If youve never used a marketing funnel, youre probably wondering, what is a marketing funnel?
Some business owners think it is too mechanical or simplistic to describe the process from which customers move from awareness to purchase.
Keeping up the latest tools and systems is important. Growth Hacking Jargon can confuse even the best marketeer.
This list also functions as a digital marketing glossary and simplifies the 99 most important keywords for you to know.
Now if you are in a sales business, your business needs to run as efficiently as possible. The best way to do that is to get your marketing funnel right!
Full Funnel Marketing Is Essential For Your Success
A marketing funnel is a simplified visualization of a customers journey from discovering a company to purchasing their product or using their service.
In simpler words, the process of converting a visitor or browser into a paying customer. The marketing funnel helps brands visualize the different stages consumers go through when making a purchase.
Imagine a classic funnel shape. In a full-funnel marketing approach, you begin at the top of the funnel marketing, which is the first contact to your potential consumer.
You use different strategies and cast a wide net to gain as many leads or potential buyers as possible. Then you move to the middle of the funnel marketing, the process which your customers go through in your sales funnel.
Last is the bottom of the funnel marketing, where your sales funnel ends.
As you move down the funnel, it becomes narrower and the efforts applied to your strategies become more focused.
And you begin targeting the most qualified audience who has the highest potential to convert.
Its a funnel because the number of customers traveling from discovery to action lessens as they move down each stage of the funnel.
If you are new to the marketing experience or even have minimal experience, creating a marketing funnel will help you organize, prioritize and implement your marketing strategy.
Full funnel marketing will help you grow your business and make the most out of your marketing efforts.
We all know that, the more conversions on your marketing strategy, the more profit to your brand or company.
Implementing a full-funnel marketing strategy will not only boost your business growth but also increase the rate of repeat purchasers and this leads to sustainable business growth.
As much as utilizing full-funnel marketing is essential for your business. It is important to understand the basis, stages, and approach of the process. In this article, you will learn:
- How To Make Your Product Stand Out With FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
- Why FULL FUNNEL MARKETING Succeeds
- 8 Simple Steps To An Effective FULL FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY Strategy
- Example Of An Effective Marketing Funnel
- Believe In Your Full Funnel Marketing Strategy But Never Stop Improving
- Key takeaways
How To Make Your Product Stand Out With Full Funnel Marketing
How to use full-funnel marketing
With the majority of consumers starting their buying journey online, the traditional approach has changed. Full funnel marketing can vary on many aspects such as industry, marketing approach, consumers, etc.
When you reach potential customers that fall within the funnel, the way you approach customers at each stage is essential.
By using different marketing strategies, you will be able to tailor-make certain strategies to meet the needs of a particular audience.
It is important to adjust marketing strategies accordingly. This strategic approach also carries over to the marketing tactics you use for your campaign, as each tactic has a different objective and goal.
What are the stages of full-funnel marketing?
Although brands often differ in how they approach and contract their marketing funnels, most funnels follow a simple structure.
They start wide at the top and narrow down as customers move through the marketing process. It is understood that not everyone who becomes aware of your brand turns into customers.
Marketing funnels work by outlining the steps of a buyers journey from discovery to conversion.
These steps will help you identify the type of content you need to move people further down the funnel.
To pinpoint where a consumer is in the buyers journey, its important to have a good understanding of the four stages of the marketing funnel:
- Awareness
The awareness stage is the first stage in full-funnel marketing. At this stage, the consumer realizes that they have a problem and begin their research in the search of a solution.
In their search, they come across your company through your marketing campaign and their research. Once they visit your site, they become aware of your brand.
According to Pardot, 70% of buyers turn to Google at least 2-3 times during their search to find out more about their problems, potential solutions, relevant businesses, etc.
Now they either find what they are looking for or your product and services dont have enough relevance towards solving their problem, so they leave and look elsewhere.
Online marketing tactics such as content marketing and informational videos are great ways to attract a wide audience.
2. Consideration
Once the consumer is aware of your product or service, they move down to the second stage, the consideration stage.
This is where the potential customer begins to evaluate your product or service which you are offering.
While they think that you might be a viable solution for their problem but they are not confident in their decision.
Paid search advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing are effective tactics to help your brand maintain visibility within your target audience.
Consumers will consider different solutions that could solve their problem by comparing your company to other competitors.
3. Decision
At this point, the consumer becomes a prospect. They are down to two or three options and just need a little more push to take action.
Once they reach this point, they often begin to interact with your calls-to-action (CTAs). This means they will engage with your sales team, contact forms, place items in shopping carts, see offers or fill out surveys.
It is important to note, that 57% of your clients decision is made before they ever pick up a phone to speak to you or any other supplier.
These actions will often let you know at which stage your potential buyer has reached. The decision stage is where you will work to nurture your prospects.
You need to let them know exactly how your product can solve their problem and why it can solve it better than other companies.
Search ads and shopping ads across platforms are a great tactic to target specific consumers.
4, Action
The action stage of full-funnel marketing comes when prospects come to their final decision, and theyre ready to act on that decision.
Here is where your prospects turn into customers. At this point, your sales team will take over and help your prospects through the purchase transaction.
By keeping in touch with your customers, you will know if they have had a good experience with your brand.
That may push them to purchase from you again.
There is also the possibility that these customers will provide referrals and reviews, which will help with other prospects in earlier marketing funnel stages.
Because each stage is unique, they each require a different marketing approach.
For example, consumers who have already decided to buy have no use for messaging that is tailored to the awareness stage.
Why Full Funnel Marketing Succeeds
Why should you use full-funnel marketing?
Full funnel marketing is a great way to boost customer interaction on your website. Whether you are looking for online sales, increase traffic on your site, or generating leads.
The funnel brings visibility to every stage of your marketing strategy. As you know, the number of visitors will narrow during the process, the ones who stay are more likely to buy your product or use your service.
By using the funnel strategy, you can increase your websites conversion rate because the ones who stay on your site are more likely to buy or are going to buy more.
Another significant reason why you should implement full-funnel marketing is that it is measurable. You can predict sales volume as well as know where you are losing customers.
As people move from one stage to another, you can improvise strategies or develop new tactics.
To create more awareness, you will need to provide relevant and informative detail for a successful conversion.
It is important to approach each stage with the right content. If you are a freelance writer or a seasoned writer, the way you provide the information is important.
With a funnel, you can predict your volume because it shows how many customers move onto the further stages.
Key Benefits of Full Funnel Marketing
Once you have understood the fundamentals of this strategy and apply it to your business. You will start to see certain significant benefits by applying the right strategy at the right place. The key benefits of full-funnel marketing are:
- Increased sales through personalized nurturing leads
- Provide insights on leads, making it easy to close the deal
- Can be automated
- Brand value – Create awareness and trust among your leads
- Build a practical plan for marketing to users at different stages of the funnel.
All of the factors help you to generate more leads and close deals faster. In addition, you can fast-pace your business at an optimized cost.
8 Simple Steps To An Effective Full Funnel Marketing Strategy
Target Audience
The first step in building a full-funnel marketing strategy is knowing who your target audience is. To create awareness for your potential buyers, you must target the right audience with relevant strategic campaigns.
There are several ways to understand your target audiences such as existing customers, social media, surveys, and web analytics. It is important to study your online visitors behaviour when they interact on your site.
For example, your website blog garners more traffic. Now you need to improvise and direct this traffic to the product or service pages with links, ads, etc.
If your website had a solid backlink profile it can dramatically increase your sites organic traffic, we are here to help you to do it.
This blog becomes the top-of-the-funnel marketing tactic for you.
Determine the Number of Stages in Your Funnel
Determining the different stages in your full-funnel marketing strategy is a way to direct more people in the right place on your buyers journey.
The way your buyers journey map forms, will help set the stages of your funnel.
- Top of the Funnel Marketing – At the top of the funnel, your prospects are just becoming aware of their problem, so this is where you attract traffic to your website, encourage blog or newsletter subscriptions and generate leads
- Middle of the Funnel Marketing – Their actions during this stage will help your team measure their fit and interest and qualify them as marketing- and sales-qualified leads.
- Bottom of the Funnel Marketing – After your prospects have considered different solutions, they’ll enter the decision stage of their buyer’s journey
Marketing Strategy to Each Stage
The beauty of full-funnel marketing is that you can build according to your target audience. Once you have determined the stages in your funnel, you can use several tools and tailor-made tactics to create conversions on your site.
The most popular strategies include:
- Top of the Funnel Marketing – Blogs, social media marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, infographics, and paid ad campaigns.
- Middle of the Funnel Marketing – Product reviews, unboxing, ebooks, whitepapers, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
- Bottom of the Funnel Marketing – Discounts, offers, product trials, and demos, and remarketing target people.
Listen to your Customer
To convince consumers to buy from you, you need to understand their wants and needs.
By regularly asking your customers by inviting feedback at multiple points of contact with them such as surveys, email, social media, etc.
- Collaborating: Ask customers to contribute their ideas to your marketing design. Encourage them to share their experience or use feedback online forms. How did they hear of you? What influenced their decision?
- Tinkering: This is where customers can advise on modifications to your buying cycle. Send an open email invite to your customers requesting their help.
- Trial it: Invite customers to review your inbound marketing funnel. You can then ask if your design was helpful to them.
Complete Brand Experience
In order to enhance the brand experience, your business should be available on different platforms and have a good online presence.
A consistent brand across channels will increase visibility and attract more customers.
Your company’s logo, colour, the tagline should display the same across the platforms. Consistency improves audience recall and reinforces your story and messaging, minimising confusion among your audience
Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map is a representation of your customers experience on your site. The goal of this strategy is to understand the customers perspective which is thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Customer journeys capture each moment that matters, each relevant touch point for a customer.
The map should be used to define how you communicate with your customers at each touch point.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on acquiring, retaining, and nurturing customers. By providing a positive experience at every stage whenever they interact with your company website.
53% of the reason why they choose to work with you is down to what they get from the sales experience itself.
Businesses that provide excellent customer experiences are more profitable, have increased customer loyalty, and will succeed where others have failed.
This strategy builds strong relationships with the customer and adds value to your company.
Beyond Conversion
Anyone in the industry long enough knows the importance of customer retention.
For many marketers, once they have turned a lead into paying customers they end their marketing efforts on those leads.
But experienced marketers know that repeat customers are much more profitable in the long run and thus, create a stage post conversions as well.
A Great Funnel Example
Check out this whiteboard video where you can build a $10,000 marketing funnel for customers and a great marketing funnel product example.
Believe In Your Full Funnel Marketing Strategy But Never Stop Improving
Shifting your marketing strategy to full-funnel marketing can seem overwhelming at the beginning.
But the results will help your brand increase visibility, sales, ROI, and smarter optimization of your website.
People are unpredictable, they might start at the top, leave, come back, jump a few stages, come back again and at some point buy something or leave for good.
Marketing has become more complex and we must look closely and never stop improving.
The customer journey, experience, and behaviour will play an integral in your full-funnel marketing strategy.
This enables you to gain a holistic view of your customers and may reveal opportunities you did not consider before.
Optimizing your website is a great way to increase traffic and a pleasant user experience. A good web host is exactly what will give you an edge over your competitors.
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A good reliable UK host will enhance your website performance making it smoother and faster which is essential for your full-funnel marketing strategy.
A few key takeaways I hope you walk away from these examples with:
- Understanding full-funnel marketing
- Importance of using this marketing strategy
- Benefits of full-funnel marketing
- 8 simple steps to boost your full-funnel marketing strategy
- Believe in your strategy
Customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty dont happen overnight. Create content that draws people to you, makes people want to stay, and that makes people want to keep on coming back for more!