What is Full-Funnel Creativity and Why It’s Your #1 Performance Lever

The path to purchase is a windy one. There are twists and turns of widened eyes, lengthy recommendation conversations, and a bit of meandering along the way. As nonlinear as the customer journey is, each moment is crucial for your brand. 

Every single impression is a chance to differentiate your brand in the market. That’s why full-funnel marketing matters. When you tailor marketing to the specific stages of the customer journey, you can reach more of the right shoppers across more touchpoints. 

Full-funnel marketing is not a new concept, but what exactly does full-funnel creativity entail? Let’s take a look at what we really mean by full-funnel creativity and how it can be your strongest performance lever. 

What is full-funnel creativity? 

Full-funnel creativity is design excellence and consistency across all stages of the funnel, from awareness, consideration, to conversion. It may seem like a no-brainer, but many brands don’t deliver the same level of design excellence across every touchpoint. Even when teams spend countless hours making brand guidelines, we still see generic product shots on plain white backgrounds flooding the lower funnel. 

Shoppers care about it more than you may think. The majority (74%) are more loyal to brands with consistent, high-quality branding in creative content. It doesn’t stop there either. Not only do they want to see beautiful ads, but they want to see ads that look like the brand. In fact, most shoppers (60%) distrust a brand when their ads don’t match the brand’s website, app, or store. With so many brands fighting for the same eyeballs, brands can turn to full-funnel creativity to enhance their marketing strategies. 

How full-funnel creativity drives performance

Driving conversions is left to lower-funnel content. When you’re that far along the customer journey, it can be easy to set design excellence aside and settle for the bare minimum. The reality is that lower-funnel assets are rarely brilliant in branding or even remotely intriguing. Instead of driving performance, they crowd the digital space that is already filled to the brim with the same mediocre lower-funnel content. 

When brands introduce the same level of craftsmanship and design excellence into their lower-funnel creatives, the numbers start to reflect that brilliance. On-brand commerce content can drop CPC (cost per click) by up to 50% and increase ROAS (return on ad spend) by up to 50%. If your brand is already investing big into branding and design, why not stretch that across the funnel and increase performance while you’re at it? 

Who benefits from full-funnel branding 

For brands that have high-volume categories where customers aren’t particularly loyal to a single brand, full-funnel creativity is everything. For example, CPG (consumer packaged goods) categories like soap or shaving cream need to constantly remind people of their brand’s existence to capitalize on brand salience near the moment of purchase. That means producing consistent, high-quality content is a big value add for global CPG organizations like Unilever and P&G. 

Not every e-commerce brand is built the same, which is why full-funnel creativity supports teams in other ways such as: 

• Capitalizing on brand strength close to conversion: Think about instantly recognizable brands like Nike. If you can use your brand recognition to visually say “buy this shoe” instead of relying on boring white backgrounds that look like every other brand, then you’re more likely to get that click and buy.
• Building trust for newer e-commerce brands: For brands that are just starting out, investing in high-quality performance ads builds shopper trust. Take for example those low-budget fashion ads that crop out models’ heads because the image is taken from elsewhere. Instead of looking scammy, brands can completely avoid this by bringing a brand element to creative and ultimately grow trust amongst shoppers. 
• Elevating consumer-generated content: If you’re an online thrift store or second-hand marketplace like Poshmark, DePop, eBay, or similar, you often rely on user-generated content (UGC) of products. These are lower-quality by nature, but if you introduce a template to these UGC images then you can elevate both the products and the consumer experience. 

Build Performance-Driving Creatives Across the Funnel with Celtra

Are you ready to deliver a lift in ROAS and spectacular creative? Meet our latest solution, Creative Automation for Dynamic Product Ads. It helps growth marketing and creative teams transform DPAs into high-quality, on-brand creative across the funnel. With Creative Automation for DPAs, you can: 

• Maintain creative consistency across all marketing efforts
• Maximize brand equity in dynamic product ad campaigns
• Increase performance with customized, higher-quality creatives

If you’d like to learn more, check out this video or send us a note today! 

Stay creative and listen to an episode of our Brand-Side podcast, like Performance Marketing x Creative with Public Goods or Demystifying Performance Creative with Headlight.