Every marketer, at some point, has executed a marketing campaign that did not bring the expected results—this article is for that marketer. It is also for the marketer who doesn’t know how to create a marketing funnel.

We’ll deep dive into the importance of a marketing funnel, an expert guide to effectively building marketing funnels in lingua that a beginner can understand, and the best practices and tips for growth success.

Let’s delve right in

So what is a marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel is a map showing your user journey from the first time they encounter your product until they make a final purchase decision. To build a marketing funnel, there are generic stages of the funnel, and it’s mainly classified as:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Decision

The essence of an effective marketing funnel is to help move prospective customers from the preliminary stage of awareness down through consideration, decision, and, ultimately, conversion.

Marketing funnels save time, money, and effort – ensuring that all actions are concerted.

1. Awareness stage:

This is the top of the funnel (ToFu), where your primary concern is introducing your brand to potential customers for the first time.

Here is where you’ll find customer research, content marketing, and marketing campaigns are vital in creating brand awareness and showing your unique value proposition.

2. Consideration stage:

This is also known as the middle of the funnel, and it’s the stage where leads are converted into marketing-qualified leads.

Here, the customers have started engaging with you by subscribing to your newsletters and following on social media. They can now see more target brand content with you offering a wide range of services like free trials.

3. Decision stage:

The bottom of the funnel (BoFu). You have gotten the prospective customers’ attention and are addressing their needs. To help hasten their decision, you can offer case studies that show how much you’ve done previously and how much value they stand to gain from you.

You can offer free trials, write a guide, create a demo session, send segmented email campaigns, or share social proof like testimonies and reviews.

Good Read: What is Growth Analytics?

How to effectively build marketing funnels for growth

1. Identify your audience

You must build a marketing funnel for an audience you know. That’s why the first step in building functional growth and marketing funnels is determining the customers you want to target and convert. You need to understand the different customer personas, how they interact with your product, and the best channels to reach them.

To identify your audience there are a couple of ways to do this, and it includes:

• Generating direct feedback from your existing customers (if you already have)

• Carrying our surveys on their needs and pain points

• Using existing data online

By analysing and mapping your customer journey, you can understand their pain points, behavioural responses, favourite channel for communication, and overall product experience (PX). Once you are able to identify these insights with web analytics and marketing reports, you can improve their user experience by removing blockers and routine bugs

2. Determine how many stages would be present in your funnel

On a generic scale, we divided the funnel into “awareness, consideration, and decision. However, in creating your marketing funnel, you can make tweaks into the funnel. You primarily need to map a typical buyer’s journey before they would patronise you – with that, you can then determine the number of stages you’ll be working with. You can use the longer

• Awareness

• Interest

• Desire

• Action

Also, you can break it down into more precise stages like:

• Awareness stage: Involving lead generation through marketing campaigns and customer research)

• Acquisition: Involving app store optimization, paid advertising, and forms of digital marketing.

• Activation: Here, the customers have shown interest, and you can proceed with on-boarding, and one-step registrations with their contact.

• Retention: Here, you are developing a relationship with customers, using active communication channels, push notifications, and re-engagement ads.

• Referral: At this point, you include growth drivers like one-click sharing, contact list integration, and incentivized sharing. Customers may execute referrals by word-of-mouth.

• Revenue: Happy users become customers by engaging in monetization processes

Once you have properly outlined the number of marketing funnel stages you choose to employ, you can create awareness about your product.

3. Create buzz!

To scale your product and grow, you must effectively create buzz about your products and services. To create awareness, you need to recognise the pain points your brand is meeting and promote your services using outbound marketing techniques.

The essence of creating a buzz is to get your name out there and your products. After you have identified your audience and you’ve seen the pain point you are trying to meet, you can employ a variety of paid ads on YouTube, Google, Meta, billboards, TV ads, etc., to reach your prospective clients.

Creating a buzz also entails identifying your competitors and pushing the value statement that puts you ahead of them. It also entails using user sentiments and needs to create trends.

4. Create the right marketing strategy

An effective marketing strategy will help you define your marketing campaign’s direction and goal. Creating an effective tactic is essential in articulating how to reach your targets and satisfy their needs.

Because marketing results don’t just happen, implementing the right marketing tactics that fit the specific target market is essential. Email marketing might do wonders for your brand, while creating a blog may not cut it. Essentially, tailor your marketing strategy to fit your customers, their preferred channel, and their pain points.

5. Optimise your content across board

To stay ahead of your competition, your content needs to be among the top responses and results potential users see when searching your keywords online. You need a strong content optimisation strategy to create and publish content for your desired customer profile. It is important because it proves essential in inbound marketing by improving your rank on search engines.

To do this, you need to find out what most users search for online and promote content in line with those searches. You can create strong landing pages or video blogs that answer questions about “how to use” your products.

Optimising your content online is not so difficult – here is a quick guide:

• Properly carry out your keyword research on words relating to the different aspects of your marketing funnel

• Group those searched keywords into your content pillars, and create blogs and posts on those themes.

• Look at other similar ranking contents and use benchmarks that they attained. These benchmarks include the length of those blog posts, the search intent, content format and type. These would inform your decision.

• Optimise your website pages, meta descriptions, page title, icons, and headlines.

• Add links to both external and internal websites to your page. These would help get more users to click through to conversion pages, further boosting the credibility of your page’s content. You can also add essential call-to-actions across your content.

6. Use proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools

A customer relationship management tool is a perfect addition to maintaining excellent relationships with your customers as it aids in customer retention.

With the right CRM tools, you can track their journey through your funnel – while keeping records of details and communication logs.

7. Track metrics through analytics

It’s not enough to create a marketing funnel. Putting the best use of the data generated from marketing into tracking results is critical in understanding customer behaviour.

It would also give more profound insight into areas that have performed well and those that need further reinforcements.

There’s no point in creating an effective marketing funnel if you do not track the growth changes and implement knowledge from these analytics. Now, what marketing funnel metrics should you measure:

Marketing funnel metrics you should measure

1. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

This measures the total value that a single customer adds to your brand or company.

This metric indicates your level of customer retention and is particularly important for businesses that employ recurring subscriptions for their customers. It also predicts the probability of a customer making other purchases.

2. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

This metric measures the total cost expended in acquiring each new client. It is a critical metric in analysing paid advertisement, growth, email marketing, social media, and other marketing platforms.

This value is obtained by dividing your marketing campaign’s total cost by the number of new customers. Once the cost per acquisition is lesser than the previous, it shows that the marketing campaign is economical.

3. Conversion rate per channel

All marketing campaign channels play different roles and should be analysed separately. Clearly defining each channel’s goal helps measure the conversion and success rate across each channel.

Wrapping Up

Most people do not buy products on their first interaction with them. It takes a journey from their first interaction to the eventual purchase (conversion). As such, it is crucial to map out an effective marketing funnel before the commencement of your campaigns so it gives you insights into customer behaviour and ultimately generates revenue for your brand.