Full Funnel GROWTH Marketing insights

Marketing leaders must choose between using AI for productivity or embracing agentic AI for true transformation. This blog from TrueVoice Growth Marketing™ explores how agentic AI drives full-funnel efficiency, breaks down silos, and delivers measurable growth—especially in regulated industries.

In a recent episode of Millennium Live | A Leadership & Discovery Podcast, Kurt Genden, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of TrueVoice Growth Marketing, shared valuable insights on how full funnel growth marketing is transforming businesses in highly regulated industries. The conversation highlighted the growing gap between customer expectations and marketing capabilities, with marketing leaders feeling less than confident in their ability and capabilities to drive marketing-led growth at their organizations.

As we've explored in the previous blog posts, Philip Kotler's vision of marketing as a strategic growth driver remains highly relevant, yet many organizations struggle to fully realize this potential. The persistent challenges identified in a comprehensive survey of more than 100 CMOs commissioned by TrueVoice highlights the need for a structured, holistic approach to transform marketing from a cost center to a profit center.

In the ever-changing financial landscape, Full Funnel Growth Marketing (FFGM) continues to be a strategic imperative. In a previous blog post, I highlighted the key barriers to its adoption in financial services, a new Gramercy Institute report offers a practical roadmap to overcoming these challenges and harnessing the true power of FFGM.

By integrating Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) with Full Funnel Growth Marketing, TrueVoice Growth Marketing ensures that every marketing investment directly supports sales enablement. This approach prioritizes high-impact content, streamlines collaboration, and enhances ROI by justifying every dollar spent. In this blog, discover how ZBB empowers marketing to fuel sales success, optimize enablement strategies, and drive sustained business growth.

Content marketing leaders are under growing pressure to balance creativity with financial accountability. Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is transforming how marketing teams allocate resources, ensuring every investment is justified by measurable impact. However, cost efficiency alone isn’t enough—full funnel growth marketing complements ZBB by aligning content strategies with business objectives at every stage of the customer journey.

Procurement leaders are under increasing pressure to optimize marketing spend while ensuring every dollar drives measurable business impact. Zero-based budgeting procurement offers a disciplined approach to budget allocation, requiring every expense to be justified based on value and ROI. However, cost efficiency alone isn’t enough—businesses must also engage customers effectively across the entire funnel.

With marketing budgets under increasing scrutiny, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is becoming a standard practice, requiring every expense to be justified from the ground up. However, success in this environment demands more than just cost-cutting—it requires a full funnel growth marketing approach that aligns every marketing effort with measurable business outcomes.

The recent McKinsey article, "Connecting for Growth," shines a spotlight on the demanding landscape facing today’s marketing leaders. It clearly outlines the growing complexity CMOs face as their roles expand into areas like generative AI, innovation, and performance management—all while bearing the weight of driving growth and maximizing efficiency. McKinsey doesn’t just name the issue; it highlights the gap between what needs to be done and the readiness of many organizations to do it. This diagnosis is sharp, but like many industry analyses, it stops short of giving leaders actionable steps to close this gap.

As we explored in Part 1, Philip Kotler's vision of marketing as a strategic growth driver remains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. However, a recent research study commissioned by TrueVoice, conducted across a broad spectrum of industries including but not limited to the Fortune 200, reveals that many organizations still struggle to fully realize this potential. These findings, set to be released in September, coupled with insights from other industry research, paint a picture of an industry in flux, grappling with evolving customer demands, technological advancements, and increased pressure to drive revenue.

In the early 1970s, a marketing visionary named Philip Kotler presented a groundbreaking idea that would reshape the business world's understanding of marketing's role. In his seminal article "From Sales Obsession to Marketing Effectiveness" in the Harvard Business Review, Kotler argued that marketing should be more than just a support function for sales – it should be a strategic driver of organizational growth. Now, half a century later, his insights remain not only relevant but increasingly critical in today's complex business landscape.

The emergence of generative AI in the marketing world is a transformative event, mirroring historical shifts in how organizations are structured. The evolution from the traditional organizational charts, introduced by the New York and Erie Railroad in 1855 to maintain hierarchical control, to the agile pod models focusing on efficiency and collaboration, marks significant milestones in organizational development. Now, as we stand at the cusp of integrating generative AI, we are witnessing another profound shift. This new era challenges us to reimagine organizational dynamics, adding a dimension of intelligent automation and data-driven decision making to the mix.

As we mark the first anniversary of the public launch of ChatGPT, we at TrueVoice reflect on a year of groundbreaking exploration and integration of this transformative technology. Building on our long-standing experience in leveraging traditional AI, our journey has been driven by a commitment to unlocking the full potential of generative AI for our clients, particularly in the highly regulated industries we serve. This endeavor represents a natural progression of our expertise, as we continue to evolve and adapt to the latest advancements in AI technology.

In an insightful sequence for The New Yorker's November 20, 2023, A.I. Issue, artist Christoph Niemann presents a tableau both humorous and thought-provoking: an artist, struck by creative block, is 'rescued' by Till-E, a well-meaning bot who takes over the artistic endeavor. Niemann's cover, with its biting humor, wittily confronts the unintended consequences of deploying artificial intelligence as a solution to challenges in the artistic imagination. His work, a subtle dance between satire and foresight, prompts us to question the intersection of AI and human creativity in marketing just as much as in art. This leads us to reflect upon the role of generative AI in financial marketing strategy—where the cover's narrative seems to parallel the evolving landscape of AI in strategic creativity.

TrueVoice Growth Marketing™ was recently honored by Modern Healthcare with a Silver Award for Campaign of the Year in the Provider/Insurer category at its 2023 Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards. The award recognized TrueVoice's outstanding Health Insurance Agent Engagement and Recruitment growth marketing campaign for its long-time client partner, Humana.

Last week, I had the honor of participating in the 2023 Gramercy Institute Forum panel on artificial intelligence in financial marketing. As a panelist, I engaged in thought-provoking discussions around the current and future implications of AI for financial services institutions’ marketing strategies and operations. This blog post represents some key takeaways and perspectives coming out of the forum.

The modern financial landscape is constantly evolving, driven by advancements in technology, heightened competition, and changing consumer expectations. In this dynamic environment, financial institutions face the urgent need for sustained growth. As CEOs increasingly view marketing as the primary engine for growth, there is a glaring disparity - only 18% of CMOs are confident in their teams' capability to meet this challenge. This disparity underscores the critical importance of a transformative approach known as Full Funnel Growth Marketing (FFGM) in the financial sector.

Unsuccessful change management is increasingly relevant for companies leaning into full-funnel marketing. Why? Because a successful marketing transformation requires a committed focus on organizational change management. By focusing on change management, marketing leaders can take steps to stop resistance before it snowballs.

Startups call it “Fail Fast, Fail Often.” In digital marketing, we call it the “Test and Learn” approach. Why? Because the best performance in growth marketing comes from innovation. And innovation comes from analyzing the information, testing something new, and changing course in response to the results.

Marketing and sales campaigns today are spread across channels like paid media, email, and social, creating a fragmented modern customer journey that’s anything but straightforward.

Marketing’s seismic shift to digital has had an impact on every facet of doing business. Many companies feel pressure to learn from digitally native companies and question the status quo, especially when it comes to creating synchronicity and alignment between the roles of marketing and sales.

In a previous blog, I shared how TrueVoice helped one of our wealth management clients leverage the power of full funnel growth marketing to grow assets under management by $5 billion. The results were powered by a full funnel growth marketing solution that enabled the client to leverage every part of the customer journey, at every stage of the funnel, in real time to build and optimize demand; increase and convert more qualified leads; and better retain and grow clients.

Businesses today, especially highly regulated businesses, are engaging with an incredibly mature digital marketing ecosystem. They have the opportunity to be very targeted in what they share, where, and who they reach. But without a deep understanding of the motivations and real behaviors of their target audiences, these companies cannot create the most robust possible marketing, sales, and retention strategies — and cannot realize the full potential of the company’s value.

When CMOs face pressure to grow revenue, adopting a growth mindset to break down silos in the sales funnel isn’t a risk, it’s a necessity.

Modern Healthcare recently selected TrueVoice Growth Marketing as a winner of its 2022 Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards. TrueVoice received the Silver Award for Campaign of the Year in the Provider/Insurer category for its successful Health Insurance Agent Engagement and Recruitment growth marketing campaign for long-time client partner, Humana.

TrueVoice’s Kurt Genden shares on Ian Truscott's Rockstar CMO podcast the five keys that will turn any marketing department into a growth engine and every marketer into a rockstar.

In this time of dramatic upheaval and change, marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to take their place in the corporate spotlight and change the perception of marketing as a cost center to create the new reality of marketing as an essential driver of revenue growth.

Content Marketing. Personalized and Contextual Experiences. Intent Marketing. These are the three key areas that marketers need to focus on to provide their potential buyers with an exceptional brand experience and to start to build brand trust, according to a recent article from B2B Marketing.

Are you really as “customer centric” as you think you are? Global executives rank customer experience as the top business priority. And yet, according to a recent Harvard Business Review report, only 15% of companies actually have a single view of customer data and the organizational structure to leverage those insights in a meaningful way.

The concept of full funnel marketing has been around for years, but most companies in highly regulated industries have been unable to overcome the organizational and technological barriers to implementing it effectively.

The ability to focus and drive success with full funnel marketing transformed marketing into a revenue driver at a leading wealth management company, resulting in $5 billion in new revenue -- $1 billion above target. In a recent TrueVoice webinar, Utkarsh Patel, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at Wealth Enhancement Group, discussed how TrueVoice’s revolutionary ACCESS powered the five keys to success in full funnel growth marketing.