7 Steps to Build a Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy
Most “full-funnel” plans are channel lists with a funnel drawn around them.
A full-funnel strategy decides who a brand is growing from, what each stage of the funnel has to do, and how each stage will be judged. A media plan decides where the money goes.
When the media plan comes first, budget drifts to the bottom of the funnel, where results are quickest to report. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows the pull: 54% of CMOs said they prioritize performance marketing, compared with 22% for brand.
The seven steps below put your strategic decisions first, so your channel plan has something to follow.
What’s inside
- Why most buyers aren’t in the market at any given moment, and what that means for the funnel.
- A seven-step process that moves from research to measurement.
- Real examples from Adidas, Liquid Death, Unilever, and Airbnb.
- Tables for stage jobs, channel roles, and stage-level metrics you can copy into a planning doc.
What is a full-funnel marketing strategy?
Full-funnel marketing is “crafting a strategy across all marketing channels and touchpoints in the customer journey.”
Those marketing funnel stages are usually awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention, and the plan connects them so each one feeds the next. Besides, your buyers need specific messages depending on the funnel stage they’re in so they can be more easily persuaded.
If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a quick explanation:
Connection is what separates a strategy from a set of campaigns.
Plenty of brands run awareness campaigns and conversion campaigns at the same time. A full-funnel strategy is the set of decisions that makes them add up, which is why it usually sits inside a company’s wider brand strategy and growth plan and gets revisited whenever that plan changes.
Why is a full-funnel marketing strategy important?
The short answer is that most of any market isn’t buying right now, whether you sell sneakers or software. People replace a phone, a mattress, or a CRM every few years, so on any given day most of your future customers aren’t shopping.
B2B has hard numbers on this: research by Professor John Dawes for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that only 5% of B2B buyers are in market at any given time. The other 95% will buy eventually, just not this quarter.
And when those buyers do start shopping, many have already decided.
On the consumer side, a Condé Nast study of 4,500 US shoppers found that 79% had brands in mind before they even searched. B2B works the same way.
In 6sense’s 2025 study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, the winning vendor was already on the Day One shortlist 95% of the time. A plan built only for in-market demand competes for a small pool of buyers whose shortlist formed before the first ad was served.
“You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can […] catch buyers as they fall.”
Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo of LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, borrowing a line from Professor Jenni Romaniuk
Source: Marketing Week
A full-funnel strategy is how a brand makes sure it’s on that list when the fall happens, whether the buyer is a procurement team or someone shopping for new running shoes.
How to build a full-funnel marketing strategy step by step
Building a full-funnel marketing strategy comes down to seven steps. You make four strategy calls first (market, audience, competition, and what each stage is for), and only then get to channels, budget, and measurement.
Notice the loop at the end. Every quarter, what you learn in step 7 goes back into the budget split, and money drifts toward whichever stages are actually pulling their weight.
1. Diagnose the current funnel with market research
First, figure out where your revenue actually comes from today. Grab a year’s worth of revenue by source from your marketing analytics tools and sketch the path people take: where they come in, where they hang around, and where you lose them.
That’s only half the picture, though.
For the other half, talk to customers, reread sales call notes, check what people search for, and go through your reviews.
Adidas is a well-known case of what this diagnosis can reveal.
Once the brand started using econometric modeling, global media director Simon Peel said brand activity turned out to drive 65% of sales across wholesale, retail, and e-commerce. It was also getting the smaller slice of the budget.
Years of leaning on digital attribution had pushed the money toward performance ads.
By the end, you should be able to answer three questions:
- Where in the funnel do you lose the most people?
- What triggers a purchase in this category?
- Which stage are you barely spending on right now?
Output: one page that names your biggest leak and the moments that push people to buy.
2. Segment and size the audience by buying state
Your usual demographic or firmographic segments are a fine start. Then cut the audience again, this time by how close each group is to actually buying.
- In-market buyers want proof, clear pricing, and as few hoops as possible before they can buy.
- Out-of-market buyers just need to remember you when the moment to buy finally shows up.
Then put a rough size on each one, so everyone knows how big the bet is. A big market with a long buying cycle is worth steady awareness spend over months. A smaller group that buys often usually pays back faster through conversion and retention work.
Output: two or three priority segments, each with a rough size and a line on how long they usually take to buy.
3. Map competitor coverage at each funnel stage
Competitors rarely cover every stage equally well. One might own category search. Another might be the name creators keep mentioning on social, while a third quietly wins on retention with a loyalty program people actually use.
Map each stage against the competitors who own it:
- Awareness: whose name comes up most in paid and earned media?
- Consideration: who keeps appearing when people compare options, read reviews, or watch creators?
- Conversion: who has the lowest-friction path to purchase?
- Retention: who keeps customers buying again?
Liquid Death shows what an uncontested stage is worth.
In bottled water, the sale usually comes down to shelf price and distribution. Liquid Death went after awareness with what its founder calls entertainment-first marketing, and by 2023 it had reached $263 million in retail scanned sales and a $1.4 billion valuation (according to Business Wire, the most recent figures available at the time of writing).
Output: the one or two stages where attention is cheap, simply because no competitor is spending there yet.
4. Give each funnel stage one job and one message
Give every stage a single job and a single message, and write both down. That’s what turns the plan into something a creative team can actually brief from. Google’s research on purchase decisions describes buyers bouncing between two modes, exploring and evaluating, as many times as it takes before they buy.
That gives the middle of the funnel two separate jobs. First, get onto the shortlist. Then survive when it gets trimmed.
| Stage | Buyer state | Job | Message focus | Proof format |
| Awareness | Out of market | Be remembered | Distinctive brand idea | Video, OOH, creator content |
| Consideration (exploration) | Starting to look | Get on the list | Category entry points, use cases | Reviews, explainers, social proof |
| Consideration (evaluation) | Comparing options | Stay on the list | Differentiators, objections | Comparisons, demos, case studies |
| Conversion | Ready to buy | Remove friction | Offer, guarantee, urgency | Landing pages, retargeting, sales |
| Retention | Customer | Earn the next purchase | Value delivered, what’s new | Email, community, loyalty |
Output: a messaging architecture the creative team can brief from, with one job per stage.
5. Assign channels and tactics to each stage
Once each stage has a job, give every channel a primary stage.
Problems start when every channel is asked to drive conversions, because the channels that build memory get judged on a metric they were never meant to improve.
Unilever made this kind of decision publicly in 2025.
CEO Fernando Fernandez said the company would raise social media from 30% to 50% of its total marketing spend and work with 20 times more influencers, because he wanted others speaking for Unilever’s brands at scale.
The move gave influencer marketing a defined role in consideration, where trust and recommendations do most of the work.
| Channel | Primary stage | Supporting stage |
| Video and CTV | Awareness | Consideration |
| Paid social and creators | Consideration | Awareness |
| Search and comparison content | Consideration | Conversion |
| Retargeting and marketplaces | Conversion | Retention |
| Email, CRM, and community | Retention | Conversion |
Output: a channel map with a primary stage and a publishing cadence for every channel.
6. Split budget between brand building and activation
Start with a split of roughly 60% brand building and 40% sales activation, then adjust it to the business. Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank put the best balance at around 60:40, and a later IPA study refined it to 62:38 (IPA).
B2B runs closer to even.
In their work for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, Binet and Field found B2B brands grow best with 46% of budget on brand building and 54% on activation.
Treat both as starting benchmarks, then let the measurement in step 7 move the split once a full cycle of data is in.
Airbnb is the clearest recent example of rebalancing.
After cutting its overall marketing investment and moving spend from performance channels into brand and PR, it reported its first full-year profit in 2022, with $1.9bn in net income and a 23% net margin.
CEO Brian Chesky has described marketing’s role as “education,” and most of the budget still goes to brand.
Output: a brand-to-activation split with the reasoning behind it and a fixed date to review it.
7. Measure each stage on its own timeline
Each stage needs its own scorecard, because awareness and conversion move on different clocks. Judging a brand campaign on last-click revenue after four weeks will almost always make it look like a failure.
Brand effects also need time to show up. Binet and Field found that campaigns need about six months before long-term effects overtake short-term ones, so a brand campaign cut after one quarter was never given a fair test.
| Stage | Leading metric | Business metric | Measurement method |
| Awareness | Reach, ad recall | Branded search growth | Brand lift studies, share of search |
| Consideration | Engaged visits, list adds | Lead or cart volume | Cohort analysis, surveys |
| Conversion | Conversion rate, CPA | New-customer revenue | Platform attribution, A/B tests |
| Retention | Repeat rate, churn | Customer lifetime value | CRM cohorts |
| Whole funnel | Spend by stage | Incremental revenue | Marketing mix modeling, geo tests |
Review the scorecard quarterly. Reallocate budget between stages only when a stage’s leading metrics have stalled for a full cycle, which keeps the plan from swinging back to bottom-funnel spend every time a month comes in soft.
Output: a stage-level scorecard and a quarterly review that decides where the next dollar goes.
Full-funnel marketing strategy: why the order of steps matters
A full-funnel marketing strategy is a sequence of decisions, and the order matters. Diagnosis and segmentation settle who the plan is for and where it leaks. Competitor mapping and stage jobs settle what each stage has to win. Channel roles, the budget split, and stage-level measurement only make sense once those answers exist.
Skipping straight to channels tends to push budget to the bottom of the funnel, because that is where results report fastest.
The examples in this guide show what changes when the order is right.
Adidas found its brand work was driving most of its sales, Liquid Death won attention in a category that competed on shelf price, and Airbnb reached its first full-year profit after rebuilding its spend around brand.
Follow the same steps with the tips we gave you to improve your results.
FAQs
1. How do you defend brand spend when attribution shows little return?
Use a measurement method that can see delayed effects, such as marketing mix modeling or a geo holdout test. Last-click attribution credits the final touch, so brand work that built the demand rarely shows up in it. Adidas only saw that brand activity was driving most of its sales after it added econometric modeling.
2. What should a small budget fund first?
Fund the stage your diagnosis flagged as the biggest leak, plus one awareness channel you can sustain for at least six months. Spreading a small budget across every stage at once usually buys thin reach everywhere. Add stages once the first ones prove they work.
3. How do you know when a funnel stage is saturated?
A stage is saturated when spend keeps rising but its leading metric stops moving. Typical signs are climbing frequency with flat reach in awareness, or a rising cost per acquisition with no change in conversion rate. At that point the next dollar usually works harder in the stage before it.
4. How long before brand investment shows up in revenue?
Expect about six months before long-term brand effects overtake short-term ones, based on Binet and Field’s IPA research. In the meantime, track leading signals such as branded search volume, share of search, and ad recall, so the plan isn’t judged on revenue too early.
