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What are Marketing Funnels?

Marketing funnels are an effective means to help you picture the route consumers choose from first getting to know your brand to conversion. Knowing marketing funnels offers data that can explain why some consumers convert — and some don’t.

The marketing funnel is an idea adopted to outline how likely consumers are to undergo various stages when engaging with your brand. Learning these stages allows you to encourage prospects to use the funnel and convert them into clients.

St. Elmo Lewis first discovered this approach in 1988. He built a model that described consumers’ journeys. He cited the idea of an AIDA model that refers to ‘Awareness,’ ‘Interest,’ ‘Desire,’ and ‘Action.’ Several people still acknowledge that the AIDA approach performs for every company when supervising a marketing campaign.

Plenty of marketers have applied this concept over many decades, as it accurately represents the buyer’s journey to beginning the marketing funnel. We can also point out this approach as a channel for communication instead of a plain customer-turning model.

This is how the AIDA concept works

  • Awareness: Here you will start brand awareness for individuals who engage with your marketing campaign for the first time.
  • Interest: This stage intends to grab the public’s notice to generate interest in your brand.
  • Desire: now, you’ll unlock a special relationship with your intended public to develop their desire to develop into your clients.
  • Action: this phase targets a full conversion by inviting your viewers to take action instantly. In this fashion, you’ll require a call-to-action (CTA) to encourage your prospects to make headway toward developing into clients.

It is straightforward to adapt and carry out the AIDA idea in your marketing campaigns. This funnel allows you to lower prospects by opening your industry through gradual marketing promotional content.
You can’t force new viewers to purchase your brand when they scantily recognize your brand. It’s not practical to jump into a desire or action stage if you skip the awareness phase.

How the Marketing Funnel Works

This funnel approach will continue to be one of the most central sales and marketing concepts for decades.Marketing Funnels depicts the basic steps a customer must experience before purchasing something. People do not simply get up and choose to purchase a new car just for the sake of it. Similarly, people never hang around to buy something until they need it.

Among the leading reasons why people purchase things they don’t require is because big brands know the customer journey. Besides that, they have knowledge of how to start this journey and mentor buyers through it.

What Are Various Funnels?

Here we’re centered on marketing funnels. These are funnels that begin with some kind of marketing campaign. It could be a PPC ad, content marketing campaign, video ad, white paper download, or even a social media ad. The fact is that the first phase of the funnel is a marketing campaign in a way.

Other types of funnels you could hear are:

  • Sales funnels
  • Homepage funnels
  • Webinar funnels
  • Lead magnet funnels
  • Video marketing funnels
  • Email funnels

Regardless of the various names, these all follow the same old story — the phases a prospective buyer takes to convert.

What Does the Marketing Funnel Look Like Today?

Today, we have more varieties of the marketing funnel than in the past. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter which variant of the funnel you wish to take advantage of as a template because the principles are roughly identical.

This five-step funnel will help you do this. Every fruitful sale expects users to undergo the first three steps. Regarding the other two, you expect every consumer to arrive at these stages of the buying process.

  • Awareness: The minute your customer finds your product, brand, service, offer, etc., for the first time.
  • Consideration: They’re excited but not willing to purchase now — maybe analyzing you against the rival or awaiting an amazing offer.
  • Conversion: When a customer finally buys (hopefully it’s your product).
  • Loyalty: Buyers who always buy from you and have difficulties going elsewhere.
  • Advocacy: Buyers who strongly recommend you to likely customers.

The most important factor here is that your marketing funnel isn’t complete with the purchase. There is a lot more work ahead currently. You can include as many steps into this funnel as you believe to be compulsory for your brand, but then again, it’s up to you to decide how difficult your marketing funnel needs to be. You can also extend it as time goes by as your plan becomes more successful and fresh avenues emerge.

1

Convey Your Brand’s Message

The initial step of your marketing funnel is to allow people to be knowledgeable about your brand. Later, create content that fully defines your brand and communicates your words meaningfully.
Bear in mind that first impressions do count. So, ensure that your introductory campaign in no case can't be too promotional. Let the public notice your company to give them an impression of what you do.
2

Understand Your Audience

It seems clear, but to enhance your sales funnel, one must know your prospects. Knowing your target market allows you to construct better marketing messaging and increase your conversions.
Begin by creating user personas — semi-fictional depictions of your perfect buyers. To create user personas, you must study demographic data, purchasing habits, buying behavior patterns, objectives, and interests.
Also, learn more about your strong opponents. Understand what’s functioning properly for them. Analytics tools can benefit. They’ll give you some understanding of your rivals’ traffic origins and their best-performing content, so you can try to dissect what is echoing with their audience.
3

Targeting the Right Leads

Any collective work towards creating a more profitable sales funnel must go ahead with developing better leads. You must go after the people that are most likely to reply to your brand or business. If you haven’t previously, maybe it is time to concentrate on mastering Google Analytics. This free service allows you to analyze the essence of how people are discovering you originally.
If your leads emanate from Facebook, you must double down on your Facebook approach or steal from your Facebook achievements and implement analogous content on different channels to take advantage of your achievement.
4

Use an Omnichannel Approach

Customers today desire a smooth and customized purchasing experience throughout all outlets. Therefore, omnichannel marketing is of great importance.
To carry out an impressive omnichannel marketing game plan, you must get your full company in agreement — put differently — your sales, product development, customer support, marketing, and PR groups. Every exchange with a probable lead is an excuse to provide a customized marketing experience and collect more details about prospects.
5

Make Your Brand Noticeable

Present content where people can rapidly identify you among the masses. With a lot of businesses fighting for the same market, it may be difficult for them to choose the finest among the rest. Among the many methods to make your brand noticeable is to produce content that people can readily consumable.
As soon as people figure out something, the risk of avoiding it is less probable. Ensure that you streamline your products’ qualities, advantages, and directives to encourage your prospects to learn fully. Occasionally, brands overlook the strength of baby language to provide fresh data in a product description.
6

Create Great Content

Useful content benefits in driving sales. Research endorses this.
What is great content? In a few words, it’s authentic, it’s conscious, it answers queries, and it’s interesting. Great content enables people to solve their issues. It gives them solutions. It gets studied, distributed, and celebrated.
Recall your buyer personas in the above section you have already created. What are their pain points? What solutions will attract them? Use these queries to produce helpful blogs, infographics, videos, and additional content that will help them focus on their difficulties, problems, or demands.
7

Shift Direction from Transactions to Relationships

Even if you intend to have people purchase a product, register for a service contract, or sign up for a newsletter, developing relationships is how you materialize. And it’s how you produce regular clients and brand promoters. Consider how you can serve and nourish leads at any phase of the customer journey.
Be good at creating targeted content, remarketing, and even customized videos. Today's marketing funnels are multipurpose. Your aim isn’t simply to secure a purchase, it’s about creating loyal clients and brand promoters. It is simply not about the “sale” — it is all about creating lifetime value, and it mainly begins with the relationship.
8

Build Customer Loyalty

As soon as you’ve captured your buyers, the next step will be to keep them in your brand for longer periods. Customer loyalty is one of the main reasons for continuing your business.
Once we tie people to a certain brand, it’s difficult to strike their interest over another brand. They usually feel a sentimental attachment to brands.
We offer reward schemes, reduced costs, and priority services to our loyal customers.
9

Use Positive Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews, testaments, and buyer narratives can assist you in building confidence with prospects. One report discovered that presenting reviews on web pages and home pages can increase conversions by 270%.
If you’re nervous about those critical reviews, don’t. The same study discovered that whereas positive reviews are important, excessive or only 5-star reviews make people apprehensive. Some negative reviews are an advantage because they make a brand or business sound more reliable.
Putting reviews on your home page and other outlets you use can enhance conversions, specifically if you’re marketing more expensive things.
10

Pick Up New Leads from Current Clients

No one could stop the power of clients. When they are happy with your brand or business, the cheerful impressions impact others.
People are highly prone to purchase from a particular brand after reading or viewing client recommendations. About 83% of the latest buyers admit that friends’ endorsements have had a major impact on their buying choices, and nearly 76% of buyers rely on online testimonies as much as individual suggestions.
Deliver the finest customer service to people dealing with difficulties concerning your product. Once they are happy with your work, invite them to leave a review on a review forum or even on their social media platforms.

You need an effective marketing strategy for a powerful marketing funnel. Doesn’t matter if it’s the traditional AIDA approach or the latest sales funnel approach, every stage matters. There is no mysterious formula for building leads. You just have to hand over the right content and framework to your targeted buyers at the right phase of the sales funnel.

Indeed, finding your brand’s content on social media is extremely impactful. It’s your dominant lead generation tool. But what you must understand when posting content is quality and consistency. We can handle the latter by using a social media marketing tool, which supports you in auto-scheduling and publishing blogs or articles. Thus, your brand steals the show while you concentrate on other major jobs at hand.