What are Marketing Funnels and How to Create a Powerful One?

If you’ve never used a marketing funnel, you’re probably wondering, “What exactly are marketing funnels and How do they work?”

Marketing funnels are among the most easy-to-use yet powerful tools to help you visualize how your customers gather information and make purchasing decisions. Understanding them will help you prioritize, organize, and implement your marketing strategy.

What Are Marketing Funnels?

A marketing funnel is the process prospects go through from their first interaction with the brand until they convert. This process usually consists of marketing actions like automated emails, videos, paid ads, SEO and other channels.

Each stage of the funnel sets the customer up for the next step until they are at the final stage where the goal is accomplished.

This marketing strategy helps you understand what potential customers are thinking and doing at each stage of the purchasing journey.

Marketing Funnels vary in the number of stages, but the four basic stages are: 

1. Awareness:

Customers can’t buy your product if they don’t know it exists. The awareness stage is the first stage in the marketing funnel. At this stage, the main goal is to introduce your brand and products to your target audience.

In order to generate leads and get audience members into this first stage of your funnel, there are several ways you can promote your business such as: Using paid advertising, Social media post, Email marketing, Podcasts, Organic search (SEO) and more.

The success at this stage depends on the number of leads you can direct down the funnel to the next stage.

2. Interest:

Once people know about your brand and products, you need to turn this awareness into interest. The most effective way to do it is to added information about the problem a person/company can solve using your products or services, explained how fast it is to set it up, how your brand differs from others…  

It is important to provide them with social proof, no matter how many times you say something, people want to hear it from another source.

In summary, once the potential customers think you can solve their specific problem, then they will want to learn more.

3. Decision:

At this stage, potential customers start reflecting on what they learned or discovered. They must determine what product, solution or service is best for them and are likely to compare your service with other tools out there. They look for reasons to believe why one solution has more benefits than the other. After reflection, the prospect makes his decision and is ready to buy.

4. Action:

This is the last stage in the marketing funnel, where your prospects take the desired action and convert into a customer.

But it is important to note that your goal at this stage isn’t just to get your potential customers to buy. You should also set them up for success with your product or service. If the product or service you are selling doesn’t offer value and help them reach a potential resolution, you’re putting yourself in a difficult position to thrive. 

The way you treat a customer after purchasing a product or service from you is also a game-changer.
There are tonnes of actions you can take to improve the post-purchase experience. The action can vary based on customer and industry. For example, you could create FAQ content or a demo, make it easier to get customer support and maintain good customer relationships.

The representation of the steps above is a basic template that you can use for your marketing strategy. It offers a simplistic roadmap of the consumer journey and the stages buyers go through before making a purchase.

The marketing funnel works as a unified whole, which means that every section needs to work towards specific goals for the journey to be successful. Each of the marketing funnel stages has an impact on consumer behavior, as should the content presented to the customer in those stages.

What Are the Different Types of Funnels?

In this post, I’m focusing on marketing funnels, that are great specifically for attracting clients and selling your products or services.

Well, the truth is that many different types of marketing funnels can be used depending on your needs and goals. Let’s go over some typical funnels that you can employ for your business:

• Sales funnels
• Email funnels
• Lead magnet funnels
• Video marketing funnels
• Webinar funnels
• List building funnels
• Social media marketing funnels

Although everyone names their stages differently and marketing funnels may diverge on finer points, the majority typically follows the same process: awareness, interest and evaluation, desire, action, and loyalty.

Once you understand the basic structure of the funnels, you can customize and segment your Funnels to suit your business needs.

The Benefits of Marketing Funnels

You stand to gain a lot by building a powerful marketing funnel for your business. Marketing funnels simplify the customer journey and provide a map of what your customers’ decision process looks like at each stage of their journey.

When you have an effective marketing funnel, you can be sure that your marketing efforts are focused on the right target audience at the right time.

One of the greatest benefits of marketing funnels is that it provides access to data that lets you see where you are losing customers. This will help you to optimize your marketing strategy.

By evaluating your funnels, you can get a better way to organize marketing strategy and make it easier to understand which strategy works the best for each stage of the funnel. This is something extremely beneficial to your business because it allows to potentially drives greater sales, more loyalty and stronger brand awareness. 

An Effective Example of Marketing Funnel

let’s look at the various stages of the marketing funnel in an e-commerce store that customers experience.

Traffic: organic, email list, blogs, and social media

Start of the Session: Customer visits the e-commerce website

Session with Product page View: Customer views a product page(s)

Session with Add-to-Cart: Customer adds the item to her cart

Session with Transaction: Customer enters checkout process, then finishes checkout process and clicks “Purchase”

The good news is that the shopping behavior report allows the e-commerce store to see their visitors flow through the various stages of their site’s shopping experience. This would look something like this:

Marketing funnel reports contain the key to understanding customer journeys, building more effective marketing strategies, and increasing sales.

Conclusion:

Now that we’ve covered just about everything you need to know about marketing funnels, you’re good to go and start building your marketing funnels.

I hope this article helped you understand how Marketing Funnels Work. If you are just getting started with marketing funnels, ClickFunnels is a solid place to start. It gives you the tools and strategies you need to market, sell and deliver your products online. Learn more about ClickFunnels.