What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a visual representation of the stages that a customer goes through, starting with when they first find out about your brand to then becoming a customer.
What are the four stages?
- The first stage is awareness, which is when someone becomes aware of your brand, product or service
- This is followed by interest, when the prospect expresses interest in your product or service.
- The next stage is known as desire or consideration, which is when they evaluate your product or service.
- The fourth stage is action, where the prospect becomes a customer.
This is known as the traditional marketing funnel, although some marketers have simplified it into a three-stage model – awareness, interest/desire and action.
Other marketers found the traditional marketing funnel to be incomplete as it focuses on converting a prospect into a customer, without considering the importance of repeat customers. So, they have added two more stages onto the funnel. These are loyalty, which is when the customer repeatedly buys from you and advocacy which is when the customer recommends your brand to other people.
How do these stages work?
Awareness – Awareness can happen in a variety of ways:
- When someone sees your ads on social media
- When someone searches on Google for something and finds your website
- When a potential customer watches one of your videos on YouTube.
Now that they have seen your brand, they will remember you.
Interest – this can be indicated in the following ways:
- Following you on social media
- Signing up to your email list
- Following your podcast
- Subscribing to your YouTube channel
- Registering for a webinar.
The more actions that they take, the more interested they are in your brand.
Desire/Consideration – this is when the prospect starts to evaluate your product or service. This may involve reading reviews, comparing alternatives and talking to friends and family.
Action – this is when the prospect has decided to buy from you.
How do you create a marketing funnel?
The best way to create a marketing funnel is to make sure that you’re doing some marketing activities or creating content for each stage of the funnel, so that you can target different people at different stages of the buying journey.
Awareness
For the awareness stage you will want your website to become visible in the search results, which can be done by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You’ll want to create keywords that relate to your product or service, so you’ll need to do keyword research. This is the process of discovering the search queries that your target customers are typing into search engines to look for products, services or information.
You could also expose your brand to a new audience, which could be by appearing on a podcast, a webinar, presenting at a conference or creating content.
Another way of creating awareness is by creating ads. This is a great way of building brand awareness if you have the budget for it.
Interest
In this stage, you will want to get prospects to sign up to your email list. This is so that you can retain their interest in the hope that they will move to the next stage. This can be done by including Call to Actions (CTA) that remind them to subscribe. You can also add a dedicated landing page for your newsletter, which can encourage sign-ups.
When they sign up to your email list, its important to further engage the prospect. This could be by introducing your brand, product or service to them. You could also teach them something new about your product, announce any new launches, or answer any common questions.
Consideration
To convince the prospect to buy your product or service, its important to get more reviews. More reviews on platforms such as Google can influence a prospect’s decision making. Also, you’ll want to make sure to respond to these reviews, whether they’re good or bad.
You could offer a free version of your product, so that you can imprint on a prospect’s mind in the hope that they will sign up in the future.
Action
There are various ways to encourage someone to purchase, including offering a money back guarantee, creating an easy checkout experience or offering them a final discount
If you’d like any help with improving your marketing strategy, contact WillCreate today.