Author: Maria

A marketing funnel system helps you track the steps prospects take to buy your product.  Increasing conversion rate which is turning them from prospects to buyers is not easy. Besides when marketers blend marketing funnel with paid advertising, lose some money.

Different marketing funnels have evolved over the years. However, a typical marketing funnel should move through awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. When using the marketing funnel every marketer should have the purchasing in mind at the final goal. All these strategies go hand in hand.

AWARENESS  This is the first in the hierarchy. It involves branding and advertisement. Prospects become interested in your product or service.  This is the start of moving in the marketing funnel through marketing campaigns.

When the prospect becomes aware of the existence of a product or service through an adequate awareness campaign, s/he becomes interested in whatever you are selling. Only the most interested ones will move further down your funnel. Marketers can increase leads through content that is focused on industries and brands, classes, newsletters, and more.

CONSIDERATION

At this stage, the prospect does some research about your product or service for example: online reviews, asks for opinion from your earlier buyers who have already purchased your product or service. Here, your prospect needs more information about the product s/he intends to buy. This is why in digital marketing we run social media campaigns for our customers in order to increase awareness about their products or services. It will be easier for prospects to make their decisions.

INTENT

In the intent stage, prospects demonstrate that they are genuinely interested in buying. Potential customers develop intent to buy a product in a survey. This is an opportunity for marketers to show why their product is the best choice for the customer.

EVALUATION

In the evaluation stage, prospects make their final decisions. Here the company should work hard to positively influence a prospect’s buyer decision.

PURCHASE

This is the final stage in the hierarchy. Here you have finally turned the prospect to a buyer. The targeted client is happy with the information provided and decided to buy your product or service. After purchasing, it is advisable to build a provider-customer relationship in such case you won’t be needing to ask for review. Your happy buyer will write review for you if customer forgets, just send him/her a reminder. They usually write reviews and recommendations for you. For example in my business, I pay less for paid advertising, because my clients refer me to other people who need my services. Positive reviews for your business helps with sales.

BENEFITS OF USING THE MARKETING FUNNEL

Increase Sales

Marketing funnel helps with sales. It makes prospects become interested in your product or service. You can track your revenue using the marketing funnel and predict the amount of profit you can make from a particular customer buying a particular product.

Predicts sale

With the marketing funnel, marketers and business owners can predict sales by tracking the prospects that showed interest in your product. This is the most tricky part or marketing funnel. Today marketers use both organic (SEO and social media marketing) and paid marketing ( Google Adwords PPC, Facebook PPC etc.) strategies.

Outshine your competitors

Adequate knowledge of marketers makes you stay one-step ahead of your competitors. When your competitors are chasing blindly for having a fore hand tool that will let you know if you are getting along with your customer or not.

Customer tracking

You can track your potential customer or prospects to see if they are actually interested in the product or not. Marketing funnels give brands insight of how the potential customer acts so that they can act on those opportunities.

Get product statistic

You can predict if a product or service sells or not. In case if it does not sell in a local market, then you should find a marketing strategy that helps with sales.

REDUCING ADVERTISING COST WITH MARKETING FUNNEL 

For companies on low budget, advertising is costly. Here are some suggestions for you to implement in your marketing campaign in order to reduce cost:

• • Content Marketing: A strategic content marketing campaign increases your brand awareness.
  • Lead generation: Offer free ebook related to your product via email marketing and social media in order to capture leads
  • Video marketing: Create informational Videos related to your product or service. This helps with branding.
  • Social media marketing: Market your product /service on social media and promote similar products. This way leads will become attracted to your business.
  • podcasts: Podcasts are great way of promotion
  • Expert roundup: By providing expert roundups related to target product, you will attract prospects. Make a short list up to 20 people in your roundup. Then promote it on social media.( Read more: tips on expert roundup )

• Create surveys: By creating surveys you will understand potential buyers’ need related to product.

In marketing communication we use five strategies such as: external marketing, internal marketing, guerrilla marketing, community outreach and corporate outreach. You have to find out the type of demand in the market then create marketing strategy around it especially when you plan to go big and enter the new market. I usually lay out a strategy for ecommerce companies who wish to become the market leader within their niche. Reducing advertising costs is mainly done through content marketing.

In content marketing your funnel will be the following:

Top funneL: Creating an article, infographic and blog post

Middle funnel: creating webinars and whitepapers

End funnel: case studies, reviews, videos and testimonials

Then we move on to sales funnel marketing. For example out of 1000 leads maybe 100 of them will be qualified to convert and out of 100, maybe 10 people buy your product. You can certainly automate the processes with Artificial intelligence (AI). I explained in my book (The future of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing).