Upper-Funnel vs. Lower-Funnel Marketing: What’s the Difference?

by The MNTN Team

9 Min Read

To make the most of your marketing dollars, you need an effective strategy based on your goals. But those goals will differ based on your target audience. Attracting customers at the top of the buyer funnel will require different language and tactics than when you’re marketing at the bottom of the funnel.

Understanding the difference between the upper funnel and lower funnel will help you launch campaigns that speak to each audience—and ultimately achieve your goals. Let’s discuss how these two sales funnel stages differ.

What Is Upper-Funnel Marketing?

Upper-funnel marketing, or top of funnel marketing, is all about creating that awareness, interest, and desire. At this stage, you’re teaching potential customers about your brand and establishing yourself as the best possible solution to their pain points.

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. Someone at the top of the funnel is in the early stages, meaning they’ve figured out that they have a problem and need a solution, but they aren’t yet aware of your brand or how it can benefit them.

Importance of Top-of-Funnel Marketing

Top-of-funnel marketing allows you to cast a wide net and appeal to a broad range of potential customers, and through funnel optimization, you can make the middle and lower portions more efficient.

Appealing to buyers in the beginning stages of their journey helps you build your brand and solidify your reputation. Some top-of-funnel strategies, including content marketing and social media, help you develop a relationship with potential customers; you might even end up converting some of them without having to move them further down the funnel at all.

Strategies for Top-of-Funnel Marketing

Because your goal with top-of-funnel marketing is to generate leads and draw people to your brand, strategies at this stage are primarily aimed at helping people find you and learn more about you. To capture potential customers at the top of the funnel, you might focus on:

Programmatic Display Ads: Expand brand awareness by serving visually compelling ads across high-traffic websites and apps.
Social Media Prospecting: Use paid social campaigns to introduce your brand to new audiences and drive initial engagement.
Content Marketing: Publish blog posts, reports, and videos that educate potential customers and establish brand authority.
Influencer Partnerships: Collaborate with industry influencers to amplify your brand’s reach and credibility.
Event Sponsorships: Increase visibility by sponsoring industry events, webinars, or podcasts that align with your target audience.

When you’re creating top-of-funnel ads for these channels, use language that inspires potential customers to take action. For example, if you’re running a lead generation campaign on social media, you might offer access to a webinar or a gated piece of content to anyone who signs up for your newsletter. Your paid social media posts would primarily promote the benefits of the webinar to encourage sign-ups. Once people sign up, they can learn more about your brand through your newsletter.

They might also choose to follow you on social media instead of signing up for the webinar. If you’re really lucky, they might even do both.

What Is Lower-Funnel Marketing?

Lower-funnel marketing, or bottom of funnel marketing, involves speaking to potential customers who are aware that they have an issue that they need to solve, are aware of your brand, and are doing research to decide whether to buy from you or a competitor.

With a solid top-of-funnel strategy, you can move more leads down your funnel to this stage, where they’re almost ready to convert. At the bottom of the funnel, your primary goal is to make the sale. At this stage, you’re circling a potential customer’s decision, addressing their questions and objections, and highlighting why they should choose you over the competition.

Importance of Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing

Bottom-of-funnel marketing, sometimes referred to as the conversion funnel, is the part of your interaction with a potential customer in which you (hopefully) close the sale. At this stage, the prospect knows about your company and has already considered making a purchase. They just need that final nudge to get them from “add to cart” to “check out.”

The bottom of the sales funnel is important because this is the stage in which prospects become customers. Nailing your marketing strategy at this stage can also help you build customer loyalty. This allows you to generate revenue from prospects you’ve nurtured through your pipeline.

Strategies for Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing

At this stage, your messaging should be succinct and actionable. Instead of communicating how your brand benefits customers in general, focus on why the potential customer should choose you over the competition. Strategies at this stage involve setting yourself apart and proving your case as the best brand. They may include:

Retargeting Campaigns: Re-engage high-intent users with personalized ads across display and social channels.
Email Drip Campaigns: Nurture prospects with automated email sequences featuring product details, testimonials, and exclusive offers.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Capture demand with paid search ads that direct users to high-converting landing pages.
Cart Abandonment Remarketing: Serve personalized ads or emails to encourage users to complete their purchase.
Loyalty and Referral Programs: Drive repeat business by rewarding customers for purchases and referrals.

Bottom-of-funnel ads and marketing campaigns should be persuasive. Instead of offering an overview of your company, a good bottom-of-funnel campaign will specifically focus on your product or service, answering customers’ questions and guiding them toward a purchase. Like at the top of the funnel, you can use content and video marketing at this stage as well.

However, at this stage, your videos should be oriented toward showcasing what makes your product or service stand out from the herd and why a potential customer should buy yours (and no one else’s).

Upper-Funnel vs. Lower-Funnel

The main difference between lower-funnel and upper-funnel marketing lies in the goals and objectives of each stage. The people you’re speaking to are at distinctly different stages of their buying journey.

In the upper-funnel, you can cast a wider net, launching digital marketing campaigns that speak to a wider range of potential buyers. The top of the funnel is all about getting people into your sales pipeline. At this stage, you need to make them aware of your brand and its benefits.
In the lower-funnel, it’s all about conversions. At this stage, you’ve already done a good job of making people aware of your brand and helping them learn more. Now it’s about inspiring people who are already interested to spend their money with you—instead of with your competition.

Importance of Full-Funnel Marketing

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. Once your company has existed for a while, it’s tempting to move past brand-building activities and focus only on the customers who are already shopping with you.

But paying attention to both the top and bottom of your sales funnel will help you keep your brand relevant with new customers while maintaining top-tier service with the ones you already have. With a full-funnel marketing strategy, you can also ensure your branding and messaging stay consistent.

To make it happen requires some cross-team collaboration, too. The members of your sales team who are tasked with closing the deal need to be in the loop on what your marketing team says about your products and services. Considering the full funnel also helps you more effectively guide shoppers through their journey. When launching video ad campaigns or writing social media posts for the top of your funnel, for example, you can slip in some language that might move a person from awareness to consideration.

Conversely, you can use top-of-funnel strategies to retarget former customers who haven’t shopped with you in a while. Customers may move through various stages of the sales funnel more than once throughout their time with your brand, and a full-funnel strategy helps you stay on top of the process.

How CTV Advertising Can Keep Your Funnel Full

Upper-funnel strategies build awareness, while lower-funnel tactics drive conversions—but the most effective campaigns connect both. MNTN Performance TV makes it easy to reach new audiences and re-engage high-intent users with precision. Here’s how:

MNTN Matched: AI-powered audience targeting ensures your OTT ads reach the right people at the right time.
Premium CTV Inventory: Get high-impact placements on top streaming networks to maximize brand visibility.
Creative-as-a-Subscription™: Scale your video ad production effortlessly with fresh, high-quality creative.
Automated Optimization: Machine learning continuously refines your campaigns for the best performance.
Verified Visits™: Measure lower-funnel impact with precise attribution that ties ad views to site visits.

MNTN’s self-serve software powers full-funnel CTV advertising campaigns with measurable results—sign up today.

Top of Funnel vs. Bottom: Final Thoughts

Concentrating on the full funnel allows you to keep growing your business, building awareness among a new audience while still guiding potential customers at the bottom of your funnel toward a purchase.

The main difference between the top of the funnel and the bottom is intent. Your goal at the top of the funnel is to make potential customers aware of your brand and how you can benefit them. At the bottom of the funnel, this goal shifts toward guiding customers to choose you over your competitors.

With a full-funnel strategy, you can meet people where they are in their journey and move them up and down your funnel. Concentrating on both ends of the funnel lets you use consistent messaging that builds awareness, drives loyalty, and ultimately helps you grow your business.