A marketing funnel is a process that moves customers from awareness through conversion to delight. It's how you reach your audience and get them to buy your product. The marketing funnel is a model that describes the steps that your customers take when they first hear about your product, evaluate its benefits, and finally make a purchase.
With marketing, funnel awareness finds a custom-built formula for your brand to find and convert prospects at every stage. Each step in the digital marketing funnel is designed to engage your audience and make them want more from your business, so it’s critical that you stick with all of them throughout the journey. That’s why every person in the digital marketing funnel should be involved from start to finish.
Learn how a good marketer can build a successful digital marketing funnel by taking advantage of strategies like lead generation, content creation, email marketing, advertising, community management and more.
What is top and bottom of funnel?
The top of the marketing funnel is where you engage with your audience and try to get them to act on your product or service. The bottom of the funnel is where you convert those shoppers into customers so they can buy your product or service.
This means that you can identify potential customers at any point along this path. If you want to reach a lot of people, you need to start at the top and work your way down. If you want to get more specific than just "potential customers," you can choose a different marketing funnel and develop one specifically tailored for your business needs.
- The top of the marketing funnel is where you would be interested in hearing about your product, like on social media or through email advertising. The top of the marketing funnel is where you're most likely to get customers who are ready to buy.
At this point, you're probably getting a lot of inquiries from people who are interested in your product—and that's great! But these inquiries are largely just interested viewers and browsers, not customers. So now it's time to educate those viewers and browsers on what makes your product unique, what features they'll get out of using it, and how they can use it best.
- The bottom of the marketing funnel is where consumers have decided to purchase your product but are not yet ready to pay for it. This is where you want to place ads that send them down your conversion path (the steps they need to take before they purchase).
You'll also want to ensure that any sales materials you send out are easy to understand by potential customers—you don't want them to feel like they're being talked down to or patronized when they read through an email or click on a link. Make sure everything about your sales pitch is clear, concise, and easy for potential customers to understand!
What are the 4 levels of the marketing funnel?
The marketing funnel is a great way to understand how customers arrive at your product and why they buy it. It can be broken down into four stages:
Awareness, Evaluation, Conversion, and Delight.
- The awareness stage is all about educating your audience about the benefits of your product or service. You want to ensure people know what it does, how it makes them feel, and why they should buy it.
You want to inform their knowledge so they can decide what they want to buy. To reach this level, you'll need to create content to educate your audience about your product and how it benefits them.
Reach out to potential customers and let them know about your product. This can be done through blogs and social media posts, but it also includes traditional advertising like television commercials and billboards.
- The evaluation stage is where customers decide whether they need what you're selling. Does your product address its pain points? Do they get enough value out of it that they would pay for it?
This is a crucial step because it informs prospected customers that there is a demand for your product, increasing sales over time as more people become aware of it and learn about its benefits.
Customers determine whether they need your product based on its benefits and price. You move into conversion if the customer decides it’s worth spending money on. Your sales team will then work with you to provide information about how to buy the product.
- In the conversion stage, you convert prospects into paying customers by explaining how your product/service will benefit them. This is often when consumers are most interested in purchasing your product or service—especially if they've already heard about it in other contexts or have been considering buying but aren't quite ready yet.
Conversion takes place when someone decides that now would be a good time for them to buy from you—and yes, these people were usually unaware of how much value buying from you would bring them!
- The delight stage is where you keep your audience engaged with updates on new developments or other content that keeps them coming back for more! Make your customers stay loyal as they move into their next purchase decision.
You can use content at each of these levels to help your audience get to that next level.
How does the marketing funnel differ for B2C and B2B brands?
For B2C brands, the marketing funnel has three stages: awareness, consideration, and purchase. The Buyer's Journey maps out all three of these stages for B2C users. For B2B customers, however, there are multiple stages of the lifecycle: Research & Development, Implementation and Operation (R&D-I-O).
For B2C consumers, the funnel begins with a website, which guides them through their purchase journey. They then interact directly with a company representative, who gives them a chance to ask questions about their product and the process of purchasing it. The customer service representative may offer a trial period or other incentives to entice potential buyers into making their first purchase.
The selling portion of the funnel is where things get complicated for B2C brands. While they have only one step in this model—direct interaction with a representative—they still have several steps in place to ensure that they are making quality sales:
- They create an environment where customers feel comfortable asking questions and interacting directly with the company's representatives
- They use call centers or live chat features on their website to make it easy for customers who want to talk with someone face-to-face (or even just hear their voice)
- They provide information about products and services that is accurate, timely, and consistent across all channels of communication
Marketing strategies for each stage of the funnel
A digital marketing funnel is a framework that helps you take your idea and turn it into a business. It's a process that starts with awareness, continues through consideration, and ends with conversion.
Your brand must be seen—in print and online—by as many people as possible. Once you've reached that goal, you can start working on other steps in your funnel: consideration (which happens when someone takes notice of your brand), and finally conversion (which happens when they decide to buy something from you).
- TOP: The top of the funnel is where you begin to get people's attention. You might do this by advertising on social media, placing ads in local newspapers, creating a website for your business, or even sending out press releases.
The top of the marketing funnel is when someone first finds out about your product or service, and they're getting ready to decide. This is where you want to focus on helping them find out more about what you have to offer, so that when they get down to the middle of the funnel and start considering whether they want your product, they can make an informed decision.
- MIDDLE: The middle of the funnel is where you start capturing people's attention and getting them interested in what you offer. This could be anything from sharing more information about yourself and your product/service online, to selling directly to customers through email or other online platforms like Etsy or Amazon.
The middle of the funnel is where most people spend most of their time trying to sell their product or service—but it doesn't mean it's unimportant! It's just not as critical as the top or bottom of the funnel. The only thing that really matters in this stage is whether or not people will actually buy from you (and if so, how much).
- BOTTOM: Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, you convert these interested parties into actual customers! You'll want to focus on getting them into contact with one another in order to build trust between both parties before moving forward with sales.
Finally, at the bottom of the marketing funnel are those who are ready for action. They've made up their minds and are ready to buy! You can use this stage to show them why they should buy from you over other options available now—or even come up with a new idea! Don't let them leave without making sure they've done everything they can do before handing over their cash
4 marketing funnel metrics you should measure
A marketing funnel is a tool that you can use to track the performance of your company's marketing efforts. The metrics you monitor in your marketing funnel will help you understand how well your company is doing with its marketing and whether it needs adjustments.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) - How much does it cost to acquire one customer?
The cost per acquisition (CPA) metric measures how much it costs to acquire a customer. This includes everything from the initial cost of advertising to the cost of shipping and everything in between.
It's a great metric because it shows how much money you spend on each new customer. If you're spending more than what you're bringing in, it indicates that you may be losing money.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) - How much money do you make from each customer?
The customer lifetime value (LTV) metric measures the value customers bring to an organisation over their lifetime. This means that LTV is calculated by taking into account all expenses incurred during the time period when a customer is active in the business.
It's useful because it helps you know how much profit an individual customer brings to your business. If they're not bringing in enough money, then they might be worth less than they were when they first joined the company—and if so, then you might need to find new ways to increase their value or make them part of a different product line.
- Conversion rates - TOFU, MOFU, BOFU - How many of your customers convert from one thing to another?
Conversion rate - TOFU, MOFU, BOFU Conversion rate per channel represents the percentage of customers who converted from the stage of interest (TOFU - visitor to lead), motivation (MOFU - mql to sign up), to buying stage (BOFU - signups to checkout).
- Conversion rate per channel - How many people do you convert from one channel to another?
This kind of conversion highly depends on
- Organic search
- Paid ads
- Referrals
Tips to improve the effectiveness of your marketing funnel
- Understand customer trends
- Understand the source of your leads/traffic
- Get strong with email marketing
- Optimize your landing pages and CTAs.
What websites are you referring to or linking to? This will help you in building your database. Assess the content you have on their site, based on their website reviews. If your customers are already sharing content, it will make conversion easier for them in the future.
- Provide a self-service workflow that lets customers control how they receive content from your company. This would improve customer satisfaction and engagement with your products and services. Intuitively, it is great how advertising can boost online sales.
- Create a series of friendly reminders that allow customers to be sure they pick the best product they can get while not compromising the speed or efficiency of their purchase journey. Keep up with trends in visitor behavior such as frequency, find one specific thing that is making them hit certain pages more than others.
- Tune into trends of new clients who are visiting your business. Explore what is causing people to enter your website more often and how they were using it before signing up, as well as seeing if there is a recurring theme that helps with converting prospects into salesmen, users into customers and proceeds from sales on the services you provide.
- Qualify for new audiences by asking about $15 or $25 per person per month (for example). Ultimately, marketers need to be aware of trends and business models that can help them drive long-term revenue from clients within their industry through targeted advertising activities at this time, since these tools are very effective
Marketing funnel styles
A digital marketing funnel can be styled in 3 different ways:
- Mainstream
- Creative
- Hacky.
The idea behind these styles is to create a brand that makes customers want to buy more of your product or service. You can achieve this goal by using all these strategies:
- Creating the product or service name, an image poster, and an article cover.
- Targeting [the right people or groups].
- Plan a campaign with as many social media spinoffs as you can get into your store.
- Make sure your products are on every social network (Facebook, Twitter etc.).
- Designing your store with a certain vibe and character; crafting objects that will attract customers not just because of who they are but because of what they like about you (for example, brand-specific products).