There are two ways to crush it as a Marketer:

  1. Sell more to your existing customers. 
  2. Attract brand-new customers.

And if you ask me, number 2 is waaaaaaaaaaay harder than number 1. 

Convincing strangers to care about your brand? That’s a whole other level of hustle.

Which is why this week I spoke to Joey Steger, VP of Marketing and Ecommerce at Alen, the air purifier company. 

When it comes to filling the top of the funnel, Joey knows ball—driving 25% YoY revenue growth, improving brand positioning, and optimizing acquisition across digital, retail, and marketplace channels.

Joey delivers results, and I’m glad I had him on the pod.

Here’s what you need to know to blow up your top of funnel in 2025:

1️⃣. Segment, segment, segment. 

“We use a multi-step pop-up on the site to immediately gather what the main concern is that brought someone here. 

This helps us create a segmented prospect journey tailored to that concern.

Some people come to Alen for allergies and dust, others because of their pets, or maybe due to mold or environmental issues.

With this approach, we have a variety of prospect flows that allow us to segment based on each person’s primary concern.

(Once someone enters the funnel, figure out where they need to go based on their pain points. Joey recommends a number of tools to make this happen. A quick peek at his stack 👀:

2️⃣. Different channels are different (duh!)

So, I’m capitalizing on their active consideration and driving them toward my brand for conversion. That starts working for you—you’re growing, seeing a good return.

Then you think, ‘Hey, we should turn on another channel.’ But now you’re trying to figure out: How does incrementality work as I turn on that new channel? Or, if I’m going to invest in it, how do I know it’s worth the investment instead of just putting more money into Google?

A lot of times, what happens is they’ll say, ‘Okay, that new channel has to either match or beat the ROAS of Google.’ Then they keep adding channels, holding each one to the same historic ROAS.

That kind of thinking leads to this pattern where an entire channel is judged solely on ROAS. 

But if you start to ask, ‘Hey, how are we actually attracting customers? What’s the journey?’—that’s where things shift. One of the key things that helped us unlock the idea of campaign versus channel was our post-purchase survey.

As we began asking more detailed questions about where people first heard about a product and if they had interacted with other parts of the funnel, it gave us valuable insight into the overlap and multiple touchpoints that exist in the customer’s journey.

That’s what really spawned this insight: within these channels, different campaigns work differently. 

(Anytime you use a new channel, you’re targeting a whole new audience. Think of it like this: an 18-25-year-old from Facebook is totally different from an 18-25-year-old from Instagram. Every placement and approach within a channel attracts its own micro-audience with their own motivations, even if the demographic data looks the same.)

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3️⃣. The platforms are lying to you—find overlap with multi-touch attribution

We track order overlap across different channels to ensure that no single channel is driving more than 50% overlap.

If we see higher overlap, it means that channel is working too hard across too many parts of the funnel.

Any pixel-based multi-touch attribution software is probably the first step—Triple Whale has been phenomenal to me, and there are several others like it out there. 

When you’re looking at platform metrics alone, it’s really hard, because every platform wants to claim credit for every sale. It’s only when you start to look at them all together that you can really parse it all out.

(I’ve seen this before—keep in mind that SaaS products all have goals to get you to spend more, so they can be VERY cagey about letting your data sync into various dashboards. That’s why you need a multi-touch tool, so you can see all that walled-off data in one place.)

4️⃣. Give a narrative, not just information

A Marketing hill I would die on is stories. You cannot win these days by just talking about product attributes. 

Brand stories, building communities, connecting to people’s emotions and passion—that goes so much further.

We came out with a campaign called Utopiair, and the idea is really about giving you control, confidence, and security in your environment with our product. 

A lot of our competitors focus on messaging like, ‘We make the air really pure,’ or ‘Pure air is a great experience.’ They emphasize eliminating 99.9% of harmful contaminants. (Competing on product features!)

While we include those base metrics to reassure people that we’re meeting their wellness needs, we’re also trying to speak to the emotion—the end state you desire when you experience the brand.

(This may feel obvious, but it’s shocking how many times I see ads where there’s no story, no values, no tugging at the heart strings.  Sometimes brands forget that humans crave connection, not just information.)

5️⃣. Evaluate new channels (even the ones you thought were dead!)

For me, and it might not be the same for everybody, but direct mail has a surprising number of new facets to it. 

I think the old world of direct mail was to pick some zip codes that you think your customers are in and let’s send them a postcard and call it an upper funnel tactic to try and grab new customers.

Direct mail is super responsive now

It relates to pixel-based data and times reminders or offers. 

I’ve seen a 17+ ROAS from it. 
It’s an underrated channel that can be a powerful complement to your digital strategy.”

(I was surprised by this one—this is why I love asking about underrated channels. But like any other channel, it requires good creative. I’d check out PostGrid for a good way to plug into other parts of your marketing stack.)

Daniel Murray
Daniel Murray
Level up your marketing game

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