Marketing funnels are tool that many brands use to get people to buy & use their products and services. As time has passed these funnels have become more dynamic. The complexity of the customer buying journey has increased greatly since the dawn of the digital age and continues to become more sophisticated as a result of the amount of choice that a customer has at their disposal.
These marketing funnels are the methods used to take a person who is completely unaware about your product or service to a becoming an advocate of the same.
Marketing funnels were created based on Philip Kotler’s 5 A’s of marketing.
This article will help you understand what marketing funnels are and how to create them for your product or service.
Table of Contents
What are Marketing Funnels?
A marketing funnel presents marketing strategy in the form of infographic which can we easily understood and applied.
Most marketing funnels consist of the following elements:
1) Top Funnel or Awareness Stage
At this stage companies and brands are looking at creating awareness regarding its product or service. This awareness and visiblity can be of two type:
- New to the market products/services: If the product or service are fairly new to the market and not many people have a fair idea of it then companies and brands can create awareness regarding the same. If people don’t know what the product or service is then they are not going to know if they need it or what problem it solves for them. If they do not know they have a problem that can be solved there will be no need for that product or service. I think its quite obvious what the implications of this will be!
- Pre-existing products/services: If there is general awareness regarding a product or service and there is a demand for the same then awareness need only be created to help people associate your company or brand with that particular product or service and the additional benefits (Unique Selling Proposition or USP) derived from using the same.
Now ideally both these levels of awareness can be conducted together depending upon which of the above two types your product or service falls under.
2) Middle Funnel or Interest & Desire Stage
At this stage a company or brand would ideally target those who are already aware about their product or service and have interacted with the company or brand at the Top Funnel stage. This stage is divided into two sub-stages:
- Interest: Once you’ve captured a person’s attention in the awareness stage, they enter the interest stage. This is ideally the stage in which the person researching has shortlisted the company or brand as one of their potential vendors that they might buy from and begin to research more about their offerings, pricing, testimonials.
- Desire: This is the stage at which a person has completed their research and is now ready to buy. At this stage companies and brand need to hit their potential customers with the best possible offers for the products & services being sought. This increases the changes of these potential customers actually converting into a customer
3) Bottom Funnel or Action Stage
At this stage a potential customer takes action and makes a purchase and becomes a buying customer. However, this is only a one time buy. To keep this customer, buying with your company or brand, the customer journey shouldn’t end here rather should move onto creating brand loyalty and convert this customer into a loyal customer.
4) Retention & Advocacy Stage
At this stage feedback becomes the most important. The feedback received if positive can be used as reviews to create better impressions on others and if negative can be used to better the product or service or the offering as a whole.
You can assume that if the experience is positive the customer will become a repeat buyer, if negative, their journey with you depends on how you as a company or brand respond to their grievances.
How should marketing funnels be used?
Marketing funnels are only a tool to help a company plan & execute their marketing strategy. These funnels are a high-level view of the marketing strategy which takes into account the features of the product or service, target market and audiences, marketing channels, customer journey. All these aspects connected to each other creates a marketing funnel.
At each stage of the marketing funnels customers drop off and can be re-targeted using the right remarketing strategy for the same. Sometimes people can enter your marketing funnel at the interest and desire stages too if you plan your marketing strategy well to lure them away from competitors.
Remarketing is an important part of the customer buying journey in the current day & age. The availability of a great number of choices ideally makes people drop off the funnel or customer journey and can be brought back on track using remarketing at each individual stage. However, the only way to remarket to these audiences is to have a clear KPI (Key performance indicator) set at each stage of the funnel
In order for your marketing funnel to work you need to have your customer journey map in place for the product or service you want to market.
Example
For eg. Let’s say I am running a Google Display Ad to create awareness about a new gym. I will measure homepage website visitors as a KPI at this stage. As a secondary KPI to understand interest I will also measure the number of people that navigate to the special offers & features page.
This will measure those that click through from the ad onto my website as well as those that have shown interest in joining the gym. These are the people whose attention I was able to capture with my display ad and they will have moved into the interest & desire stage in the customer buying journey.
For some reason, they haven’t moved further from here and haven’t converted into a lead by either filling a contact form or calling, I can remarket to them using YouTube Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads etc in which I will create an offer specifically for these audiences to entice them back onto the customer buying journey and use the secondary KPI created at the awareness stage as an audience for running these ads. This way I will be able to remarket to them and potentially get them back onto the customer Journey.
5 Simple Steps to Build your Marketing Funnel
To create a marketing funnel for your product or service you can follow the following steps:
1) Define your product or service features
The first step to building any marketing funnel is to have in-depth knowledge of the product or service being marketed.
To best understand your product or service they can be divided into the core benefit or problem the product or service solves, the features of the product or service and the additional benefits of the product or service.
2) Define your marketing personas
This step is probably the most important step. It is extremely important to understand your marketing personas because they are going to be the buyers of your product or service. To be able to understand this the first step is to define it.
The best way to define your ideal marketing personas is to use the features of your products or services defined above as a foundation to conduct a market research around who your ideal target market will be.
Once you have your target market you can create audience segments and with each segment a marketing persona can be attributed to help understand your ideal customers better.
3) Choose your marketing channels
At this step the channels that your product or service use need to be shortlisted. These channels can include the website for the product or service, social media channels, digital ad platforms that you wish to use, offline marketing channels, TV, Radio etc.
This step is crucial as it is the foundation of your entire marketing funnel. These channels are your assets and need to be used appropriately in the funnel to bring about best results
4) Building your customer journey
During this phase of the funnel building process we will use the information gathered above to create a customer journey map. This customer journey map consists of a step by step detailed process that an individual follows from the point at which they first learn about the product or service till they become a buying customer and an advocate of the product or service.
This customer journey map will help you define the entire customer journey for your particular product or service and each and every touch point during each phase of the funnel. This will help you understand the platforms you can use and help set up key performance indicators at each touch point to measure the success of marketing strategy along the customer journey.
This customer journey map also helps you realize loopholes, mistakes and pain points in your marketing strategy and will help you correct them by constantly updating the customer journey.
5) Building Your marketing funnel
The last and final step includes connecting all the above into a working marketing strategy. This marketing strategy uses the key performance indicators at each stage of the marketing funnel to provide you the information to understand how people are moving along the funnel.
It will also give you information regarding the people dropping off the funnel and help you find ways to remarket to them using the key performance indicators set at each touch point.
While building these marketing funnels at each stage of the funnel you can use the information gathered from the points above to answer the questions under each stage below:
Awareness:
- On which platforms are my target audience going to be active?
- How can I create a hook that will capture the audience’s attention?
- Which page on the website will be the best page to land them too?
- What should I measure as the Key Performance Indicator at this stage?
Interest:
- Will the audience generated from the key performance indicator in the awareness stage be appropriate as a target audience for this stage?
- Which action on the website/landing page will best account for the person browsing being interested?
- Which is the best way to generate interest amongst this audience?
- What kind of social proof will help the audience move onto the desire stage of the journey?
Desire:
- How to remarket to the audiences that have shown interest?
- What kind of offers will bring in the best results & conversions?
- Which Key Performance Indicator will best represent desire to convert?
Action:
- Are my conversion pages set up well?
- How to remarket to those audiences that dropped off at the desire stage?
Retention:
- Can we create a loyalty program, a blog or a newsletter to keep customers updated about our offerings?
- How can we convert a pull a turn around on a negative customer experience?
- How can the pain points from customer feeback be removed to create a good customer experience?
The above questions need to be answered with a big drawing board in front of you! This will not only help you figure out your marketing strategy but also, help you identify pain points in your existing structure by breaking it down into its individual elements.
Also, while asking yourself these questions there will be other questions that come up and based on those question solutions for the same can be thought off.
Conclusion
It is extremely important to go in with a marketing strategy for each and every product or service. It is advisable to create separate marketing funnels for every single product or service.
Marketing strategy for any product or service can never be the same as they will need to target different audiences. This will lead to change in behavioural aspects that can only be accounted for if every product or service has its own customer journey.
Having such individual marketing funnels can also help you comeback to the drawing board and make updates and changes very easily.