26 May
Marketing funnel is a useful tool to help you visualize the path customers take from first finding out about your brand to converting.
Just imagine, you may have put all your hard efforts on starting a business and creating a website to offer your services or products, but if the results are not as expected, it’s you, not your customers, who needs to change.
This means you need to be able to identify every pain point of the customer journey to figure out where people are losing interest in your offering. The marketing funnel will give you all the tools and data you need to do so.
What is the marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is also known as purchase funnel. It is a model for understanding the process of turning leads into customers. Like a funnel, marketers cast a broad net to drive brand awareness, capture as many leads as possible and then nurture prospective customers through the purchasing decision, which narrows in each stage of the funnel. The marketing funnel can be used to illustrate marketing effectiveness by measuring conversion rates between each step in the funnel, as a KPI.
In other words a marketing funnel is a visual representation of all the steps a visitor has to go through before they purchase a product or service.
This buyer decision process included the following stages: Problem/need-recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. Over time, this idea evolved into the contemporary marketing funnel, which focuses on the different stages from the moment people first hear about a business to the moment they make a transaction.
What is the difference between marketing and sales funnel?
The funnel that we are talking about is often classified as a sales funnel. Strange, since most of this funnel consists of marketing, while sales comes around the corner only at the end. That is why we make a clear distinction between marketing and sales here.
Marketing funnel
In the marketing funnel you are busy attracting potential customers. You’re focusing on a broad audience and try to convince the customer that your company is the best choice for their needs. In this process it is of the utmost importance that your target audience gets as little ‘red flags’ as possible. That is why you only communicate about problems and opportunities that your target group has and do not yet speak about the solution that you can offer. If you do this, potential customers will start to doubt your motives and sincerity and thus trigger a ‘red flag’.
Sales funnel
The sales funnel starts when the marketing funnel has done its job well. The customer is aware of his needs and now is the moment to talk about your product or solution and how it can help your customer.
How does the marketing funnel work?
The marketing funnel visualizes the buyer’s journey, and it works by incorporating the key stages of awareness, consideration, and decision. To do this, these stages correlate to three sections in the funnel:
- Top of the Funnel
- Middle of the Funnel
- Bottom of the Funnel
Top of funnel content
At the top of the marketing funnel, your aim is to attract more traffic, so that you boost the potential for securing leads, and subsequent conversions. People here are in the awareness stage, as they may just have realized they have a need for a product or solution of some kind. Your business must look to spread brand awareness to appeal to these people early in their journey before your competitors can.
Blog content is arguably the best form of top of funnel content, as it is easily accessible, inexpensive to create, and helps establish your brand voice and thought leadership. This is excellent for nurturing trust, which is essential for people to convert later on.
After your blog articles build trust, you can make more compelling calls-to-action with lead magnets, such as an eBook or cheat sheet. This can encourage people to share their contact information and join your mailing list.
This effectively moves leads further down the funnel, and also filters out unqualified leads who aren’t engaged enough with your brand or what you have to offer. In addition to blog content, marketers can use other tactics to spread brand awareness at the top of the funnel. Some powerful channels include:
- Social media marketing
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Video marketing
- Online Ads
- Influencer outreach
At this stage, you can measure awareness among your audience, which helps you align your content with the needs of your target customers.
That being said, although you want to create targeted content, you don’t want to filter out too many people at this early stage. Therefore, it’s best to try and appeal to the majority of your target audience with relevant content that encourages conversation and responses. Ultimately, you should be educating your audience on specific needs, but the key is to only offer value. There shouldn’t be any attempts to sell until later on.
Middle of the funnel
After you collect some qualified leads into the middle of your marketing funnel, you must nurture a relationship that breeds trust and loyalty. People that make it this far are in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey, and so it’s up to you to convince them to make a decision.
Modern marketing has a plethora of tools and programs that enable businesses to keep tabs on customer behavior. This makes it easier for you to monitor customer engagement, and you can then build up their purchase intent by responding to the insights you gain through data analytics.
In the middle of the funnel, you will continue to educate people who are in the awareness stage, and also build upon that by positioning your brand as the solution they need. There are many ways of doing this, including:
- Advanced eBooks
- Newsletters
- Email marketing
- Marketing automation
- Webinars Live events
If you want to strengthen your credibility, high-value content like white papers, case studies, and video courses will accelerate the process. Middle of funnel content is all about identifying whether your leads are aligned with your solutions, and whether or not they are interested in buying your product. If they are, then they will move to the bottom of the funnel, just one step away from the conversion.
Bottom of the funnel
Before we explore it, here is an essential nugget of wisdom: Save yourself from silo syndrome. This is when sales and marketing departments work independently to the point that communications suffer. If that happens, your marketing funnel suffers, and you’ll lose out on sales because there are unnecessary hurdles in the buyer’s journey.
This is the most crucial stage so you should share whatever information your leads need so that the bottom of the funnel is streamlined for an easy conversion.You can expect to have a significantly smaller group at the bottom of the funnel compared to the initial group of leads at the top.
However, people here are ready to take action – they are in the decision stage of their journey. With that being the case, you can cut back on educational content, and instead focus on giving your leads the details they need to make their minds up. You can make them aware of:
- Pricing
- Costs
- Quotes
- Benchmarks
- Specific product information
- Service information
The goal here is to make your leads comfortable and confident with making their decision. Perhaps you can offer a consultation call or even a free trial of the product or service. This is a great way to convince leads to buy. Here, you can measure the total number of leads, and deduce your conversion rate.
What can you use a marketing funnel for?
You aren’t limited to using a marketing funnel strictly for signing up and/or purchasing. You can put funnels all over your website to see how visitors move through a specific website flow.
You may want to track newsletter signup (Viewing newsletter signup form > Submitting form > Confirming email) or a simple page conversion (Viewing a signup page > Submitting signup).
Figure out what your goals are and what you want visitors to do on your site, and you can create a funnel for it. Once you have the data, you’ll be able to see where roadblocks are and optimize your funnel. Let’s dig a little deeper into that.
Benefits of the marketing funnel
As a business, your success does not only depend on the quality of your offering, but also on the way in which it’s presented and marketed to consumers. Everything from your website layout and color scheme to the packaging of your products also plays a huge role in your customer’s journey through the marketing funnel.
Having a clear view of a customer’s journey will allow you to identify any roadblocks that hinder their progress through the funnel. Based on this data, you can make changes to eliminate these barriers and improve your conversion rate, whether it’s by making your website more user-friendly, creating a social media campaign, or promoting on different channels. That’s why funnel marketing is so effective.
Stages of the marketing funnel
Here, we’ll discuss the various stages represented in the marketing funnel template above. These stages include:
1. Awareness
Awareness is the first stage which is located at the top of the marketing funnel. This is the point where customers first learn about your brand, and it’s where lead generation takes place.
To build awareness, develop targeted marketing campaigns that are geared toward people who may need your product. Be sure to use market segmentation to create tailored campaigns for each customer type.
Then, use lead capture forms to get their contact information (typically their email address) so that you can continue marketing to them. This is one of the most important lead generation strategies, as you’ll be using their contact information to reach out to them and guide them through the rest of the marketing funnel.
2. Interest
Once leads are generated, they move on to the interest stage, where they learn more about the company, its products, and any helpful information and research it provides. Here is an opportunity for brands to develop a relationship with the people in its lead database and introduce its positioning. Marketers can nurture leads through emails, content that is more targeted around industries and brands, classes, newsletters, and more.
One of the most effective ways to build interest is through email marketing. This allows you to start building relationships with leads by reaching out to them directly with relevant, branded content.
3. Consideration
The third stage of the funnel is consideration. Now the consumer is evaluating the different methods that are available to them to address their needs. At this point, they already know about your offering and are familiar with your brand. Now, it’s your job to convince them that a product like yours presents the best solution to their problems.
To do this, try using marketing automation to send targeted email campaigns with actionable intent, such as free trials and sales announcements. Another popular funnel marketing technique is to offer them informational content, such as blog posts and webinars, that addresses their needs while gently guiding them toward your product.
4. Intent
To get to the intent stage, prospects must demonstrate that they are interested in buying a brand’s product. This can happen in a survey, after a product demo, or when a product is placed in the shopping cart on an ecommerce website. This is an opportunity for marketers to make a strong case for why their product is the best choice for a buyer. But adding a product to cart doesn’t mean that they are going to buy right away, but it does indicate that they are primed for the purchase.
With that in mind, the intent stage is the time to prove why your offering is the number one option for the prospective customer. You’ll need to target them with marketing materials that make a strong case for why your product is better than your competitors’.
5. Evaluation
The evaluation stage of the marketing funnel is where lead nurture meets sales. Here, the prospective customer is making the final decision about whether or not to buy your product. In this stage, marketing and sales teams must work together to convince prospective buyers to take the leap and make a purchase. Much like the previous stage, the focus is kept on positioning your business’s offering as the ideal choice.
6. Purchase
This is the last stage in the marketing funnel, where a prospect has made the decision to buy and turns into a customer. This is where sales takes care of the purchase transaction. A positive experience on the part of the buyer can lead to referrals that fuel the top of the marketing funnel, and the process begins again.
Additional representations of the marketing funnel
As we’ve discussed, the six stages above represent one of the most popular ways of dividing up the marketing funnel. Still, it isn’t the only version. Other common variations of the marketing funnel include:
- AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
- TOFU-MOFU-BOFU: Top of the funnel (generating leads), Middle of the funnel (generating prospects), Bottom of the funnel (generating sales)
Below, we’ll also talk about how the marketing funnel differs slightly between B2B and B2C companies, as well as a variation known as the nonlinear marketing funnel.
B2B vs B2C marketing funnel
The main difference between the B2B and B2C marketing funnel is the amount of people involved in the process and the level of interaction between businesses and consumers.
In the majority of cases, B2C consumers navigate through the funnel alone with little to no direct interaction with the business. Customer outreach efforts are conducted by targeting large buying groups or by using marketing automation tools, and very few customers actually interact with a representative.
On the other hand B2B consumers usually include more than five people from different departments. While the uppermost stages of the marketing funnel follow the same pattern as that of B2C consumers, in lower stages sales representatives establish direct communication with B2B consumers.
Nonlinear funnel
The marketing funnel template above represents the nonlinear marketing funnel. While the cone-shaped marketing funnel has been the default for many decades, some experts argue that the market has evolved beyond linear buying processes.
The goal of this new funnel approach is to create strong relationships with customers, not only to ensure they don’t move to your competitors’ services, but also so they’ll become repeat buyers and loyal advocates of your brand.
While there isn’t a consensus about the different stages of the nonlinear marketing funnel, it nonetheless remains a valuable way to gauge consumer behavior and optimize your marketing efforts. Whichever model of the marketing funnel you use, the most important factor is that your marketing plan strongly aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Final words
Marketing funnel tracks the steps that lead up to the conversion. A funnel report shows you where people are dropping off in the path to conversion so you can optimize your conversion path and drive revenue.
Setting up a funnel starts with a thorough investigation of your potential customers, how you can reach them and can help with your product or service. Then it is important to determine which phases your customers go through and with which communication you can respond to them.
Think carefully what you want to tell per phase and at which stage of the customer journey this fits in. Finally, it is very important to determine the turning point between marketing and sales.