Younger generations might not remember, but before commerce was a thing on the internet, there was no one-to-one attribution between ad spend and sales, there was no Google Analytics, no targeted ads and most definitely, no “micro-influencers” as we know them today.
Not so long ago digital marketing favored lower-funnel strategies. The digital ecosystem became the perfect playground performance-driven strategies – spend $100 in campaign A, track $150 in sales, optimize, and repeat. It’s an amazing concept.
This model worked well when platforms like Google Ads had a relatively direct link between ad impressions, clicks and revenue. However, the digital ecosystem and consumer behavior has evolved. Social media, user privacy, and artificial intelligence have made the purchase journey more complex, unpredictable, and much harder to track with the same level of precision, pushing marketers to reconsider where to spend.
Shifting Budgets Back to the Upper Funnel
Supporting industry intuition, eMarketer recently identified upper-funnel strategies as a key area where commerce media ad budgets are flowing.
Consider social media in channels like YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn – commonly used in top-of-funnel awareness strategies. Estimates We’re sure many have been thinking or had a gut-feeling about this trend, but upper-funnel investments in awareness and engagement are making a comeback.
Influencer marketing and content creators are another example of a shift from nice-to-have to must-have for many brands. Estimates put influencer marketing in the U.S. alone growing by 14.2% in 2025. Brands are investing more in building relationships with audiences, rather than just closing immediate sales. In Japan, social media influencers have benefited fashion, food & drink, and beauty product industries. The trend seems to be going this way.
Why Top-of-Funnel Works
The rise of micro-influencers and niche communities is one of the impact drivers for top-of-funnel strategies. Commerce has always been marked by search (PPC), affiliate, email, gated content prompting user signups, and other lower-funnel strategies. Now that users and technologies have evolved, a similar appetite to invest in newer “awareness” type strategies, even if attribution is not as straightforward as an email campaign.
Platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and X, Digital Out Of Home and connected TV are proving themselves as a dominant force in top-of-funnel marketing, particularly for B2B brands. Yet, trends are still changing. Consider LinkedIn, which is well known for its effectiveness to deliver ads to targeted audiences in the US, India, and Europe. Yet, in Japan it is still a growing platform.
Balancing the Approach
Although some upper-funnel tactics like social media, connected TV and Digital Out Of Home are having a moment, it is important to keep a balanced strategy and not overcorrect.
Upper-funnel advertising often requires significant investment, with larger brands allocating $10k, $15k, or even $20k per day to maximize brand awareness. Without careful planning, a large portion of the budget may be spent at this stage alone, making strategy a critical step of any initiative.
Effective overarching strategies will have multiple plans of attack, and until recently, creating and managing multiple campaigns was prohibitable expensive and overwhelming, but this is where AI-driven advertising is changing the game. Platforms like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ already offer AI to generate content, and in some cases, image assets. ChatGPT, Gemini and other LLMs and assisting teams and agencies so that a full-funnel strategy is relatively accessible
Closing Thoughts
For the last couple of decades or so much of digital marketing has skewed toward the lower-funnel tactics – where results are measurable, and ROI is more or less immediate. But as the digital ecosystem becomes more fragmented and algorithm-driven, balancing funnel tactics with upper- and lower-funnel, brand building and transactional objectives, are no longer optional.
Whether through purposely researched audiences, influencer partnerships, niche community engagement like LinkedIn or Reddit, or AI-driven media strategies, the brands that succeed in 2025 will be the ones that embrace a full-funnel approach.
（グローバル）
