Average Cost Per Lead on Facebook: July 2025 Report

Upper-funnel strategies build awareness, while lower-funnel tactics drive conversions—but the most effective campaigns connect both. Considering the full funnel also helps you more effectively guide shoppers through their journey. If you want to sustain growth for your company, you can’t neglect either end of the marketing funnel, and you can’t forget mid-funnel marketing, either. This allows you to generate revenue from prospects you’ve nurtured through your pipeline.

• Therefore, the marketing funnel simplifies the customer journey and serves as a mental model for businesses to tweak their marketing strategy.
• The content should speak directly to potential customers, fostering and building relationships with them to establish trust and credibility.
• Despina Gavoyannis is a Senior SEO Specialist at Ahrefs, a leading marketing platform for search, AI, and beyond.
• Start with broader audiences and let the algorithm learn before narrowing further.

In fact, typical B2B buyers complete about 70% of the buying process before engaging a vendor’s sales teams. This definition matters in B2B because buying behavior has changed. This journey outlines the stages buyers move through as they learn about your product and decide whether to move forward.

Then, go to the “Pages” tab and filter for “Informational” intent again. You now have a list of informational keywords. You need to understand search intent (i.e., the motivation behind a search) to rank well on Google. So they often use keywords with informational intent. Then, target those keywords with valuable content that naturally draws potential customers to your business. They are starting to look for the right solutions.

Funnel hacking is the practice of mimicking competitors’ marketing funnels. Before you can deploy a marketing funnel strategy, you need to know exactly who you’re marketing to. You can also create a referral program or loyalty program to incentivize buyers to recommend your brand and make future purchases. “You can run paid ads at any stage of your marketing funnel,” Amanda says. Organic social media posts can familiarize potential customers with your brand voice and help you develop a relationship with them through direct engagement. To encourage email list sign-ups, businesses use lead generation strategies like discount code pop-ups on their websites or promises of compelling content or early access to product drops.

A healthcare company evaluating project management software wants to see case studies from other healthcare organizations, not generic business examples. Generic content fails to convert because prospects immediately recognize mass-produced messaging that doesn't address their specific situation. Case studies should focus on companies similar to your prospects and include specific challenges, implementation details, and measurable results to help prospects envision their own success. Content mapping is also foundational to creating effective middle of the funnel strategies that align content to buyer needs and nurture leads through the consideration stage. Strong middle funnel tactics balance education with gentle guidance toward buying decisions, demonstrating expertise while building trust. Stable, a virtual mail service provider, saw the impact of strategic mid-funnel content on lead nurturing and conversions firsthand, achieving a 509% organic growth rate in 6 months.

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Upper funnel drives long-term visibility and lead generation, while lower funnel delivers immediate ROI and revenue growth. Some marketers focus heavily on one stage, while others aim for balance. Marketing efforts often align with different stages of the customer journey, most commonly, the upper and lower funnel (also middle funnel, but that’s not our focus in this piece).

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That’s one reason why 78% of B2B marketers are already using video, and 56% will increase their use of it in 2026. This is especially important if you’re using maximum delivery or cost cap, since the system needs enough data to optimize effectively using those methods. Start with broader audiences and let the algorithm learn before narrowing further. With an auction-based advertising platform, your bidding strategy matters. LinkedIn is one of the most expensive paid social channels, and that’s unlikely to change.

Come for the automated marketing. Stay for the endless revenue growth.

Effective mid funnel marketing requires sophisticated orchestration—better data integration, cross-channel coordination, and account-level measurement. Strong mid funnel programs accelerate this timeline by keeping accounts warm and engaged throughout evaluation. The most effective mid funnel strategies use multiple touchpoints to build familiarity and credibility. Mid funnel marketing requires this level of sophistication—you can’t treat all consideration-stage accounts the same way. They’re past the awareness research stage and deep into evaluation mode.

To measure funnel performance, track how effectively prospects move between stages and how efficiently demand becomes revenue. Since early research is about learning, not buying, aggressive gating can limit visibility and slow buyers down. Targeted email campaigns are an easy and effective way to reach many potential customers. Case studies include examples of past success that can inspire potential customers.

That means you can track Mid funnel conversions wherever they happen without relying on cookie-based tracking. Today, you can connect CRM data, attribute revenue to specific campaigns and forecast performance before you even launch, all of which we’ll cover below. If your tracking isn’t set up before launch, you’ll fly blind while the algorithm is learning the most.

Like quizzes, calculators are a great MOFU strategy that can often be created with no-code tools. Quizzes are a type of interactive content that provides answers or recommends solutions to users based on their responses to specific questions. It’s unlikely Purple will be able to recover this traffic for these keywords unless it starts selling these types of mattresses.

Creating Engaging MoFu Content

Stage-to-stage conversion rates show how effectively prospects progress through the funnel. HubSpot’s Loop Marketing reflects this reality by emphasizing continual engagement and learning instead of a one-way descent. Marketing Hub can surface high-intent behaviors, trigger notifications, and recommend next steps so sales can engage prospects at the right moment. High-intent behaviors might include repeat pricing-page visits, deep trial engagement, sandbox environments with multiple users, or frequent documentation views. When marketing and sales share definitions of “high intent,” follow-up becomes faster and more relevant.

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The “buying funnel” refers to the process of sorting (or segmenting) potential customers based on where they are in their purchasing journey and what they know about your brand. While results may differ for other campaigns or brands — and it’s worth testing for incrementality — the attribution analysis and conversion lift studies showed us that mid-funnel marketing can drive real business impact. Early-stage offers may only require essentials, while product evaluations, ROI tools, or demo requests can justify more detail. A marketing funnel is a multi-stage process that guides potential customers from first learning about a product to making a purchase.