Marketing Funnel: Then and Now
One of the most effective business tools that can help marketers to generate successful conversions is marketing funnel.
As a marketer, what we want is for the audience to take certain actions, be it purchase, subscribe, watch, or comment. These types of actions is called conversion. Being a creative digital marketer, you might find yourself filled with endless vision, unfortunately, grand ideas and determination alone are not enough to generate successful conversions. One of the most effective business tools that could help you with that is marketing funnel.
What is Marketing Funnel?
Most businessmen refer marketing funnel as a lead generation and sales closure strategy. Specifically, marketing funnel is a tool that helps marketers visualize a buyer’s journey, from a prospect to an actual customer and sometimes, beyond.
Marketing funnel helps companies understand their sales process and measure their conversion success. It was modeled in the shape of a funnel; wide on top because there are usually more potential customers during the initial phase, and narrow at the bottom because as the process continues, the pool of the prospects would be cut down into people who are likely to take on the offers.
Traditional Marketing Funnel
There are typically 5 stages of marketing funnel: awareness, interest, evaluation, commitment, and purchase.
In the awareness phase, the audiences are familiar with your brand but they are not particularly engrossed with that your brand offers. Only the audiences who are actually interested will seek more information about your products or services which will turn them into prospects. Usually at this point, companies will take on a more strategic approach to target them personally and ‘push’ them into making a decision, either to purchase or to accept their offer. When prospects are converted into actual customers, the process ends and marketers return to the initial step.
But here’s the catch. With this model, all the marketing efforts are mostly concentrating at achieving the point of purchase. After a prospect becomes a paying customer, the focus moves onto acquisition and finding more prospects. Though it might work in the pre-digital era, that is not enough in the long run now.
Modern Marketing Funnel
Yes, marketing is all about attracting potential customers to your business and turn into actual buyers. Almost all conventional marketing strategies focused solely on that. Today though, customer retention changes that paradigm. For business to grow, marketers cannot simply focus on looking for new potentials. As customer expectation grows higher, marketers will also need to pay attention on their existing clients.
In other words, brand’s relationship with customers shouldn’t end at the bottom of the funnel. Instead, brands should focus on optimizing the lifetime value of the customers by expanding the funnel after the purchasing stage. A complete customer journey includes the pre-purchase and post-purchase stages. That’s what modern marketing funnel is all about: a multi-interactive customer experience.
According to the Harvard Business Review, profits rise as customer’s relationship with company strengthens. Indeed, long-time customers act as the valuable advocates that brands can leverage. After all, in the era of authenticity, what’s more credible than personal referrals from friends and family?
Wrapping Up
Marketing funnel is beneficial to create a well-directed content and effective marketing strategy. But that shouldn’t be all. As business strives to grow in the new digital space, marketing funnel should be able to assist them in strengthening relationships with customers as well. Beyond that, effective modern marketing funnel increases the chance of gathering feedback to reevaluate a brand’s strategies.
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