How can you most effectively reach your target audience? There are a lot of answers to this question, but one of the most important things to consider is meeting your customers where they’re at in their buying journey. An easy way to picture this concept is to imagine the marketing funnel. What is the marketing funnel? In this article, we’ll look at what the marketing funnel is and explain how it can help boost your success.

Marketing Funnels Made Simple

Let’s start with the key question: What is the marketing funnel?

The marketing funnel is a visual representation that shows the customer’s journey and describes how a prospect becomes a customer. Every marketing funnel is designed to match how your buyer buys. The stages of a funnel show the progression of a customer’s relationship with a business and enable your business to identify and refine the journey. The specific moves vary depending on your business, product, and brand.

A marketing funnel is an essential tool to help you appeal specifically to your target audience. It’s a way to think about how your brand boosts awareness, increases interest, nurtures leads, and converts visitors into customers and potentially loyal brand enthusiasts.

With analytics, creativity, and strategy, it’s possible to optimize your marketing funnel. Let’s dig a little deeper into how this works.

Defining Terms: What Is the Marketing Funnel?

While there is not a single standard way to label the stages of the funnel, many people use different models with three, four, five, or more stages.

According to Hotjar, a marketing funnel can be described in three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Some businesses define the three by their place on the marketing funnel:

1. Top of the funnel: Awareness. The top of the funnel is all about boosting awareness. This is where consumers become aware of your brand and get engaged for the first time.
2. Middle of the funnel: Engagement. The middle of the funnel is where potential customers engage with your brand.
3. Bottom of the funnel: Conversion. The bottom of the funnel is the last place people funnel through before converting into customers.

Digital marketing expert Neil Patel describes four stages with the “AIDA” model: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Many marketing experts include a fifth stage, Loyalty. Some businesses use different labels to describe the stages such as Awareness. Consideration. Conversion. Loyalty. Advocacy.

Let’s use the simplest three-stage model to understand what happens in each stage.

What Happens in Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?

Stage One: Awareness

The top of the funnel is where visitors become aware of your product, service, or brand. The critical work at this stage is to help people learn your brand exists and engage with it. In the beginning, people may not know much about your business, product, or service.

Some of the ways you can help to increase awareness include paid ads on social media, television, or podcasts that appeal to your target audience. You can create a shareable post on social media or even design an infographic that showcases your service or product to newcomers. The options are really quite endless.

Stage Two: Consideration

As a prospect becomes aware of your brand, they begin to consider your offerings and get more engaged. This is the time to help prospects discover more about your uniqueness and brand. This can be done using a number of tactics:

• Provide value in an article or whitepaper
• Answer common issues and problems your potential customer’s experience
• Share case studies and user experiences with your product

According to Amazon, the consideration stage is an ideal place to use positive customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, and webinars.

Stage Three: Conversion

The conversion stage is the time to focus on converting prospects into buyers. This is when you give prospective clients a reason to choose your brand. Some businesses focus on making it easy to try out a product with offers such as:

• A demo or chance to experience the product firsthand
• A trial to eliminate barriers to using the product

Depending on your business, product, or service, you may want to highlight price, proof, and comparison charts. You can build trust and confidence by showing how your business is superior to the competition. You have many options for reaching your audience at this stage:

• Price offers and limited-time offers
• User-generated testimonials, reviews, and videos
• How-to guides or articles to banish doubt

Optimize Your Marketing Funnel for Success

An optimized marketing funnel is valuable for both generating and nurturing leads. It helps people become aware of your brand, compare your services and products to those of competitors, and feel confident to work or buy from you.

By evaluating each step of the customer’s journey, you and your marketing team can develop a marketing strategy that converts leads into customers.

Use Data to Make Decisions

Marketing experts recommend using analytics to track the effectiveness of your funnel. A traditional tool is Google Analytics, which allows you to understand what people do when visiting your site. You can make decisions based on how much traffic you get to your site, where people exit, how much it costs to acquire a customer, and how your conversion is going.

Optimize for Maximum Performance

Precise analytics help you optimize the funnel for maximum performance. If customers leave at a specific point, this is called a funnel leak. According to Chargify, fixing small leaks in the marketing funnel can create big increases in conversion.

Use qualitative tools to see what users do, such as heatmaps and session recordings. Consider conducting surveys to get real-time responses from visitors. The more you understand what isn’t working, the faster you can fix the problem.

Be Agile

If you’re struggling with designing and developing successful marketing funnels, consider hiring expert digital marketing professionals such as the team at InnoVision Marketing Group. Trends change. Customer buying patterns evolve. It takes creativity, expertise, and skill to design the right marketing funnel for each brand. Take an agile approach to optimizing your marketing funnel for your business.

The team at InnoVision designs marketing funnels optimized for epic success. Talk to an expert about making magic happen for your business.