For any business to get attention and ensure a strong market presence, it is important to do marketing. Be it digital marketing practice or the traditional ones, both hold equal importance, and businesses need to strategically focus on both. It also won’t be wrong to say that the success of brands mostly depends upon their marketing strategies and the way they react to those.
When it comes to marketing, one of the key things everyone should know is the ‘marketing funnel.’ Every business needs to follow this funnel to ensure effective marketing and optimize only required strategies later on. Marketing funnel gives businesses the liberty to individually manage each step and check their progress. In this way, it will become easy to identify what is going wrong and what is hitting the right spot with their marketing tactics.
This post will tell you about marketing funnel and what role it plays in defining success. Let us see what it is.
What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a system through which every customer passes from knowing your product to buying it. This funnel comprises a series of steps that hold equal relevance and helps businesses identify at which stage the maximum people end their interaction with your products or services. The reason why it is known as a funnel is that a huge number of people enter it from the top but only a small percentage of them make it to the end-stage.
Each marketing funnel has these four basic stages:
- Attention
- Interest
- Consideration
- Action
Attention
The first stage of the marketing funnel is to attract people towards your product. People need the products or services that you offer will search for it, and you need to ensure that your brand encounters them. If they are not visible in their search results, you will be out directly from the first stage. Thus, it is important for you to take every necessary step in order to make your brand visible in people’s search, and that could happen with your effective marketing strategies.
Interest
When you successfully get the attention of people towards your brand, its time is to create interest in the product. For that, you need to give them an offer that is better than your competitors and show the quality your products or services have. If you keep things as they are and don’t do anything to differentiate your brand from others, then people will prefer your competitors or the one that they normally choose. Thus, it is necessary to tempt them and show that you are better.
Consideration
The third step of the marketing funnel is to ensure that people are considering what you offer. If they don’t, how will you promote sales? Thus, here you need to tell people that your products/services can solve their problem the best than any other products could. You need to create trust in your products by ensuring that they are of better quality. Wherever possible try to give a live example as it will make their consideration to buy your product stronger.
Action
It is the last stage of the marketing funnel where people are convinced that your brand or product is best for them or better than others. Thus, they make the final decision of buying the product.
Remember, the action will completely depend upon the efforts made during the first three stages of the marketing funnel. If you want the action of most of the people to be in your favor, then you need to attract and convince them through the right means & tactics.
Each of the stages of this marketing funnel has its own purpose and makes your work easier in the long run as well. Thus, every business must create strategies for all stages individually and make the same efforts to achieve success.
What is the need to have a marketing funnel?
It doesn’t matter what you do, having a strategic approach always helps. It not only improves the result but also assists in effective planning. Same is the case with your marketing efforts, having a market funnel will help you out analyze each stage and find from where you are losing your customers.
In other words, we could say that the marketing funnel organizes all our marketing activities and ensures that all the activities are implemented correctly. With the use of a funnel, you need to make the process of driving customers to the sales smooth. For that, you need to provide the information about your products and brand in the simplest, yet interesting way. Because, that’s how people will get attracted, and another way to grab their attention is to be genuine with whatever you say and ensure transparency with what you offer.
If you don’t work according to the marketing funnel, it will make it almost impossible for you to decide where you are lacking and what you need to improve. In that scenario, you might need to work from the start again and that is something no one wants.
Benefits of having a marketing funnel
Businesses that use marketing funnel effectively have an added advantage over those who do not. Let us take a look at some of the key benefits a marketing funnel provides:
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Increased sales
Marketing funnel allows businesses to personally monitor people who opt out of buying your product at the last stage. Thus, it helps retarget them by sending personalized emails, discount offers, and other tempting messages. Considering this helps in improving sales. Plus, through effective use of marketing funnel, one can also maintain good relationships with the customers by giving exclusive offers and even freebies.
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Get insights of lead’s behavior
The marketing funnel helps analyze how people are reacting to your products. Whether they are comparing it with others, looking multiple times, and then going back, leaving them abandoned in the cart, etc. Getting such insights are helpful for the sales team to close the leads by giving what they need. That could be free delivery, extra discount, or even an extended warranty.
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Improves brand awareness
The use of marketing funnel ensures that the audience is encountering your brand multiple times and this has the highest chances of getting improved brand awareness. If a person sees a brand multiple times on different channels or even a single channel, it creates trust for that brand. This is human nature, what we see everywhere is of good quality for most of us and we tend to give that product a try. Now, if the experience with that product is great, the person will eventually start considering that brand.
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Easy problem identification
As we are saying it again and again that having a marketing funnel in place helps businesses hit the right spot to see exactly where they are doing wrong. Thus, by identifying the actual cause, businesses can optimize that strategy to get good results. This way, their entire marketing process remains intact as only the required one gets changed. This is not possible without having a marketing funnel in place because all your activities will be unorganized and it will be difficult for you to find the cause that lets you down.
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Reduced errors
Most marketing funnels are automated; thus, the chances of errors are reduced to a minimum. With less to no errors, the marketing process can run smoothly and give better results. Minimum errors also reduce unnecessary losses and expenditure.
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Time-saving
As marketing funnel can be automated, it saves a lot of time and effort in processing it. It automatically tells how many visitors end up moving out at which stage. Thus, that gives an idea of how impactful your marketing strategies are and where you need to work harder. It collects and offers a detailed report of the interaction of people with your brand, and for that, no human intervention is required.
Conclusion
Marketing for every business is a primary requirement to bring their brand in front of a huge audience because that’s how they will get recognition. How effective your marketing is, decides the kind of attention your brand gets. The theory is simple, if your marketing strategies are not good enough to get the attention, you won’t be able to get success.
To make sure that your marketing tactics work the way you have thought of, it is important for you to use a structured approach, and that is a marketing funnel. It helps to keep everything organized and ensures that you go step by step to see how people are moving towards buying your product. If anything goes wrong, you can easily pick the correct step and optimize accordingly to make things right. Plus, it has a lot more benefits that we have discussed in this post.
We hope, that it would have given you an idea of what marketing funnel is and how important it is to move ahead focusing your goals. It has also covered the benefits of implementing marketing funnel to your entire marketing strategy. So, consider it to a good effect and see how things improve.