Marketing Funnel

8 Key excerpts on "Marketing Funnel"

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  eBook - ePub

  Customer Analytics For Dummies

  • Jeff Sauro(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  7-1 is a common example of how a funnel can map the journey a person takes from prospect to customer. It can also be used as a starting point in building a journey map.

  Figure 7-1: An example of a typical purchase funnel.

  Funnels, like the one shown in Figure 7-1 , show that people move from becoming aware of a product or company to becoming interested to eventually making a purchase. They provide some clear stages for understanding the customer journey and targeting marketing, advertising, and sales efforts accordingly. For example, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about pricing when people don’t want or haven’t heard of your product.

  Just about every marketing organization has or should have a funnel. In fact, the funnel concept of AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) was at the center of a famous scene with Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glenn Ross.

  Organizations likely have different names for each of the stages. Table 7-1 shows some popular examples of marketing and sales funnels your organization might use. Despite some minor differences, funnels generally share a similar pattern of customer behavior:

  1. Contemplate a purchase.
  2. Narrow down on a choice.
  3. Purchase the chosen product.
  4. Experience post-purchase effects.

  It’s a theme you’ll use with the customer journey map you create as well. Table 7-1 compares different types of Marketing Funnels to illustrate their similarities.

  The Marketing Funnel is a linear process as the metaphor suggests. People start at the large end of the funnel and then make their way through the stages. The narrowing of the funnel conveys the smaller percentage of people who make their way through. Linearity in mapping the customer journey can be limiting because it assumes every customer starts in the same spot, proceeds through the same steps, and finishes at the same end point. You can overcome this challenge by incorporating loops back through earlier stages.

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  eBook - ePub

  Digital Marketing in Practice

  Design, Implement and Measure Effective Campaigns

  • Hanne Knight, Lizette Vorster(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  Figure 19.2 ). This funnel is also the most frequently used in digital and social media marketing strategies (Digital School of Marketing, 2021). This funnel is particularly attractive to digital marketers as it includes means of increasing engagement with customers via digital channels (such as social media), and subsequently brand advocacy (positive electronic word of mouth) and loyalty (retention of existing customers).

  The stages of the funnel are:

  • awareness: creating initial awareness in the mind of new customers
  • consideration: implies inherent interest, because it necessitates the consumer moving from awareness to interest to considering your brand, despite being aware of other products from competitors
  • action: self-explanatory, marks the point of purchase
  • engagement: increasing engagement with customers post-purchase to build relationships
  • advocacy: increasing trust and loyalty to the point of positive brand advocacy via customers

  Figure 19.2 Digital Marketing Funnel

  SOURCE Adaptation of Digital School of Marketing, 2021

  Marketing Funnels are useful for developing overarching strategies and dividing activities, tactics, channels and budgets into different stages. However, once the digital marketing strategy, project or campaign is implemented in the marketplace, marketers need to be able to monitor and evaluate its progress.

  See Worksheet 6 in Additional Resources for a template you can use to create your own digital Marketing Funnel complete with objectives, channels and key metrics.

  Digital dashboards

  As a result of digital marketing and consumer activities online, marketers are faced with a challenge in the form of mountains of Big Data. In order to evaluate their digital marketing strategies, projects and campaigns, they need to know what the data says. This is where digital dashboards

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  eBook - ePub

  Drive Sales With Digital Marketing

  A Complete Blueprint on How to Use Digital Marketing Resources to Grow Your Business and Outsell the Competition

  • Peter Dickinson, Charleh Dickinson(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • PublishDrive

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  Developing the Customer Journey

    This chapter will cover everything you need to know about the Marketing Funnel and how you can use it as part of a proven process to ensure your marketing efforts are successful.  

  By combining the information in this chapter with the knowledge you’ll gain completing the rest of the course, you’ll be left with a good understanding of how to create a seamless customer journey that converts more prospects into sales.

    Firstly, I’ll start by walking you through the sales funnel, including what it is, why it matters to the success of your business, and how you can apply it within your digital marketing strategy.  

  The sales funnel has been around for a while, but it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Understanding each stage can help transform the results of any business’s digital marketing efforts because it highlights the process they need to follow to give the customer everything they need to fulfil their journey.

   

  It’s easy enough to build a basic understanding of the funnel, but the magic happens when you understand how it applies to practical applications that enhance your customers’ experience and keep them coming back to your business time and again.

   

  With this information, we hope you’ll be left with a good understanding of the Marketing Funnel, fresh perspectives on how you can engage your customers at every stage of their journey, and how to identify an approach that’s right for you.

  1.1 Introducing the Sales Funnel

  Welcome to your first section in this chapter, where we’ll explore some of the Marketing Funnel basics. This section will demonstrate the process that begins when a customer is introduced to a brand and ends when they make a purchase.

  1.2 Know, Like, Trust, Buy

  If you’re already familiar with the Marketing Funnel, you’ll know that every one of your customers has gone through it. While individual journeys may differ, every customer needs to have fulfilled each stage before they commit to buying from you.

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  Flip the Funnel

  How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

  • Joseph Jaffe(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The final few steps of the Marketing Funnel may seem like a fait accompli, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Walls of competing SKUs, diversions and distractions from in-store displays, and gondola ends designed for that change of heart (a place to dump your unwanted goods) or to make an impulse purchase are all difference makers. It’s exponentially magnified online, where pretty much anything and everything is only a click away, and where self-imposed ADD in the form of a Twitter chirp, Outlook ding, or IM ping is enough to reverse several carefully constructed steps of migration from one side of the funnel to the other.

  Warts and all, this is the Marketing Funnel in its simplest terms and definitions: a linear, standardized, and otherwise predictable process of defining, segmenting, and describing consumer behavior from marketing management, communications, and even sales perspectives.

  It is a funnel that has stood the test of the time . . . or has it?

  Today, the once-shiny funnel is dinged and dented, rusted and dusted. It relies on masses of quantity in order to arrive at a manageable end point of quality; it is a methodology that takes protracted time, endless reserves of energy, and (though not endless) a ton of money. The Marketing Funnel is synonymous with—and probably should just be called—an acquisition funnel, and it is a funnel of futility when it is an end unto itself.

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE FUNNEL?

  This book hypothesizes that there’s something inherently out of whack with the traditional Marketing Funnel and that there are better ways to optimize it. Most of this book concentrates on the latter approach, the “flipping” part. However, it is worthwhile to spend a little bit of time calling out several shortcomings associated with the incumbent theory in order to provide a base level of context for the suggested alternative.

  It’s Out of Date

  Come on; people aren’t predictable, linear, rational, or sequential beings. They probably never were. Though the four steps make sense in theory from a logical or even chronological standpoint, the buying game is very different in reality. In a word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse led world, the process of researching and buying is decidedly nonlinear, and it’s likely that some steps are skipped altogether in an always-correcting, efficient, and evolving marketplace.

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  eBook - ePub

  SOLD

  Every Real Estate Agent’s Guide to Building a Profitable Business

  • David M Greene, David Greene(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • BiggerPockets

    (Publisher)

  If you want to stay on the right path, you must have a very clear understanding of what that path is, when you have strayed from it, and how to progress along it. After having learned to navigate the big, scary, confusing ocean myself, I’ve come up with a system for staying on track and moving forward. I call it the sales funnel.

  The sales funnel is designed to help you take every single piece of information that comes your way and understand where it fits into the big picture. It simplifies the incredibly vast ocean of information you’ll be swimming in and provides you with structure. The sales funnel is how I create my own swimming lanes so I can make progress while my competition flounders.

  Everything Is a Funnel

  Real estate sales, like any other business, is a funnel. I credit The BiggerPockets Podcast host and best-selling author Brandon Turner for pointing this out. You start with a large group of potential leads. Then, through a careful process of refining, effort, and qualification, you end up with a much smaller group of highly qualified candidates at the other end. The process of making your way from a large group of potential candidates to a much smaller group of more valuable candidates is what we refer to as the funnel process.

  The best agents, as well as the best business owners in general, are good at two things: 1.  Putting large numbers of people into the top of their funnel. 2.  Moving those people from one stage of the funnel to the next. For context, let’s look at how this process works in other businesses and organizations. The following are examples of using funnels to earn profits and achieve results.

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  eBook - ePub

  Grow Your Business

  • The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Eric Butow(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Entrepreneur Press

    (Publisher)

  People need time to make decisions, and they also need reminders. Marketers know about the “rule of seven”: potential customers need to see a brand’s message seven times before they will buy. Online marketing tools make it easy for customers to be exposed to your brand much more often than that.

  To help the customer through your sales funnel, you need a strategic marketing campaign. You can set up ads, email messages, or both to keep reminding people of your value.

  Valuable content needs to be in every piece of communication you use in your campaign. That content can include case studies, customer testimonials, reviews, and even offers for a trial version of your product or service. No matter what you use, reinforce the value of your product or service, which in turn increases customer trust in your company.

  4. Don’t Limit Your Platform

  Creating a profile and/or business page on a social media platform is free, and it’s an easy way to connect with potential customers. Some businesses forgo a website for Facebook or other platforms because that’s where they think their customers are. But as a Facebook and Instagram outage in October 2021 reminded the world, if you are active only on one social media platform, your business could suffer.

  You need multiple platforms—and not just on social media websites. You need email marketing, websites, blog posts, audio and video content, and ads—especially because one platform or another, such as your web server, could go down for a while. If that happens, you’ll still have multiple marketing streams online and moving leads into your sales funnel.

  How to Fix Your Broken Sales Funnel

  No matter what type of funnel you select, and no matter which strategy you adopt to convert leads into customers, your sales funnel won’t work perfectly from the start. At some point early in the process, and maybe at various points during the life of your funnel, it will need some adjustment. Here are three signs that you may need to improve your funnel.

  1. It’s Hard to Buy from You

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  Understanding Marketing

  • (Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Harvard Business Review Press

    (Publisher)

  3. Create a marketing plan. Decide how you’ll position, price, and promote a product, which distribution channels you’ll use, and so forth. 4. Put your marketing strategy and plan into action. Prepare for surprises and disappointments and incorporate feedback and controls into the implementation process. 5. Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and plan, and adjust them accordingly. Whatever your position is in your organization, your awareness of the marketing process and participation in it will help your company achieve its marketing and strategic objectives. In the sections that follow, we’ll explore these steps in greater detail. But let’s turn now to the first step in the marketing process: identifying the market opportunities that will best help your 14 Understanding Marketing company achieve its mission, given the products and services that the company has to offer. To determine these opportunities, you must answer two questions: • Who are your target customers? • Why should they buy your product and not your competitors’? Your firm probably has many different potential customers who may be interested in your company’s offerings. But they likely fall into one of two main categories: individual consumers or businesses and organizations. Whether your firm sells mainly to individual consumers or businesses depends on its mission. For example, if your company makes electronic gadgets for the home, you probably sell primarily to individual consumers. But if your firm makes high-speed pho-tocopy machines or offers management consulting or corporate financial services, you probably sell to businesses or organizations. On the other hand, your company’s primary market may shift over time if such a change would have strategic value. To illustrate, an automobile manufacturer that sells mainly to individuals might see some advantages in developing and marketing certain kinds of vehicles—such as limousines—for business customers.

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  eBook - ePub

  Lead Generation For Dummies

  • Dayna Rothman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Part IV The Middle of the Funnel Visit www.dummies.com/extras/leadgeneration to find out how to make sure your emails hit the right inboxes. In this part … Create well-designed emails that engage your audience Find out how to nurture leads until they are ready to buy Use multi-channel tactics in your lead nurture campaigns Learn scoring techniques that send purchase-ready leads to sales Chapter 16 Communicating Through Email Marketing In This Chapter Moving leads through your sales funnel with email marketing Targeting and personalizing your email campaigns Writing compelling subject lines and email copy that converts Going beyond the basics when measuring your email marketing After you have plenty of leads in your database, what do you do with them? Lead generation doesn’t stop at acquisition. In fact, according to Marketo's data, 98 percent of their leads are not ready to buy when they come into their database. That sounds crazy, right? Well, if you are doing a ton of top-of-funnel lead-generation tactics, you are casting a wide net and introducing people to your company very early in the buying process. Your leads have a buying journey to go through, and by engaging in middle-of-the-funnel marketing tactics such as email marketing, you can ensure that you are speaking to your leads in all stages of the buying journey. Email marketing helps create personalized relationships with buyers over time. Without a focus on a middle-of-the-funnel strategy, many of your leads dry up and never become customers. Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with leads already in your database. Send emails to your leads when you are launching a new product or service, promoting a new content asset, attending an event, and so on. Email is as relevant as ever before, with 94 percent of Americans more than 12 years of age using it regularly. Fifty-eight percent of adults check email first thing in the morning

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