What’s a Marketing Funnel and Why You Need One Right Now

First things first: if you have a business and you want to set up a digital marketing campaign to help your brand conquering new customers, you must have a Marketing Funnel.

As I said other times, in these articles, nowadays being online doesn’t mean that much if you don’t have a proper digital marketing strategy that moves your content round. You are online, and so are your competitors. Why should a customer pick your company instead of another one? Your reply will probably be along the line “Because I know what I’m doing, and I can do it well.”
Good answer, but how can your customer know where you are or what you do if they can’t find you? Even worse, how can you convince them if you propose them just a cold sale? Being online in an effective way requires more than a decent website or a generic Facebook page.

Too many times I encounter companies with a good-looking, well-structured online presence that complain about the total ineffectiveness of those assets in generating business for them. This is a result of the lack of planning and goal-orientation of the contents that have been posted.

Today, what you need is a clear Marketing Funnel that creates an effective path for a prospect to become a customer of your company.

WHAT’S A MARKETING FUNNEL?

Sadly, there isn’t a marketing technique that will convert any random user in a loyal customer for your business — sorry, that still requires a bit of work. What you need is a strategy that nurtures your prospects, brings them through the status of Awareness, Evaluation and Conversion: a Marketing Funnel.
Companies need to build a journey for a Prospect following these steps:

• From user to lead: you’re online, your brand is online, and many, many people will see what type of product or service you sell if you have an effective digital marketing campaign. The part of these random users that will fill your online form giving you their contacts — email address, address, phone number –to hear what you propose them becomes leads.
• From lead to customer: sadly, not all your leads will become customers. Some of them won’t be able to afford your service, and others simply won’t be interested, and so on. However, the part of the group of leads that will be willing to do business with you becomes your customers.

To reach these new customers, you — or better us, your marketing department — will need to:

• Create Awareness: one of the goals of a digital marketing campaign is to target the right audience for your product, and then show them all the essential information about what they would be interested in buying from you. This interaction is the first contact between a possible lead and a business, and it’s your shot to convince them to proceed to the next step.
• Generate Interest: you need to convert a random user into a lead. Acquiring a Lead requires a differentiating “Magnet-Offer”. Something that will grab your Prospect’s attention. This can be a Free Content, Access to a limited discount, or whatever it could persuade these people that they’re signing up for something more appealing than sterile spam emails.
• Convince the lead to make a decision: now that the user has become a lead, you have information and it’s time to persuade them to buy from you. Nurturing emails and Retargeting Offers are a great way to enlighten the advantages they will have doing business with your company. You can show them content related to the ones that have visualised on your website. The important thing is to provide additional value. In this way, you’ll obtain both the goal to avoid a place in the Spam folder and to convince them to buy from you.
• Take Action: they have bought from you. Congratulations! Now what? Now it’s time to avoid they let you go. Like many entrepreneurs, you surely prefer to create a pool of customers who are happy to return and buy from you more than just once. So, after the first sale, is time to convince them to stay, and why not? Talk and review your services in a positive way with other — potential — customer.

So, all the actions we talked on the list above will determine the success of your Funnel. I think it’s clear at this point that this tool is necessary if you want to acquire new customers interacting with the users that are genuinely interested in purchasing from you — hence, the leads who will give your contacts.

If you’re still not convinced that a Funnel is what you and / or your brand needs, allow me to tell you more about why you need one:

A Marketing Funnel helps brands to connect with prospects online

Sometimes an entrepreneur thinks they’re communicating well with their audience, instead, maybe they aren’t taking full advantage of their promotional material, or they are speaking in a language that’s too technical. Seeing what the leads that give their contacts have in common, will help a wise entrepreneur to shape their brand’s communication better. Once you have a clear picture of what type of leads you’re attracting thanks to your Funnel, you can think about offers tailored to their preferences. Let’s make an example: if all your leads arrive after browsing through your website, and a very few of them reach you out using social channels, you know that the website is working well and you need to reinforce your social channels interactions.

A Funnel can help you shape a Marketing Strategy

A marketing funnel is vital to check which marketing features or what new approach you would need to make your business succeed. Also, if you want to focus on a particular step of the funnel — for example, if you’re going to convince the lead to decide on a purchase — you can organise your digital marketing campaign targeting the segment of your audience that is in the part of the funnel you’re more interested in.

There is another step you should take to really take full advantage of your marketing funnel: open it at its bottom. An excellent example of this method is the way Apple approached its customers. After they purchased a product from this brand, their experience doesn’t end with the purchase:

• Loyalty: they now customers are persuaded to stay loyal to the brand, purchasing technology from them via an offer of various services. It can be free consultancy you geta t the Genius Bar, or a special discount during the holidays. Apple, through the years, built a system that — you like it or not — makes its buyers feeling part of a community.
• Advocacy: these customers, both old and new, are now part of a group they like because they feel valued or they consider it has the best of the market in that particular branch. Now they’re your ambassadors in the world. If you offer them enough reasons to trust your business, to think your customer service is excellent, not only they will return — and real profit happens when your relationship with a customer lengthened — but they will talk positively about your brand to other people. Or, as we see them, to other potential customers.

Now that you have a picture of what a digital Marketing Funnel is, you’re probably wondering which steps you should take to make this idea come true. Fear you not, here at Targeto we have your back covered. As you can see in the link, we’re specialists in creating funnels for any necessity, for brands or entrepreneurs who want to invest in their careers. If you wish to have more information or clarification, please, feel free to schedule here a completely free online session with our experts. I hope we will hear from you soon!