The digital marketing funnel is a strategic framework that illustrates the customer journey in distinct steps: awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty. Optimizing each stage brings in more leads and increases conversion rates.
In our guide, we explore the stages of a digital marketing funnel, the various types, and how you can implement a profitable one for your business.
Table of Contents
- What Is a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
- Stages of a Digital Marketing Funnel
- Why You Need a Marketing Funnel
- Differences Between a Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing Funnel
- 6 Main Types of Digital Marketing Funnels
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Marketing Funnel for Beginners
- Digital Marketing Funnel: Takeaways
What Is a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
A digital marketing funnel is a process involving the various stages potential customers go through before making a purchase, from not knowing about your product or service to becoming loyal customers. Marketers set up a sequence of activities to guide potential leads from casual browsers to loyal customers.
A marketing funnel can be visualized as a pitcher with a broad mouth and narrow base. The wide top represents a broad audience — given that the worldwide digital population is 5.44 billion — while the narrow bottom is selective to the strongest prospects ready to complete a purchase.
Stages of a Digital Marketing Funnel
The digital marketing funnel consists of the following stages:
Awareness
This initial phase involves strategies to capture the attention of your target audience. Pique their interest and ensure that they remember your brand and offerings. This can be done across various channels: social media, search engine optimization, paid ads, and more.
Consideration
Modern consumers are savvier than ever, with 55% conducting product research on search engines, 36% on Amazon, and 34% on retail websites before making a purchase. Therefore, it is important to provide these potential customers with detailed, accurate information about your products or services to encourage them to purchase. This can be done through website content, personalized recommendations, email marketing, customer testimonials, and more.
Conversion
This is the critical juncture where interested leads become paying customers. Discounts and limited promotions can lead to quicker action. A streamlined checkout process and multiple secure payment options will also ensure a good user experience.
Loyalty
Fostering long-term relationships with customers leads to more purchases and brand advocacy in the future. Loyalty programs, exclusive discounts, and personalized campaigns can provide attractive rewards for customers.
Why You Need a Marketing Funnel
Your marketing funnel is the process that leads customers from the initial discovery of your product or service to the point where they are ready to buy. A solid online marketing funnel will help attract interested customers, increase sales, and improve conversion rates.
You can also leverage your digital marketing funnel to measure your marketing efforts. For instance, you can track the number of people who visit your website (organic traffic) and how many of them become paying customers (conversion rate). Additionally, you can use different versions of sales funnels for your business, all designed to make your marketing efforts more organized and effective.
Differences Between a Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing Funnel
Here are the key differences between digital marketing funnels and traditional funnels:
- Marketing channels used: Fostering awareness via traditional marketing involves ads on billboards, newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio. In contrast, digital marketers leverage social media, search engines, and brand websites.
- Budget: Costs for TV and print ads can be quite high. Meanwhile, posting content on social media and writing blogs are comparably more cost-effective.
- Personalization: The most effective awareness strategies in digital marketing target specific demographics and buyer personas, while traditional marketing channels are meant to appeal as broadly as possible.
- Audience engagement and reach: The Super Bowl attracts more than 100 million viewers each year, which is why 30-second commercials cost an average of $7 million to air during the event. However, not all traditional marketing methods gain such a vast audience. In contrast, a viral post on social media can earn millions of views and engagements at a fraction of the cost.
- Performance metrics: Dedicated tools and analytics make tracking and measuring performance at each stage of a digital marketing channel easy. In contrast, it is difficult to determine the exact number of consumers who purchased an item because they saw a commercial on TV.
6 Main Types of Digital Marketing Funnels
At the heart of a sales funnel is the understanding that not all leads are created equal and that not everyone who enters the funnel will ultimately become a paying customer. Recognizing this, marketers use different types of sales funnels to effectively guide, and nurture leads through the process.
Here are the most common types of sales funnels:
- Lead Generation Funnel
- Email Funnel
- Content Funnel
- Webinar Sign-Up Funnel
- Sales Call Booking Funnel
- Onboarding Funnel
1. Lead Generation Funnel
The lead generation funnel is the first type of sales funnel you should create. It is designed to generate leads for your company by collecting contact details from anyone who shows interest in your product or service. This is the first step in the sales process and is the foundation for everything that comes after.
Continue to nurture leads as they progress through the funnel. Provide something valuable to maintain engagement, like an e-book or a free consultation call. Follow up with the lead and explain how they can take advantage of this valuable resource.
2. Email Funnel
Email marketing is still one of the most potent forms of online marketing due to its personalized nature and ability to reach larger audiences at scale. The main goal is to persuade recipients to act based on the messages they receive, such as clicking a link to a blog post, subscribing to a newsletter, or completing a purchase with an exclusive discount.
3. Content Funnel
Once you’ve generated some leads, the content funnel nurtures these prospects, helps them make decisions, and turns them into paying customers.
Publish high-quality content related to your product or service and distribute it on different channels, such as your website, blog, newsletter, social media, and more. This content should be valuable, insightful, and engaging to attract ideal customers.
When someone interacts with your content, you can follow up via email marketing or other strategies to entice them further down the digital marketing funnel.
4. Webinar Sign-Up Funnel
A webinar sign-up funnel is an effective tool to build your email list and generate sales. Webinars are an excellent way to engage directly with your audience, increase conversions, and improve lead generation metrics.
Hosted by industry leaders and experts, webinars provide valuable information to attendees through how-to guides, tips and tricks, best practices, Q&As, and more. You can put out a call to action for interested audiences to sign up for your webinar. You can collect their email address or another contact method through these signups and engage with them down the line.
5. Sales Call Booking Funnel
A sales call booking funnel combines lead generation and content, two powerful tools that can help you generate more sales. This is the perfect funnel for businesses with high-value products and services requiring a lot of handholding from the sales team. It's a great way to onboard more customers and generate more sales.
Let's say you're selling software for managing employees' timecards. When someone clicks on your link in Google search results for "time tracking software," they land on a page where you've laid out all the benefits of using your product. You might showcase testimonials from satisfied clients and images or videos demonstrating how easy it is to use the app, with links to more detailed explanations.
At the bottom of the page, include an opt-in form where users can sign up for more information about pricing plans or free trials, which sends their email addresses to your sales pipeline.
6. Onboarding Funnel
The first few moments after a customer makes a purchase are crucial to the success of your business, which is why it's crucial to have an effective onboarding funnel. You want to ensure that they’re satisfied with their purchase and correctly onboarded into your business to encourage them to return in the future.
There are several ways to create an onboarding funnel:
- Create a welcome email flow: This provides your consumers with helpful information about how to use your product or service. If you have multiple products or services, segment the messages into separate flows depending on their use.
- Use Calendly: Integrate Calendly into your booking process so clients receive automatic notifications when their appointment time arrives.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Marketing Funnel for Beginners
From defining your audience to lead tracking and paid ads, here’s a six-step guide to creating a marketing funnel:
- Define Your Audience and Know your Customer Journey
- Build a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
- Create a Lead Magnet
- Build Out Your Content Marketing Strategy
- Develop a Lead-Tracking Strategy
- Add Paid Strategies for Tailoring and Awareness
1. Define Your Audience and Know your Customer Journey
First and foremost, you need to define your audience and their journey. This will help you maximize your digital marketing efforts by targeting your customers more effectively and knowing where to reach them.
Identify your target audience's pain points, interests, and problems. This will also help you understand their journey to purchase so you can be there to guide them at each step of the buying process.
Dilay Coban Oruc, Founder of Skouter Digital, says that the traditional linear sales funnel is outdated and replaced by a complex journey called the "Messy Middle."
“In this stage, consumers engage in extensive research, comparison, and opinion-seeking across various sources, including reviews and social media, making their purchasing path longer and more complex. Winning tactics involve accommodating this complexity by providing valuable experiences, timely incentives, social proof, and a personalized approach.”
Understanding your customer journey will help you to create an effective online marketing funnel that drives your customers through each stage and keeps them moving towards a completed purchase.
2. Build a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
Determine how much time, money, and resources you can invest in your funnel. Then, choose the channels you want to use to reach your audience. You should also identify the most appropriate entry points to draw in your customers and convert them into leads.
3. Create a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is an enticing piece of content you give away for free to draw in leads. It can be almost anything; what's important is that it is relevant and actionable for your target audience. It can be:
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- Cheat sheets
- Checklists
- Audio series
Juanita Veronica Michael, Content Writer at Wonkrew, emphasizes the importance of capturing attention and guiding potential customers towards purchase: “Effective strategies include offering free consultations, eBooks, webinars, workshops, product trials, and samples to demonstrate expertise, engage directly, and build trust. Personalizing experiences with free quotes and using interactive elements like quizzes and surveys can further tailor your approach.”
A lead magnet is essential for building an initial list of contacts and creating a solid foundation for subscribers interested in your product or service. Moreover, these leads are warm contacts who have permitted you to contact them.
4. Build Out Your Content Marketing Strategy
Create and share relevant and valuable content with potential customers and leads. This will help establish your brand as an authority in your industry and drive traffic to your website.
Kira Kelsie, Owner of Kasm Consulting, suggests the winning tactic for converting prospects at the middle and bottom of the sales funnel: “Combine personalized content that speaks directly to their needs and marketing automation that nurtures and guides them toward a purchase. This approach ensures that your marketing efforts are highly targeted and efficient, leading to increased conversions and business growth.”
A strong content marketing strategy can help you build trust, gain leads, and provide information that will convince customers to purchase from you. It also increases lifetime value and reduces customer acquisition costs.
5. Develop a Lead-Tracking Strategy
A lead-tracking strategy enables you to track the progress of every lead in your sales funnel. It also allows you to evaluate the performance of each phase of the funnel. This can be as simple as creating a spreadsheet or using an Excel template. You can also leverage customer relationship management (CRM) and automation software.
Make sure your lead tracking system is integrated with the rest of your digital marketing tools.
6. Add Paid Strategies for Tailoring and Awareness
Paid marketing strategies are designed to tailor your message to a specific audience to increase brand awareness and website traffic. They are typically used to supplement other digital marketing strategies. You can invest in paid ads for platforms your target audience uses, such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
Retargeting is one of the most common ways to use paid marketing for tailoring. You can place ads in front of leads who have previously visited your website.
Digital Marketing Funnel: Takeaways
To develop a successful marketing funnel, you need to identify your target audience, understand what they want, and determine their pain points. Then, create high-quality content that addresses their needs and drives them to your sales page. Once you’ve created your funnel, track your metrics, tweak your funnel as necessary, and be prepared to adjust your strategies as needed.
A digital marketing agency can design a sales funnel to take your marketing strategy to the next level, attract potential customers, convert them into leads, and invigorate sales.
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