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Being into digital marketing, sometimes it gets really annoying for us to reach out to our targeted audience but have nothing to show for it. One reason for this can be that your marketing strategy lacks structure.
Marketing strategies are always changing and evolving. And if you have ever had a chance to be in digital marketing, even for a short time, you must have heard the term “funnel.”
Funnels give structure to your marketing strategy.
Do you want to learn more about this marketing funnel? Read the complete blog. We will also walk you through the process of creating a marketing funnel.
But first, let’s define what a marketing funnel is and why we need one.
Marketing Funnel- What it is?
A marketing funnel is an illustration of the steps and stages users travel from finding out about your brand till they get converted. Marketing Funnel is also referred to as the purchase funnel. In simpler words, the marketing funnel describes the customers’ journey with the brand.
So, suppose you are looking on the internet for making a purchase so the brand marketers will get you from being aware of the brand to purchase the item from the best and the post-purchase steps.
In the marketing funnel, there are five steps-
1. Awareness
Brand awareness will always be the first stage of marketing. As it is a measure of what percentage pf customers know that your brand exists. Awareness marketing should be a major focus for all the new brands in the market.
2. Consideration
The second stage in the marketing funnel is brand consideration. It shows the percentage of users who consider their brand for making purchases.
3. Purchase
The purchase stage defines the percentage of customers who purchased from the brands.
4. Loyalty
Once a customer makes the purchase, the branding is not over. Brands aim to develop a strong consumer relationship to cultivate repeated customer purchases.
5. Advocacy
The last stage is advocacy. Customers who are loyal to a brand are really advocates for brand marketing, and they can be used to attract new users. So brand advocates actually act as marketers and market the brand for free.
Now, these stages of a marketing funnel vary depending on the type of industry. In your case, you may not want them to make a purchase, but you want the users to sign up, fill out a form, or schedule a demo.
When a user does something that you want them to do, it is termed a “conversion.”
Why You Need a Marketing Funnel?
With a content marketing funnel, you can map a customer’s journey into different stages and plan marketing strategies for your target buyers at each stage. This will help you organize your marketing efforts in a more focused way to deliver the best results.
Through this, you will reach the right people with the right marketing tactics at the right time. The marketing funnels will help you save time, money, and effort by making the initiative more focused and targeted.
A marketing funnel will save you a lot of time, money, and effort by making your strategies more focused and targeted. Thus, one should use a funnel to improve the marketing ROI.
The marketing funnel can attract and convert more users by directing relevant leads toward your brand.
Now that you know how important marketing funnels are, let’s discuss how to create one and see the results.
Steps to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel
1. Know Your Audience
The very first step in creating a marketing funnel is to know about your target audience. You should know what kind of customers you want to target before creating a marketing funnel. This way, only you can convert the targeted users into your customers.
For understanding your targeted customer, you can either take direct feedback from them through surveys, social media, or web analytics data. Although you also have to understand how users interact with your products and website.
Knowing their online behavior and how much time they spend on your website will help you understand how to shape your funnel and what stages to add.
For example, take blogs. The website gets more of its traffic from its blogs. Now the goal here should be to direct the blog traffic to the service/product page. This can be done by including a page link and CTA at the end of the blog.
In this case, the blog should be at the top of the funnel, and conversion rate optimization will be at the next stage.
2. Decide the Number of Stages in Your Funnel
Once you have clearly understood your audience and their journey on your website, you can easily decide the stages of your marketing funnel. The five stages have already been mentioned in the above section. You can make some variations in those stages depending on your business type.
In the end, the marketing funnel is a way to show users the way.
Do you know why it is called a marketing funnel?
It is because of its shape. It’s broad on the upper side and gets narrower at the bottom.
which means that not all the users get converted into leads. But that’s also obvious.
At the beginning, there will be a lot of people who will take the first step. During the next step, some of them will drop out, reducing the size of the crowd.
But please don’t take it otherwise. Losing customers isn’t a bad thing. It’s the truth: not everyone in the funnel will convert.
If this is your first time making a marketing funnel, keep things simple. like placing awareness and interest at the top of the funnel, the desires of the users in the middle, and actions at the bottom of the funnel.
3. Do Not Forget to Add Marketing Tactics
Once you have decided on the stages in your marketing funnel, the next step will be to figure out what tactics to use at each stage.
For instance, at the top of the funnel, popular marketing strategies that you can include are social media marketing, influencer marketing campaigns, brand awareness, paid to advertise, and blog posts for organic traffic. Other than that, SEO techniques are used to get organic as well as referral traffic.
In the middle of the funnel, you can have reviews, videos, case studies, user-generated content, and white papers.
The bottom stage of the funnel should only lead to high purchase intent, and all you have to do is show them the right path. The bottom-funnel marketing tactics include offers and discounts to allure customers, free product trials and demos, and creating scarcity by showing limited stock is left.
At The End,
For all the individuals in digital marketing, the marketing funnel ends with converting a lead into a paying customer. But only we marketers know the notion behind that line of thinking.
If you have been in the industry long enough, you can easily tell that customer retention is more important than customer acquisition. Repeat customers are considered more profitable from the business point of view and are also profitable in the long run.
Thus, it is important to include post-purchase stages in the funnel. You can redefine your funnel in your own way, like many marketers are doing with one or two post-purchase stages.
You can use this post as a starting point for your marketing campaign. If you are still unsure about all of this, give us a call, and we will assist you.
Extern Labs offers strategic digital marketing services with high ROIs. With our Digital Marketing Services, you can establish a robust presence among your competitors and on the SERPs.
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