What You Need to Know About Marketing Funnel

A great sales process comes from an effective marketing funnel.

Marketing funnels might sound too technical and complicated, especially if you’re a newbie in your business or industry.

That being said, you need to get your marketing funnel right to make sure that you understand your consumer buying process.

In this post, we’ll explain what you need to know about the marketing funnel and how it plays such a significant role in your business success.

Let’s jump right in!

What Exactly Is a Marketing Funnel?

Simply put, a marketing funnel is a visualization for understanding the process of turning leads into customers.

So, there are some stages or sets of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can purchase the product or service.

Let’s make it even simpler. Here are a few steps that you’ll go through before you choose to purchase a product, right?

• You go to the website and explore it
• You view the products you’re interested in
• You add the products to the cart
• You make a purchase

So, why a funnel?

It’s called a ‘funnel’ because many people perform or go to the first step, but a lot of them drop out along the way.

This way, the size of the potential customers narrows down. Only interested customers will move further down your funnel.

No wiser? Here, take a look at this visualization below:

More often than not, there are three stages in a marketing funnel. Some marketing funnels have four phases, some have five, and some even have seven.

But the three-stage funnel is the most common one.

First, the Awareness stage — the top of the funnel where many people are aware of your brands. You call them ‘leads’ or potential customers.

Then, as they move through your funnel towards the much narrower neck, some potential customers will choose to stay, engaging with your brand — while some others fall off. This one is often called the Consideration stage.

On the last stage or the Conversion stage, only a few of them will make it through and finally become a customer.

Why Should Your Business Care?

A marketing funnel maps out each phase of the customer journey.

This way, you’ll have insights into how your potential customers interact and connect with your brand.

Being aware of your customer buying process won’t only help you understand how they interact with your brand but also make it much easier for you to develop a relevant marketing plan.

It shows you at what point your potential customers stay and what makes them drop out.

Therefore, you can use your funnel to tweak your overall marketing strategy.

It helps you organize your marketing efforts in a much more focused way in order to get the best marketing ROI.

It also means that you can target the right people in the right place with the right marketing tactic at any time.

You know what content you should produce, what kind of landing pages you need, even what marketing tools you should use — which marketing effort goes where to help move potential customers down the funnel.

At this point, you can say that if you want to consistently and systematically generate leads for your business, a marketing funnel is a must-have.

How to Create a High-Converting Marketing Funnel

Now you know how crucial marketing funnels are and how they can help you boost your conversion rate.

You need to remember, though, a high-profiting marketing funnel takes your best customers and uses them to constantly refill the top of the funnel.

That’s what makes building goodwill and trust is crucial when it comes to marketing funnel creation.

So, here are essential steps you can follow to create high-converting marketing funnels and see the results first-hand.

Define and Analyze Your Potential Customers

Let’s start with the most basic and important one: understanding your potential customers.

You need to define who they are, what their values, what makes them interested, and more.

The more you understand your potential customers, the easier it is to tempt them to move all the way through the funnels until they reach the conversion stage.

To make things easier, you can rely on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, and even LinkedIn to create surveys.

You can also use your marketing analytics to understand your audience and potential customers by seeing how they interact with your brand.

Determine the Number of Stages You’re Going to Use in Your Funnel

As mentioned above, there are no rigid rules when it comes to marketing funnel stages and sales pipeline management.

Yup, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

The key here is to decide just how many sales funnel stages are right for your sales team.

Even if there is no one right answer, many marketers agree that:

• A 2-stage marketing funnel is not enough
• A 6-stage marketing funnel is just too many

It all depends on your potential customers, actually.

You can try to picture what potential customers have to go through to buy your product.

For instance, what will they probably do after they discover your product?

Research the Right Marketing Strategy for Each Funnel

After you get a solid understanding of your potential customers and how many stages your funnel should have, now it is time to research and perform the right marketing tactics for each funnel.

Each funnel has different goals and aims.

That’s why you need to establish a different strategy for each of them.

For the top of the funnel or awareness stage, you need to go all-in for the promotion and catch as many eyeballs as you can to attract potential customers’ attention.

Move to the next stage; you need to create content to engage them and gain their trust.

You can invest in blog posts, explainer videos, exclusive reports, newsletters, and more.

At the bottom of the funnel, you should focus on making potential customers convert or make their purchases.

That’s been a quick guide on the marketing funnel. Even though it might sound too technical for some marketers, it’s actually quite beneficial for your business growth and improvement.