Marketing Funnel 101
Marketing and sales funnels have been a critical part to business for some time now. Although there’s been a lot of buzz about marketing funnels being dead, this couldn’t be further from the truth! Like most aspects of the digital marketing world, marketing funnels aren’t dead, they’re just evolving — and they’re evolving fast.
There are endless possibilities for the modern marketing funnel, but the basic principles are the same. Online, they’re a way to get your visitors to take specific actions on your website and with your business. Due to the internet, the number of visitor interactions has multiplied. A marketing funnel helps you to capture prospective consumers, and direct them closer to a conversion (or a sale.)
Do you really need a marketing funnel?
The answer is simple. YES. Of course. Absolutely. If you think about what the purpose of your website is, overall it’s to do one thing: generate leads. You’re not spending thousands of dollars on a beautiful, functional website just for it to sit there and look pretty. It’s one of your most important salesperson, and needs to be set up in a way that draws in prospective clients. The marketing funnel as a whole is a necessity when it comes to sales and needs to be a part of your marketing strategy.
Parts of a Successful Funnel
Even though your website could just be the part of your funnel that creates warm leads, it’s still important to the marketing funnel as a whole. You need well-planned content for every phase of the funnel. If you’re not familiar with the phases of a marketing funnel, here’s a basic overview of each one:
Awareness
The moment when a user first discovers your brand is the awareness phase. The potential clients in this phase have a need that they want resolved. However, they aren’t always sure exactly what service can resolve this, so they’re most likely looking for answers on a search engine.
In this phase, you will need to create quality content that speaks to the consumers queries. Make them aware of what your business provides and how these services directly speak to their problems. If your content resonates with what the consumer is searching for, they’ll move onto the next phase of the funnel.
Consideration
In the consideration phase, the consumer now knows exactly what they need resolved. They’re search engine queries are more detailed, which gives you a great look into what topics and keywords you should be addressing on your web page.
Because potential clients at this phase know more about what they’re looking for. They’re likely spending time on blogs, signing up for email lists, and searching for downloadable information. This type of content should be a part of your marketing funnel as well.
Conversion
The conversion phase is the phase you want to aspire to get to. It’s when the perspective customers moves to being an actual customer and decides on a purchase with your business. All that hard work you put into your content and business has paid off.
The best thing you can do at this point, is to make sure the buying process is seamless and easy. You don’t want to put in this much hard work, to have it go down the drain in an unhappy buying experience.
Loyalty
If you’ve provided education, resources and an enjoyable buying experience with a customer, chances are they’ll continue coming back to your business. That’s what the loyalty phase is all about. You’ve now earned their trust and they have faith in your expertise.
In order to get a consumer to this phase, It’s imperative to continue to remind them why they need your services, and why they may need other services too.
Advocacy
To get to the advocacy phase, you want to make your customers so happy that they’re praising your services to everyone they know. You may think you don’t have to put as much work into your marketing strategy at this point in the buying process, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Continue to impress your customers with exciting new announcements and products. Give them a reason to brag about you to all their friends.
What does it take to produce a healthy marketing funnel?
Now that you know all the steps to a healthy funnel, it’s time to automate it. Even if you tried, you can’t manually do every part of your marketing funnel for every prospective client. It’s just not plausible, and who would want to? As a business owner, you could be using that time to do all the other tasks on your never ending to-do list.
Automating includes plugging in your list of operations into a system that will organize and execute every phase of the marketing funnel. Today, hundreds of automation systems exist. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by creating a marketing funnel and automating it, feel free to reach out to us at Tintero Creative today.