IPA Bellwether Q1 2026: Marketing Budgets Revised up to Highest Level in Almost Two Years

“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. You can then push them through the email marketing funnel to encourage purchases and cultivate post-purchase customer loyalty. If customers are on your email list, they’ve already bought into your brand at some level. Hiring a public relations professional can also help you increase brand awareness by getting your company into the press.

Channels like streaming and CTV are highly fragmented, making it critical to understand not just overall performance, but how each channel contributes to specific marketing objectives. There is a sense of cautious optimism as brands are leaning into digital, particularly online and video where engagement has remained consistent over the years. If these increased budgets are to result in sustained growth for the rest of the year, marketers will want to monitor how spend performs closely. And while caution is to be expected, the marketers who succeed will be those who can prove value, stay aligned, and invest for both short-term impact and long-term growth. Looking ahead, the most effective B2B brands recognise that sustainable growth depends on balancing brand and demand, not choosing between them.

We also saw AI move beyond experimentation into strategic application, with the brands that have already operationalised it gaining a clear competitive advantage. We saw investment in performance marketing accelerate, as the need to demonstrate clear business impact has moved from a nice-to-have to a fundamental requirement. The geopolitical climate has tempered the optimism we saw at the end of 2025, with marketers taking a more cautious approach as uncertainty persists. Crucially, it’s the combination of that connected view with the expertise of our teams that allows brands to interpret these signals properly and act on them with confidence.

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Often called the "consideration stage," this is where potential customers are actively researching solutions to their problems. But the middle of the funnel, or “MOFU”, is a critical stage for converting potential customers into buyers. Track metrics at the company or team level, not just individual users. Click any funnel drop-off to land directly in a playlist of session recordings for those exact users. Pageviews, clicks, form submissions, and session data are tracked automatically the moment a user lands on your page.

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If you’re ready to build a smarter, more efficient LinkedIn advertising engine, TopRank Marketing can help you turn these capabilities into real business impact. Document Ads spark qualified interest, Event Ads convert hand-raisers into meetings, and Dynamic Ads can revive dormant revenue. Buyers discover and consume a substantial amount of content on LinkedIn through ads and these options shared provide a full funnel opportunity to engage very specifically with buyers in the best answer spirit.

This mid-funnel strategy helps your target audience get to know your brand up close and personal. If you do it well, they may even start to look forward to your next installment. Instead, you just want to give them a little nudge by connecting users to information that’s most relevant to them. For these scenarios, you don’t necessarily have to create new content for them. Regardless of the market that you’re serving, there are already go-to strategies for implementing mid-funnel marketing.

If I’m shopping around for a new pair of jeans, I probably don’t need to consult an infographic or a two-minute video to figure out what they do. Sure, it’s ultimately just another email featuring a big list of products. Looking specifically at the mid-funnel stage, you definitely don’t want to be too salesy. They want to take a closer look at your products, and perhaps learn a little more about who you are, what you do, and if you’re “legit”. By the point a potential customer lands on your site, they’re well on their way to the bottom of the marketing funnel.

The customer’s intent can help marketers gauge when it’s appropriate to put conversion-oriented content or ads in front of them. Buyer guides offer detailed insights, tips, and recommendations based on the product’s features, empowering consumers to make a more informed decision and guiding them further down the marketing funnel. Creating product comparison charts gives consumers a holistic picture of how your product offering compares with other benefits and prices across alternatives. These personas can outline audience demographics, preferences, pain points, and behaviors, allowing marketers to create more personalized messaging and pinpoint who they’re targeting.

Measuring mid funnel marketing results

In this article, we’ll be covering the middle mid funnel marketing of the funnel or evaluation stage of the buyer’s journey. As you can probably guess, as leads move through the sales funnel, their understanding of their problem and available solutions changes. But when do you provide content to your customers, and what type? Use platforms like LinkedIn for professional audiences or Instagram for visually-driven campaigns.

• Promote the features and USPs you offer that your competitors don’t so your leads know that you’re the best option for them.
• Combine this data with metrics from the platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, for more information.
• According to TikTok, Market Scope is designed as a full-funnel analytics tool that gives brands a single view of how audiences move from awareness through consideration to conversion, across paid, organic, and branded content.
• As marketing budgets start to recover, the focus is shifting from volume to value, with greater emphasis on targeted, performance-driven investment.

Strategies for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Promote the features and USPs you offer that your competitors don’t so your leads know that you’re the best option for them. Then you need to provide them with the information that’s relevant for them. Ignoring mid-funnel strategies can leave a company with a fragile marketing framework that’s prone to collapse under pressure. So segment your nurturing efforts based on prospect characteristics and engagement patterns, creating separate tracks for different industries, roles, and company sizes to ensure relevant messaging. Proper measurement connects nurturing efforts to revenue by tracking how prospects advance through consideration stages.