In today's landscape of digital buying and selling, enterprises often have an upper hand in marketing because they have dedicated teams supporting digital, remote, and omnichannel selling.

Those large companies have the resources and technologies to attract and retain new customers, convert them into opportunities, and drive revenue.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs), on the other hand, often require a level of creativity to boost revenue in the same way. For those organizations, the key to success is employing a full-funnel marketing approach.

That means approaching marketing and sales efforts through a lens of complete unification.

Unifying the sales and marketing functions is a good start. But, beyond that, a unified, full-funnel approach requires thinking of all the activities to nurture a prospect and then determining who's responsible for those activities in the organization. From there, a full-funnel approach requires aligning those activities and responsibilities to the appropriate funnel phase rather than assigning them to Marketing vs. Sales.

Here are three steps to get started.

1. Identify current marketing efforts

The first step in crafting a full-funnel strategy is identifying current marketing efforts. SMBs don't often have separate teams aligned to Marketing, let alone dedicated to each product and practice area. Those employees and teams must wear multiple "hats" to cater to customer needs.

However, even if an SMB doesn't have a formal marketing team, it's likely using marketing tactics and just not calling it marketing.

If your sales reps, customer management teams, or account managers are identifying prospects and executing actions to get in front of those buyers, they're marketing in some way. That is also true of both cross-selling—stimulating a current customer to buy something new—and new-lead acquisition.

It's important to collectively—as an organization—identify such efforts. If your company hasn't had a formalized marketing function, determine whether there's enough effort or opportunity to warrant a dedicated person or team to head up marketing efforts and strategy. If there isn't enough demand or activity, take it a step further and consider which marketing tools could help sales reps scale and automate their top- and middle-funnel activities.

2. Set your approach for each funnel phase

Once you have a complete picture of your marketing activities, it's time to think about how they track to the various phases of the funnel and address prospects' needs during each stage of the buying process.

The top of the funnel is where you attract buyer interest. In that phase, your content approach should focus on educating, helping, and answering common questions and pain points rather than trying to sell your audience on a product or service.

By offering free and appealing content, such as demos or thought leadership content such as e-books and whitepapers, SMBs can effectively fill up the top of the funnel with high-quality leads. They can also regenerate demand and influence the front of the buyer's journey with a high-quality website and by cross-selling to current customers.

The middle of the funnel is for converting interest into opportunities. That is where you establish a trust-based relationship with your customers and support their desire for research and evaluation. It's where prospects often compare competitors in the same space, so it's important to offer content that helps answer questions before prospective buyers have a call with sales reps.

For the middle-funnel phase, think of informative blog posts, personalized emails, and webinars as helpful content types. The middle of the funnel is also where the lead handoff between Sales and Marketing needs to be seamless.