What Is A Digital Marketing Funnel?
Before we get into digital marketing funnels, you need to know the concept of a traditional marketing funnel. A marketing funnel breaks down each point of a customer’s interaction with your brand. It involves every step the customer will take from the moment they are made aware of your product/service to the point of purchase and beyond.
Some funnels will include steps leading up to the awareness stage, like advertising, which is all about increasing brand awareness and customer traffic to your site. Additionally, some funnels include steps following the purchase stage. This could include post-purchase steps to increase customer retention. With every successful conversion of a lead into a customer, you will learn the best ways to apply and personalize each step of the funnel to best represent your brand while driving sales.
When it comes to digital marketing and marketing funnels, the concepts remain the same. We are just applying them to an online context. Generally, you can think of a digital marketing funnel in three sections, the top, the middle, and the bottom.
The top is all about increasing brand awareness and authority, and website traffic.
The middle is all about capturing leads and turning them into sales. Finally, the bottom involves turning leads into both immediate and long-term customers.
We can break these three stages into six key steps. These include the following: Exposure (top) Discovery (top) Consideration (middle) Conversion (middle) Customer relationship (bottom) Customer retention (bottom) So, let’s explore these steps in further detail so that you can build an effective digital marketing funnel for your business.
6 Steps to Create a Powerful Digital Marketing Funnel
1. Exposure (Top)
Regardless of your approach to digital marketing, the first step should always involve exposure. This is why good advertising is so crucial. You can’t attract customers if they have no clue who you are!
Exposure is all about advertising on the correct platforms in strategic ways. Consider Google, where tens of thousands of searches happen every second. How can you ensure that your brand isn’t lost in the ether?
Alongside your paid advertising efforts, the best approach is to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This will help get your content to rank higher on the various search engines. Basically, you want to ensure that when a prospective customer enters relevant keywords into the search bar, your brand is there to greet them at the top of the page!
You want results to include content that is attention-grabbing. Carefully designed videos or visually appealing infographics is a good way to maximise traffic and capture attention so that people will click on them.
When it comes to your blog, make sure your posts are informative and help visitors fully understand what your brand has to offer.
Focus on how your brand holds solutions to their problems, and why they need to invest in these solutions.
2. Discovery (Top)
So, step one is all about making potential customers aware of your existence. The next step is all about encouraging them to explore your site and discover the range of products and services your company has to offer.
Good SEO techniques might ensure that your site gets plenty of traffic, but this is meaningless if no one is interested in what your brand has to offer.
If your site cannot keep visitors interested, your bounce rate will go up. This will damage search engine optimization and collapse your funnel at step 1.
Make sure your site is rich in useful content. Again, you want to focus on visually appealing graphics, and the solutions offered by your brand. Tell the customer how your product will solve their problems and make their lives easier!
The goal here is to try to turn visitors into leads. So, you want to include a section that urges visitors to enter their contact details for a lead magnet or to subscribe to your newsletter. This way, interested parties can be officially turned into sales leads.
3. Consideration (Middle)
So, your interested parties now know a little more about your brand and are aware of the solutions offered by your products. In other words, they are in the consideration phase, prior to committing to a sale.
Your site’s job now is to provide material that tips the scales towards a sale! You want to give them every reason to commit to your brand over another. This involves highlighting how your brand is different from competitors. Showcase the unique benefits that can be expected by going with your company’s solution.
By this step, you will know which product the individual is interested in. So, you can provide them with specific information related to the solution under consideration.
You might include a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section that answers their most pressing questions. You might also consider displaying positive customer reviews to build up trust in your service. Alternatively, hone in on a few positive case studies of satisfied customers whose problems your solutions were able to fix.
All this information will function to reassure an interested party that they will be making a sound investment should they commit to a sale.
4. Conversion (Middle)
Now the time has come to convert those leads into paying customers! At this step, you want to really customise your approach depending on who is interested.
You want to create custom campaigns that are personalized to your leads or visitors. Point them toward specific, conversion-focused landing pages to give them the nudge they need. You could also direct them to a free trial so that they might experience the benefits of your service for themselves.
By now, they should have everything they need to make a decision so you just need to make it easy for them. Emphasise exactly what they will gain from your product or service and encourage them to give it a try or make a purchase.
5. Customer Relationship (Bottom)
We have now reached the bottom of the digital marketing funnel, post the sale or conversion. Now, you want to ensure that the customer is content with your product. Here you can focus on teaching your customer how best to utilize your product. Ensure that they have direct contact with your brand every step of the way. Good customer service at this stage might just set your brand above the rest.
Make sure there are resources accessible to the customer to teach them more about their newly purchased product or answer any pressing questions they may have.
Include tutorial videos in your product package for example, so that the customer isn’t left without direction following purchase. Additionally, give them a direct email address or phone number to contact with any further queries.
This way, you are ensuring that the customer doesn’t feel disregarded as soon as your business has gotten money from them. Instead, they are offered a direct channel to help meet all their specific needs.
This will showcase that your business is genuinely interested in solving the clients’ problems. It will also ensure that clients look to you for more solutions in the future, rather than jumping ship to a competitor.
When you establish this more direct contact with a customer, it will also provide you with more marketing opportunities. You can offer existing customers exclusive deals or insight into new products that aren’t offered elsewhere!
6. Customer Retention (Bottom)
Customer retention is essential for a thriving business. Again, this step is largely about nurturing existing customers. It is all about encouraging clients to make future purchases. This will involve a lot of the previously mentioned steps (the other stages of the funnel). But it also includes investing in the ongoing communications with previously established customers.
A good way to stay on top of client communications is to conduct interviews with customers who will become featured case studies. This way, customers can shed light on some of the strengths and weaknesses of your digital marketing funnel, in addition to contributing to the funnel in their own right.
Be sure to continuously revisit your funnel structure in light of customer feedback.
Key Takeaways
Marketing funnels are essential for attracting and closing sales, and retaining customers. As such, businesses need to invest in every step of their digital marketing funnel if their marketing strategy is to be successful.
The top of the funnel involves the exposure, discovery and consideration steps. It is all about increasing site traffic and retaining browsers attention with targeted content. The middle of the funnel involves the conversion step, where an interested lead is converted into a paying customer. Finally, the bottom of the funnel is all about nurturing the customer relationship, to ensure future customer retention.
By monitoring and optimizing each stage, you can boost your success and see more sales!