the marketing funnel before even opening the box and trying the product.

However, a different customer may experience a completely different customer journey. Let’s say they notice the soap container is almost empty and decide to do something about it. They might start looking for a soap that has positive customer reviews and ships quickly by typing “men’s soap” into Amazon’s search bar. They might come across Suds through an advertisement on the product detail page of another soap brand. After clicking on the advertisement, they might read customer reviews to see if they like the “Surf and Sea” scent too, and then they might go to Suds’ Store to find out more about how their packaging is good for the environment.
The customer enters the funnel at the consideration stage in this instance. They are aware that they require soap and favor male-branded products. They narrow the field, and Suds successfully distinguishes itself from competing products.

To put it another way, the funnel is a useful framework for ensuring that you are reaching customers on all possible paths to purchase, but a few customer journeys will be identical to the funnel.
You can reach more customers through more touchpoints with a full-funnel strategy. Customers can enter the funnel at any stage or appear to skip stages. However, Suds can attribute the conversions in both of these instances to a full-funnel advertising strategy that includes awareness, consideration, and conversion.
By investing in Sponsored Products ads and bidding on branded shopping queries, Suds may not be able to reach customers whose shopping journeys begin with awareness and consideration.

By investing in strategies like Sponsored Display product targeting, Suds may reach shoppers who are browsing the category but miss out on shoppers who are not in the aisle.
The brand may reach audiences who see its Fire TV ad, but it will miss an opportunity to engage audiences entering the consideration stage if Suds focuses solely on building awareness through streaming TV advertising. If they don’t combine their upper-funnel campaign with lower-funnel strategies like product detail page remarketing ads, they may not be able to keep customers engaged.
A full-funnel approach is a good framework for an engagement strategy that enables you to meet customers where they are, even though you may not be able to predict the steps that customers take before purchasing your product.

A full-funnel Amazon marketing strategy can be built in five steps.
More than 215 million customers search Amazon.com for new goods and make purchases there each month. Although it is a retailer, Amazon is much more than that. Customers rely on Amazon to read customer reviews, watch movies, listen to music and podcasts, stream video games, read their favorite books, and keep up with their shows, both at home and on the go. During their morning runs, they listen to Amazon Music, ask Alexa to make dinner shopping lists, and watch Fire TV to unwind at the end of the day.
During a customer’s journey, they may come into contact with an Amazon touchpoint. Because of this, Amazon Ads is in a unique position to develop full-funnel marketing strategies that can interact with audiences throughout their day-to-day lives.

When creating a full-funnel strategy, this breadth and depth of reach can also make it difficult to know where to start, so we’ve broken it down into five easy steps:
1. Verify that your products are available for purchase.
When developing a full-funnel strategy, we always recommend starting at the bottom of the funnel and working your way up. For instance, before you pay to advertise a product, make sure that the product’s detail page is free of spelling and content errors, has enough images, reviews, and ratings to compete with other products in your category, and presents the Featured Offer. Within retail readiness, we refer to this as A+ content.
Tip: The free branded content that Amazon Ads provides, such as Posts and Stores, is yet another quick and inexpensive method of making your products retail-ready.Stores are a good place to spread your brand and encourage discovery. Using compelling lifestyle images, you can educate customers about your products through posts.

2. Reach out to customers who are most likely to buy.
Start experimenting with strategies to encourage purchases after optimizing your product detail pages for conversion. Sponsored Display or remarketing to audiences who have viewed your product detail page are two examples of our recommendations for Sponsored Products ads that target shoppers with branded search terms that indicate high intent (such as “Suds surf soap”).
Tip: This strategy is a great way to stay in people’s minds because remarketing ads appear on and off Amazon. Consider remarketing after key buying periods like Prime Day and the holiday season, when your product detail pages may have seen increased page views since the total potential remarketing audiences depends on the size of the audience that has viewed them.

3. Make your mark in your field.
We recommend investing in ad types that will help you stand out in your category and differentiate your brand from competing products once your products are retail-ready and optimized for conversion. This is known as owning your aisle. Sponsored Display product targeting, for instance, can be used by a soap company to reach customers who are browsing relevant categories (such as soap), similar products (such as peer soap bands), or complementary products (such as shampoo).
Tip: If your product just came out, you might even want to use product targeting to place ads on your product pages to let customers know about it. It is also less likely that other placements will appear on your product detail pages if you use product targeting on your page.

4. Enhance your brand.
We recommend increasing consideration with products like video and display ads through the Amazon DSP and Sponsored Brands once you are confident that you own your aisle. Consider bidding on broader shopping queries, such as “soap,” at this point to reach audiences within the market. People who shop in a way that suggests they might be interested in your product are called “in-market audiences.”
Tip: Make use of Sponsored Brands to get customers to your Store page and educate them about your brand’s products and story at the consideration stage.

5. Reach more people.
A full-funnel campaign’s final step is to raise awareness. Without sacrificing relevance, Amazon DSP can assist you in scaling your reach across multiple channels, including display, audio, and over-the-top video. You can define audiences using the audience builder in Amazon Ads based on lifestyle (for example, Jeep enthusiasts), streaming preferences (for example, Soul Surfer was recently streamed on Prime Video), and lookalike audiences (for example, Amazon Fresh lookalikes).

Tip: To reach audiences outside of the screen and at home, think about combining audio and streaming TV ads. Find out more about Jimmy Dean’s strategy for achieving double-digit growth in purchase intent and action by combining Amazon Streaming TV ads on Fire TV with audio ads on the free tier of Amazon Music.

Remember: To be successful, full-funnel strategies do not need to be complicated.
With Amazon Ads, you can use shopping signals to make your campaigns work harder and engage audiences that would otherwise be hard to reach by using a full-funnel strategy. Amazon Ads’ full-funnel solutions are designed to help you connect with any audience, at any point in their shopping journey, whether you want to promote your cosmetic brand to viewers who recently streamed Lady Gaga films or introduce a new air filtration product to allergy sufferers. To manage a successful full-funnel strategy, you don’t need a large marketing budget or a large team of agency employees.

The four advantages of full-funnel marketing

Advertisers who take a full-funnel approach to Amazon Ads see more success than advertisers who hone in on a single stage of the funnel (e.g., driving purchase) or goal (e.g., return on advertising spend). In addition, a full-funnel approach helps you prepare for a diverse range of customer journeys.

The best part is that your full-funnel strategy doesn’t have to be complicated to work. The results of many advertisers’ initial combination of sponsored ads and displays speak volumes. Research indicates that you will experience even stronger results when you are ready to increase awareness by incorporating audio or streaming TV advertisements.

We’ll refer to the media mix below as a modified full-funnel strategy for simplicity’s sake: Display advertising with Sponsored Display and/or Amazon DSP, as well as sponsored brands and products. A modified full-funnel strategy that incorporates streaming TV will be referred to as a comprehensive full-funnel strategy.

Five objectives may benefit from a modified or comprehensive full-funnel strategy:

1. Reach new audiences and increase brand-new sales by up to 21%.
Think again if you think that focusing solely on branding is the best way to increase new-to-brand sales. According to research, lower-funnel strategies work best with upper-funnel campaigns.
Advertisers employing a modified full-funnel strategy have, on average, seen 11% more new-to-brand sales than those employing Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands alone. When compared to advertisers who use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands, advertisers who take a comprehensive, full-funnel approach have seen 21 percent more new-to-brand sales.

The main takeaway: Very few customers make a purchase right away. Your brand’s prominence can be maintained by combining tactics from the upper and lower funnels.

2. Up to 2.5 times more ad-attributed detail page views can be considered.
Even though we have a variety of products, such as Sponsored Brands and over-the-top video ads, that are meant to help brands get more attention and help them stand out from competitors in the same category, research shows that brand-building strategies work best when they are part of a balanced marketing plan that combines upper- and lower-funnel marketing.
We found that advertisers drive 2x more ad-attributed detail page views and 1.7x more ad-attributed Add to Cart actions when they take a modified full-funnel approach compared to times when they only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands in an analysis of brands that have used a full-funnel strategy intermittently (e.g., on and off). When advertisers take a comprehensive full-funnel approach to Amazon Ads, they generate 2.5 times more ad-attributed detail page views and 2.1 times more ad-attributed Add to Cart actions than when they only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands.

3. Boost sales—up to an 8% increase in sales growth.
Our research indicates that a full-funnel approach is more effective, even though many advertisers believe that performance marketing is the most effective strategy for increasing sales.
When compared to businesses that rely solely on Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands, businesses that take a modified approach to full-funnel marketing have, on average, seen sales growth that is 4% higher month over month. In addition, in an analysis of brands that have used a full-funnel strategy intermittently (e.g., on and off), we found that advertisers drive 1.8 times more ad-attributed sales when they take a modified full-funnel approach and 2 times more ad-attributed sales when they take a comprehensive full-funnel approach, compared to brands that only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands.6 The key takeaway: You can actively engage new customers and increase sales in the long run by expanding your strategy beyond the buying stage of the funnel.

4. Increase customer loyalty—up to 1.9 times more Subscribe & Save customers
Research indicates that investing in a full-funnel strategy, rather than pursuing loyalty as a separate strategy, is the best way to position your brand for repeat purchases. While some marketers view loyalty as a separate stage of the funnel, others do not.
We found that advertisers drive 1.7 times more ad-attributed Subscribe & Save customers when they take a modified full-funnel approach and 1.9 times more ad-attributed Subscribe & Save customers when they take a comprehensive full-funnel approach compared to when they only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands in our analysis of brands that have used a full-funnel strategy intermittently (e.g., on and off).

Key point: If you want to increase customer lifetime value, a full-funnel strategy may help you build the trust that supports customer longevity. Trust in a message increases by 106 percent when it is seen across four channels.

Conclusion: A full-funnel strategy can assist you in streamlining the entire funnel.
At the point when you take on a full-channel promoting procedure, you’ll probably see intensifying impacts that lead to more grounded brings about each phase of the pipe, from expanding ROAS to developing deals to building mindfulness and buying plans. Start with a modified full-funnel strategy and work your way up to a comprehensive full-funnel strategy if you’re new to full-funnel marketing.