When do you hear or read the word funnel, what do you think? Your answer will depend in part on who you are, what you do or what your interests are. In this particular case I am referring to the marketing funnel . If you have no idea what it is, or what it’s for, this post is for you.
Marketing funnel?
In simple words, it is called a Marketing Funnel to the process that allows a client to know that your business or product exists until he or she arrives to buy it. That is to say, they are the steps that a client follows until arriving at the conversion .
Why a funnel?
Suppose you want to fill a bottle with some liquid and do not want it to spill absolutely nothing what do you do? Unless you have a perfect or almost perfect pulse, it is most likely that you use a funnel to make sure that all the contents enter the bottle. In the same way, using a funnel in marketing will help not to lose potential customers , and therefore sales.
Steps by Step Guide
A basic marketing funnel consists of 5 steps . To explain them, let’s think of an example: you sell flannels with personalized designs.
Attraction or Awareness
This phase focuses on letting you know to start attracting customers. You want people to know you exist. What can you use? Yes, just what you are thinking, a blog, your social networks, press releases, word of mouth, … In short, those means that help you promote your product or service.
Interest
Once people know you exist, the time has come to capture the interest of your potential customers . For this, you can start by offering quality and attention-grabbing content on your blog and networks. Give reasons to the interested in a flannel to choose you and not your competition .
Desire
You have already developed the interest, now it is the turn to make the possible client want your designs. Explain why your shirts are the best, what kind of materials you use and so on. Generates desire, curiosity, longing . This step is fundamental because it is what is done prior to the conversion. Make the easy thing for your future buyer, include on your website the famous shopping cart or basket and an electronic payment platform.
Sale
The most longed for step and to which the whole world does not arrive (unfortunately). It is the moment in which the potential client becomes a Client with all of the law. You just generated a conversion, they just chose your designs. But remember that to get here you must work very well the previous steps of the funnel.
Loyalty
We can also call it retention , because that is what is sought, to retain customers. Once they have bought you, the goal is for that person to continue to choose you over the others , to choose your designs again. Send your promotions, offers and news to your email (without abusing). On special dates send him some detail (physical or digital), in a few words: comfort him. Obviously, not everyone who knows you becomes a customer, that is, not everyone will reach the end of the funnel, hence if you want to get the most conversions you must create a good marketing plan , design good strategies for Each step and especially provide reasons for your customers to see that you and your services or products are unique .
What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a direct response marketing process by which people interested in certain topics are passed on. The ultimate goal is to convert complete strangers into evangelizing clients , those who freely promote your products among their acquaintances. This process has a series of elements scientifically designed to capture the interest, train, filter and encourage these people to perform the different actions that you propose and make the purchase of your product or service. The beginning of this process whose main objective is “to awaken the interest of people about something you want to advertise”. The important point here is: How does interest awaken, how does it get people’s attention? The answer is, showing them an advance of what they will see. Can you show your advance or presentation to everyone? Probably not … then, if you had to choose who to show them your presentation, who would you choose? To the people who habitually consume that type of product or service, in other words, to your target market. In the same way that if you want to talk to a group of people you call them to a place calling them to meet and pay attention, you must gather your target audience or go where they meet. That is exactly what advertisers do, they carry out their communications in the places and times where each segment of the market meets. For example, if you go to the movies, notice how before the movie you paid for begins, you will see advances from other similar movies, to awaken your interest. These advances, which are advertising, are different depending on the schedule and the film, do not advertise a movie for children if you are going to see an action movie in the late night. Continuing in the same line of the advances in the films, so that this marketing funnel is a success, the graphics, the scenes, the special effects, the sound, etc. They must be attractive and of excellent quality, because otherwise there will not be much interest.
Each advertising element of the marketing funnel should suggest a single action, follow or abandon. Those that follow are a more select public, more filtered, more interested. To these people you must build loyalty, build a relationship with them, give them value with each new contact. You must also generate intrigue, this is called “cliff hanging” – cliff-hanging adj. very exciting (for its dubious and exciting end), which has everyone awaiting its result -, so that curiosity leads them to perform the action you propose to move to the next level. The actions can be to register, request promotional material, call, buy, associate, make a visit or what you consider according to the design of your direct response marketing process. The process also gives you the right to try to close the sale. It’s like when you go out with friends, you meet a girl, you invite her to the movies, then you invite her to dinner, that gives you the right to try to kiss her, kiss her, introduce her to your family, now you have earned the right to ask her for marriage. ? The same goes for the clients, they must tell you many times that if before you win the right to offer your goods for sale. After the first sale, if you achieve loyalty, subsequent sales will be made with much less effort.
Marketing Funnel What is it and how to implement it?
I’ve talked about this on another occasion , however I think this topic has much to talk about so I will dedicate this and another post to the topic of attracting customers through the web … At the end of the day that is precisely the intention of any SME when creating a website, if it were not … What would be the point of having it? But first of all we must understand that “the sale is far from an event, the sale is a real process” and even more in this world of the internet where there is so much “distrust” and precisely, with a marketing funnel we can counteract this. A well-built marketing funnel is looking for the best way to make our readers / visitors go through this process in a natural way, what is sought is to convert our visitors into prospects, our prospects into customers and our customers into customers recurrent and to achieve this we must make this process flow naturally, that our future customer feels comfortable and satisfied, that is whoever tells you next: follow me selling, please … I beg you! Exactly, as it appears in the image of the funnel! Well with the image I hope to have defined what is a marketing funnel, as you will see the intention is to turn each visitor into a customer but what is unpleasant is that you get to a web and first appear 20 popups and 50 forms asking for your email , you subscribe and once you start selling something that really does not interest you … It’s like when you go down the street and a salesperson hits you wanting to buy a pen when your charges 3 in your pocket that are of much higher quality than the one you are selling … Yes! What annoying! A few days ago I was reading a blog from a friend and there was a real discussion about the differences in the way of doing marketing and the one that many latin marketers implement, the particular topic is that here they implement one and another technique trying to obtain your almost email that costs anything, well yes, that’s what I told you above in the picture, but it is not so that we get to point our readers with a weapon to give us your email! It is not the way. I do not want you to misunderstand me, I am not saying that the way marketing is done here does not work, I am sure that it works because many times I have bought some of these things, some very, very good ones and others of those that Just remembering gives me some anger! In fact I could implement something similar and the reason why this works is because of the great secret to succeed on the internet, which is really no secret … It is about adding value.
How to build a marketing funnel?
It was good enough to talk so much, so I’ll go immediately to provide you with this miniguide – I promise that it will be mini- so you can build your own marketing funnel:
It attracts traffic to your website : This is the most difficult thing to do … No, I was not wrong: It is difficult if you do not know how to do it and very easy if you know it. I know it’s worth telling you that you can attract traffic by doing something called SEO , with social networks and paid advertising, but hey, I told you so! However you attract traffic to your website you must ensure that when your visitors are there they feel the best and so we went to step next
Contributes value: I already talked about the reasons why a company should have a blog but I summarize it: It helps you with SEO, it allows you to connect with your potential clients, it allows you to tell them that you know what you’re up to You dedicate, that your main interest is that they feel good and that you do not want to sell them, well, do not tell them but let them think that! By the way, I’m not selling anything but you can leave your email in any form here! And so I’m getting ahead of myself, this is going in step next.
Try to capture your mail : You do not need to be intrusive to ask the mail to someone who comes to your website, in fact, I have done twice in this article and I think I have not bothered you, in another blog article I have also talked a bit about it but better will be that you wait a bit for the next post where I will be talking about a tool that I have used before to make sure I’m doing this well, at the time you will tell me your opinion. Maybe I can talk a little about what I’m doing here in the blog: In the sidebar I have a form, at the end of the article there is another form, when you comment I give you the option to also subscribe … Well, I do not think that is being intrusive.
You already got your email and it’s time to … continue to give value! You can send your articles by email, you can send exclusive information to your subscribers or you can make special gifts to people by the fact of being subscribed to your email list, precisely for this reason is that many people subscribe to a list even knowing that they will bombard you with sales emails, because they offer you something of value! Aja And when will I sell? You will always be selling! Still do not understand? Even if you are not offering anything, at the moment that person, who has already received enough from you, needs one of the services you offer, you can be sure that he will buy you without needing you to tell him. And well, it is not wrong from time to time to send an email to sell … Who wants to understand that.
Prepare your website to sell: I have already told you that once you have your prospect and value it at the time that person will buy you but you must ensure that this action does not involve a great effort for that person, so try to put it on, as we say here in Venezuela, that he does not have to go through a complicated process to buy your product / service and finally step 6 …
Keep adding value: You already have a client that I imagine you have left enchanted because you offer a service of the best! Hey! I told you I was a customer so you should treat it as the most precious treasure, so you’ll have to get it “out of the bunch”, you know, that bunch of leaflets … That customer who will serve you through a list of special emails, will give exclusive gifts, discounts, … Yes, discounts to keep buying you! Have you copied? For this you can do what I told you to put him on a special subscriber list or, depending on the case, manage your relationship with him through a CRM (Costumer Relationship Management). But we’ll talk about this another day, it’s enough for today.
I hope I could have made you understand what a Marketing Funnel is and how we can implement it within our website, if so and this information has been useful then I imagine you will thank me sharing the article on social networks. Ah! And you know that you can subscribe to my newsletter sometimes I send … Better not tell you, if you want to know subscribe! Hehe Successes
What is a Conversion Funnel?
The conversion funnel is an online marketing term directly related to the objectives we set ourselves when we launch an online store and, in general, a website or blog, especially if its objectives are commercial. This funnel, also called ‘conversion funnel’, determines thedifferent phases or stepsthat each of thevisitors of our website must take to meet a specific objective: usually become a record or lead or specify the purchase of a product or service.
Its different phases
In general, we can distinguish five basic phases or stages in the conversion funnel:
Acquisition . It consists of publicizing our brand or service through online marketing strategies (content generation, SEO optimization, participation in social networks …) in order to attract the largest possible number of users to our website or blog.
Activation . It is about gaining little by little the trust and interest of the audience.
Retention . The objective is that users spend as much time as possible on our website and build loyalty. For this it is essential that they become registries or leads, to have their data and be able to follow them up.
Sale . It is the most important conversion, consisting of transforming the audience into real customers.
Reference . It is an after-sales objective with which we must try that customers who have already bought us feel satisfied, do it again and recommend us.
Usefulness of the conversion funnel?
A first-order metric
First of all, the funnel helps us to know a very important fact: what is the percentage of losses of users of our website in each of the steps defined to achieve the objectives that interest us.In other words, of the anonymous users who come to our website, only a certain percentage will end up leaving us their data in a register (conversion to leads).And, of these, a smaller number, after a series of follow-up or maturation actions, will end up buying a product or contracting a service, thus becoming a real customer.We can see that the term ‘funnel’ is very successful, since the number of potential users and potential customers who enter our website is initially very large (wide part of the funnel) and a part of them is lost by the path (narrowing of the funnel).
It helps us make the best decisions
Obviously, when we launch a content marketing or online marketing project we want to achievemaximum profitability.And for this our objective must be thatthe percentage of losses be as low as possible.Or, in other words, that the users who overcome the different phases of the funnel are the maximum possible.In this regard, the conversion funnel can be very helpful, since in addition to its purely metric function of determining the users that we are losing, it can also help us tooptimize the different phases based on making the best decisions in each of the steps that the user is giving.An analysis of the behavior of users in the different phases of the marketing funnel will allow us to:
Know when users fall from the funnel . For example, a very high percentage of abandonment at the moment when users leave their data in a form can be indicative that it is not well signposted or designed.
Detect errors and areas for improvement . Following the previous example, the key to improving the conversion can be to create a more visible, attractive or, simply, simpler form.
The funnel allows us to have a much clearer idea of exactly where we have to focus our efforts .
It also helps us calculate the return on investment (ROI) of our campaign.
One of the most common mistakes in an online marketing campaign, and especially inbound marketing, is to focus efforts on attracting the largest number of customers, that is, placing users in the widest phase of the funnel.The definition of a funnel of conversion, with its different stages and objectives and really achieved, can make us understand that it is possibly more profitable and effective toattract a more interested type of user with our productin order to reduce the percentage of falls during the different phases of the process.This focus on a higher quality client has a lot to do with the accurate and exhaustive definition of an ideal target or buyer person.
What is the sales funnel? Differences with the marketing funnel
One of the advantages introduced by inbound marketing is that it allows us to anticipate a lot in the process of buying potential customers, and even detect and capture “buyer people” who have not yet realized that our startup or company offers a product or service that provides a solution to your need.It is called a sales funnel (funnel in English) basically to the different phases of the sales process through which the potential customer passes from the time the purchaseis captured until the end of the purchase. Let’s see what stages it consists of and what they consist of.
Sales funnel: Converts the User into a Customer
- Awareness: itis basically when the person is aware that he has a certain need or motivation (which is usually called pain) and begins to learn about how to solve it. The objective in this phase is to give you specific and quality information in order to better understand your problem and the best way to solve it.
- Research: The potential client looks for relevant information and profiles the products that solve their pain. It is the moment in which we must show you contents on how our product can help you.
- Decision: The consumer is already aware of their need and is assessing the related market options. In this phase we must convince him that our solution is the best through explanations about the advantages it would provide.
- Action: This phase is the most proactive, we must take the initiative offering free trials, coupons and all those necessary actions to finish convincing the client that our product is the best option. The key to the success of this phase is to adapt to your purchasing possibilities.
Sales Funnel vs. Marketing Funnel
Now that we understand the phases that a person goes through from being a simple user until he becomes a client, we can establish the difference with what is called the marketing funnel. Basically they differ in that they study different stages of the sales process. The marketing funnel is at a stage above the commercial one, that is, it is still the same process, but it starts with the launch of the marketing strategy. The marketing funnel is therefore prior to the commercial funnel. The funnel or funnel denomination is very explanatory, because it graphically shows how the customer screening is done based on advertising and marketing strategies, which guide customers through the different stages. If we analyze the funnel from this more graphic point of view we can see that three phases are clearly differentiated.
Phases of the Marketing Funnel
- TOFU (Top Of The Funnel) : the top of the funnel is where the advertising and marketing strategies that the company will launch are located.
- MOFU (Middle Of The Funnel) : in the middle part of the funnel is when the analysis techniques must be applied to specify the business opportunities.
- BOFU (Bottom Of The Funnel) : The lowest part of the funnel is the conversion into real customers, where we achieve the personification of the results. It should be noted that these new techniques of digital marketing emanate from the development of new information technologies, big data and machine learning are two technologies that allow us to process and transform all the amount of information we obtain from the market and order it according to the exposed techniques to finally obtain concrete data to optimize the purchase process.
Marketing Funnel : the Success of a Strategy
Do you want to create a successful strategy ? You have to know what a marketing funnel can help your brand! To reach an objective in a precise and complete way it is necessary to organize the activity that we carry out and to maximize the actions that we set in motion.
The funnel is a marketing model that has different structured phases to achieve different objectives . It helps us plan our customer attraction system. Some funnels are focused on the part of marketing that deals with generating qualified leads , others are more focused on the commercial part that tries to generate sales.
At ONiAd we propose a global marketing funnel that caters both to the achievement of qualified leads and to the consolidation of our acting force in the sector in which we operate. Only then, with a complete marketing methodology will achieve the ultimate goal of any company or professional: to awaken the confidence of our public and have loyal followers and ambassadors of our brand.
Marketing Funnel: Discovery
Every marketing process begins when users discover that our brand exists . Maybe you still do not know where you are positioned, but you already know what market segment you are targeting, what you offer with your activity.
Marketing Funnel: Interest
The interest of a user for our product or service can occur naturally or induced.
The content we disseminate on our website about our services, on our blog or on social networks, works as a reflection and speaker of who we are. Users can inquire about our brand and be interested in it.
Automated, we can awaken that interest in potential users. For example, through cookies, retargeting or CTAs .
Marketing Funnel: Consideration
It occurs when a user goes from being interested in our brand to considering it as a real purchase option. What can help us in this section of the funnel? The lead nurturing , the nutrition of leads . This technique is concerned with educating or maturing business opportunities . It is a key phase in the sales process. The natural, logical and most beneficial for our activity is to feed the value of our brand as we drive the user through the different stages of the funnel . We must dose content to awaken little by little the confidence and emotion of the user in the relationship with our firm or company.
Marketing Funnel: Purchase intention
If our actions in the stage of Interest / consideration are effective, we will successfully reach the purchase intention phase. The intention reflects the user’s preference for our product or service over the options proposed by the competition . Although you have to keep in mind that not all the intention translates into purchase. Precisely, it is the objective in which we must work: to obtain that the maximum percentage of intention ends up becoming a purchase.
We can achieve this by optimizing thecustomer journey , that is, the path the user follows on our website, so that we can positively influence the decision-making process. Thus, we drive it to the last phase of the first part of the funnel.
Marketing Funnel: conversion
The step from intention to consumption is conversion. It supposes the activation of the client . The choice of our brandagainst the firms that make up our competition culminates with consumption. The user chooses and buys our product or service and generates a sale. He has made the decision and moves on to action.
When we get the customer to buy what we offer or enjoy the service we sell, we should not think that our marketing work is over. On the contrary, a new section of the funnel is opened that acquires a profound influence for our brand image and commercial expansion: our brand prescribers .
Loyal customers, fans, in love with the brand. Call them as you want and give them a position of weight in your strategy. Making a customer not only buy you, but repeat and have full confidence in you is an art of marketing and communication.
Marketing Funnel: loyalty
It lies in the retention of the person in our commercial and emotional structure . A loyal customer is one that has your brand positioned in a preferred place in the niche where you work and that chooses you whenever you need or want a product or service that you offer. Again, this repeat purchase may occur because of your interest in repeating experience with you or by the induction that you can develop through automated marketing.
Do you know the retargeting ? To be graphics, in ONiAd we always define them as “the ads that chase you”.
If we want to adjust to a much more formal definition, retargeting , also called remarketing , is a digital marketing technique that involves impacting users who have previously interacted with us with advertising. Either by visiting our website, opening an email or simply by clicking on a link on the network, for example in a forum.
This technique can play in our favor both in the decision process (in which the user leaves the consideration to transform it into a purchase) and in the process of loyalty and repeat purchase .
Is there anything better than a loyal customer? Yes, a client that acts as a prescriber of our activity. The last section of the second part of the funnel.
Marketing Funnel: Recommendation
When a user chooses us and repeats, has generated a bond of trust with us. That confidence translates into a very powerful advertising channel: the voice of a person who has consumed our product or service, which we have liked and tells.
The personal recommendation is invaluable for our brand. It is a way that can intercede in the different phases of the funnel during the path of other users in relation to our product. A satisfied and faithful user can with his recommendation make others discover us or decide to buy if they already knew us. Have you ever been to a restaurant because it was recommended to you by a friend who loves going to that place? Have you never hesitated between two options and have you finally bought the one that you know to some family member or acquaintance that has worked for you? It is the power of recommendation. These people have acted as a catalyst in the discovery and conversion phases. Without that it supposes an economic cost for us: it is the value of a good experience of purchase.
Do you know what a lovemark is ? It is that brand able to make the user fall in love and retain it. It supposes to take the state of recommendation to the maximum, so that it consolidates a lasting relationship of mutual trust.
In this state, the user’s connection with the brand is more intense, the brand’s credibility is more powerful, so that the marketing actions that we launch to promote a new purchase will have a much higher effectiveness rate.
It does not mean that we should accommodate ourselves and that any call to action is worthwhile. It means that we already have the confidence of the user , which will allow us to awaken their interest in other ways. As we move forward in the funnel we must be more perfectionist and creative: the user no longer moves only by needs, but the sensations gain more weight . Purchase arguments give way to emotions.
