What is a marketing funnel, how do I create one and how can I optimize it? Dive with me into the world of funnels and get inspired to build a marketing funnel or optimize existing ones.
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Definition of a marketing funnel
They are called marketing funnels because they contain fewer and fewer contacts over time. Not only because the contacts drop out of their own accord, but also because as a company we specifically screen them out. This is a controversial approach that is not always easy to understand at first. After all, we usually want as many contacts as possible.
However, it also makes sense from a business perspective to weed out contacts from a funnel. Because in this way we can ensure that we do not send irrelevant messages, resp. that we are not too pushy at the wrong moment and waste our resources.
The phases of a marketing funnel
The most common marketing funnel is divided into three phases: top, middle and bottom. Within these phases, however, there are other sub-phases to go into more detail.
Main part of the marketing funnel
In each of these phases, the potential customer has a different understanding of your brand or your offer and must be addressed differently accordingly.
Awareness
Your future customer gets to know your brand for the first time. The first touchpoint may be a social media post, a poster on public transit, or the person heard something about it from an acquaintance. This phase is about the first points of contact with your company.
Interest
After the first touch points, people inquire even more about what kind of brand it is. You read a blog post or research terms and topics you don’t yet understand. If he has already provided his contact information, he is a lead from now on.
Consideration
Your lead likes your offer more and more and informs himself further about the product, the service or your company. In this phase, people consider whether or not they want to buy this product or service at all. Here it does not yet matter for the lead which provider.
Intent
At this stage it becomes clear whether you want to buy or not.
Evaluation
With the evaluation, the lead now weighs where to buy. Competing products are contrasted and even compared in detail to find out which provider has the most suitable offer.
Purchase
In this final phase from potential customer to buyer, it is important that the buying process has as few hurdles as possible and that the buyer has a good feeling about the purchase.
Phases after the purchase
The ideal funnel is structured in such a way that your potential customers find all the information they need at every stage in your company and thus connect with your brand more than with the competitor’s brand. This increases the chance many times over that people will also buy from you.
From the moment of purchase, however, the marketing funnel is not yet complete. The existing customers have already been convinced by your company. Now it’s a matter of not letting those customers down and bringing more customers. There are phases in the marketing funnel that you can use as a guide for this as well.
Repurchase
After your customers have made a purchase, the next step is to turn them into repeat customers. This means improving customer loyalty and getting customers to make more and bigger purchases. In this phase you will work with the same measures as before in the Bottom of the Funnel.
Loyalty
In the loyalty phase, your customers develop a preference for your brand and begin to identify with it and personalize products. These individuals want to do more with the brand and want to get involved. Contribute to this motivation and build a community and promote engagement and discussion platforms.
Recommendation
If customers are loyal to your brand, they are more likely to make business referrals and recommend products or services from your company. Make sure the necessary platforms are in place and maintained for this as well. Testimonial and review sites are great for this. If you don’t have a Google Business profile yet, create one right now. After all, if a potential customer is in the middle of the funnel, good testimonials/reviews on such platforms can bring the decision to your company. Moreover, such reviews help in all stages of the funnel and should be integrated into the strategy in any case.
Fan (supporter)
Conversion into fans is the highest level a customer can reach. These advocates engage the most on community platforms and write the most reviews and reviews. The more advocates for your business that are on social media, the more potential customers will start organically with the first phase because they will connect with your brand faster. In the advocacy phase, supporters should therefore also be supported and rewarded with direct addresses and invitations to participate in case studies or surveys. Fans are especially happy when a company integrates them.
What other funnels are there?
There are several types of different funnels for a wide variety of applications. Here is an excerpt of known funnels:
- Lead Funnel
- Content Funnel
- Webinar Registration Funnel
- Onboarding Funnel
- Review Funnel
Or here are a few examples of specific funnels
- marketing funnel for social media
- marketing funnel for ecommerce
- marketing funnel for b2b
- marketing funnel for saas
- marketing funnel for websites
- marketing funnel for mobile apps
The beauty of funnels is that you can customize them and build them customized to your business. By far the best known is the Sales Funnel, but all of these funnels fall into the umbrella category of Marketing Funnel.
Difference Sales Funnel and Marketing Funnel
The Sales Funnel has a strong focus on sales, and from Middle of the Funnel aims to encourage purchases with short and clear messages, with the Marketing Funnel mapping the complete process. The sales funnel is therefore inevitably part of a complete marketing funnel.
The sales funnel is therefore the classic marketing funnel. With it, you’ll get more qualified leads, more closings, and more cross-selling and upselling. Just like in personal selling, potential customers who don’t know your company yet need a different approach than people who have been thinking about it for a while or who have already bought. People need to get to know your company first and build trust. In a sales funnel, you build that trust step by step.
This requires multiple touchpoints and multiple offers adapted to the level of trust. I.e. if at the beginning of the relationship the trust is still low, you ask for the email and only when the trust is high, the annual subscription is presented. In this article, we show you how to create a sales funnel.
What is the difference between a marketing funnel for B2B and B2C?
In truth, the marketing funnel for B2B and B2C are almost indistinguishable. The big differences are found in the behavior of the target groups. The buying process is much longer in B2B. That’s why you can expect these customers to spend a lot longer in the middle-of-the-funnel. Another difference is the number of people. In B2C, there is usually one person moving through your funnel. B2B, on the other hand, involves different people or even departments, all of whom have different requirements or ideas about what they want.
So you need to pay close attention to how the information is presented and what people might be involved in the buying process. A completely different important point is the interaction. Individual B2C customers interact mainly with the website or customer support. In B2B, your prospects will spend much longer talking and discussing with a sales person or other people in your company.
All these differences must be taken into account and adjusted accordingly if the funnel is to work.
Difference Customer Journey and Marketing Funnel
With the Customer Journey, we understand and define the journey of a customer. With a marketing funnel, we set the strategy. Or to put it another way: We use a marketing funnel to measure, control and optimize parts of the customer journey.
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Why does your business need a marketing funnel?
It’s highly unlikely that someone will come across your name, research everything you have to offer, and then immediately decide to buy your most expensive offering.
Actually, that almost never happens.
In order for customers to buy your products, they must first be convinced that they are making a good investment. They need to trust your business. You must feel that the risk is relatively low.
In short, they need to get to know your company and your offering through a process. They need to have different touchpoints (touch points) with you over time. You need to see consistent benefits over time.
And that’s exactly what a marketing funnel does.
It takes your customers from the point they first hear about your brand (for example, through your blog or an interview you gave on YouTube) through all the steps until they become regular buyers of your products.
What are the benefits of a marketing funnel?
The marketing funnel is a powerful tool to communicate with your prospects at every stage of the buying process. Whether you want to sell your products online, generate more traffic to your website or leads. For this and many other applications, you need a marketing funnel to efficiently achieve success. There are many reasons why a marketing funnel is a must. Here are the main advantages:
- The marketing funnel is measurable and thus helps you find out where you are losing customers.
- A marketing funnel increases your conversion rate because you can better sort out irrelevant traffic with a targeted funnel.
- Thanks to a marketing funnel, you can identify problems in the process or in your offer.
- You get to know your customers better and know better what the main motivation is to buy from you.
How do you create a marketing funnel?
As you already know, you can create a funnel, name it, and create a completely new and unprecedented marketing funnel. That’s why we’re going to get into the basics of how to create a funnel using the most popular phases of Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Bottom of the Funnel.
First, we’ll show you what’s important in each phase and what measures make sense in each phase. If you then want to create your own funnel you can choose as many of the measures from each phase as you like and build content on them. If you are completely new, I recommend you start with simple measures first.
Top of the Funnel
Destination from the Top of the Funnel
The first step of any funnel is traffic. You want to get lots of relevant traffic like in so you can fill the funnel with people who might be interested in your brand, product or service.
How do you measure top of the funnel success?
I’ll briefly explain the most important metrics for the ToFu here:
Sessions: The best way to measure the effective traffic on your website is sessions. Try to reach as many as possible.
Sessions with interaction: sessions alone are good to start with, but you want sessions, from people who will then also interact with the site. When you add in the Google Analytics metric sessions with interactions, you find out if you’re driving the right people to your website.
Users and new users: You want to constantly attract new people to your business. Use the two metrics “users” and “new users” to find out if you can do that.
Top of the Funnel Measures
You want to familiarize visitors with your brand, and for this stage you should also create content that is created just for this purpose. So make sure your Top of the Funnel measures always meet the following criteria:
- Free, so you don’t put a hurdle from the beginning.
- Educational so visitors see that you are generating value for them.
- Customized to your industry so you can also position yourself as an expert in the field.
The best ways to create your content for Top of the Funnel:
If you already have an address list of people interested in your topics, then that is always the easiest way to generate relevant traffic.
- Social media
Who doesn’t spend more time than necessary on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit or TikTok these days? This is exactly why social media is one of the best top of the funnel channels. Either you build your own community with followers, or you participate in existing communities in the form of groups.
- SEO
With search engine optimization, you can consistently generate traffic. Your business can become very successful simply with SEO. However, if you’re just starting out and need to achieve a lot of traffic quickly, then you’d better choose a different path. Depending on the industry, it can take a long time before you see results. So SEO is definitely recommended if you are aware that it simply takes for it.
- Online advertising
Used correctly, online advertising can work really well. Thanks to the advertising platforms of Google, Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn and Co. you can target your content more precisely than anywhere else (except possibly social media).
Middle of the Funnel
Destination from the Middle of the Funnel
A visitor has successfully passed through the Middle of the Funnel if they have provided their contact details. In other words, your goal at this stage is to generate a lead by providing at least the email address. After that you can nurture in and encourage to buy.
How do you measure Middle of the Funnel success?
Here’s how you can measure the success of the Top of the Funnel:
Number of email addresses: Your email list needs to grow so that you can maintain and inform these email addresses with more content. There is no better way to inform interested people about news. For this reason, this is an important metric for the Middle of the Funnel.
Session to Lead Conversion: you need to know how many conversions you have achieved in relation to sessions. This shows you how attractive your lead magnet is. Conversion here does not mean a purchase, but the provision of contact details. Therefore, configure your conversions accordingly.
Email open rate and click-through rate: Nurturing is a big part in the middle of the funnel and without email, it’s not automatic. The open and click-through rates show you how well the emails are performing.
Middle of the Funnel Measures
In order for you to convert visitors into leads and nurture, you need content that builds on the top of the funnel and is viewed as premium to visitors. This is the only way you can get them to provide their contact information.
So the content must meet the following:
- More valuable than the free content from the Top of the Funnel.
- Must build on the free content.
- The access is available only if the contact information is provided.
These contents and measures work particularly well
- Create PDF or eBook
Specific expert knowledge works very well as a lead magnet, provided they can actually offer added value.
- Free course
If your business can share knowledge and your customers are interested, a free course is an ideal way to generate relevant leads and build trust in your business. Such a course can come in different shapes and colors, but must be accessible behind a form so that you get the contact information for further nurturing. The beauty of this course is that you can already direct people to relevant products or services of yours in the course.
- Webinar
Like the free courses, the webinars are perfect for showing that your company is an expert in a specific area. The effort for a webinar is of course quite a bit higher than any other measure, but you can expect a higher session to lead conversion.
- Free version or pro version
If you have a software, you can offer a free version or a trial version of it. The perfect thing about this solution is that not only will you get leads relatively quickly, but you will also get feedback on the tool automatically. Besides, it is easier to decide in favor of a product if you have convinced yourself of it beforehand.
Bottom of the Funnel
Target from Bottom of the Funnel
In the final stage, the only goal is to get the lead to buy or buy again.
How do you measure bottom of the funnel success?
The Bottom of the Funnel is all about sales.
Turnover: Probably the most important is turnover. And the goal, of course, is for sales to increase steadily.
Number of new customers: This metric is also pretty clear. You want the number of your customers to grow steadily.
Customer Lifetime Value: You want to know how much money you make from each customer on average. With this number, you can better evaluate your measures and make decisions about them competently. If your CLV is e.g. CHF 500 and it costs you 600 to acquire a new customer, then you immediately see that you are losing money and urgently need to change your pricing or your measures.
Conversion rate: Money and new customers are important, without question. But the conversion gives you important information about whether your measures to convert a lead into a customer are working and the conversion rate allows you to make a simple comparison between measures.
Bottom of the Funnel Measures
At this point, you can assume that potential customers have gathered enough information to make a purchase decision. The measures should help in this decision that the choice falls on your offer.
- Scarce supply
Limit your products by availability or quantity to move the buying decision in your favor. This is a very common measure because it works very well in most cases. Give it a try and let us know how it worked in your Bottom of the Funnel.
- Offer packages
Take different products, put them in a package and sell that package for a lower price than if the visitor had to buy each product separately. The difficulty here clearly lies in the correct composition and presentation of the package. The visitor must understand that he is getting a much better deal if he buys the package.
Optimize marketing funnels
No matter if a funnel works less to well, better is always possible. There are quantitative and qualitative indicators along which we can optimize.
Key quantitative indicators
- Sessions and sessions with interactions, you get relevant traffic
- Conversion rate in the different phases
- Average Time to Buy, how long it takes from first contact to purchase
- Average time to churn, how long do customers stay with us?
- Average deal value, for how much do customers buy/order on average?
- Customer Lifetime Value overall
- Number of leads, customers in absolute figures
Key qualitative indicators
- Feedback and queries from contacts and customers
- Challenges in Sales Conversations
- Support request content
If your marketing funnel is built up with the different phases, I recommend that you also write down the indicators that are important for you for each phase. After you have collected data, you can then write the measurement data for each phase and quickly notice where you are losing the most contacts and where you need to optimize.
Sometimes the content is good, but the timing is not right. But it’s also possible that contacts will respond to your marketing efforts, but then not stay tuned. Then your offers or content don’t deliver what is promised. There are several reasons why people don’t jump from one phase to the next, and you can only find out if you compare the readings.
Typical approaches for the optimization of marketing funnels are
- Purposefully create more touchpoints to build more trust
- Run Campaignsometimes faster, sometimes slower, depending on the target group
- Constantly improve content quality, incorporate feedback directly
What are the biggest mistakes with marketing funnels
Plan marketing funnel beyond the target group
The problem is that the target group has not yet been sufficiently understood and/or recognized. For example, there are often some personas, but they are superficial and cannot be operationalized. That is, no meaningful Campaign can be derived from the general knowledge that exists.
Nobody wants that! Still, it happens and that’s okay. The important thing is that you realize this and act accordingly. If you find that your knowledge of the target audience is too general to create targeted content, here’s what you can do:
- Survey existing customers of the target group
- Start a general survey to get to know your target group better
- If all this does not work: Make assumptions and adjust them
Also, it often happens that simply what some tool or framework gives as a template is done. We are also constantly asked for templates for Campaign. Certain basics are known and you don’t have to keep reinventing them yourself. But, when it comes to filling the templates with the appropriate content, copying is not enough. And A/B testing on the off chance is inefficient. Here, a few critical questions about the target group and the value proposition must be answered so that the funnel can make any sense at all. Therefore, use templates more as inspiration or as a basis for your individual marketing funnel and don’t be afraid to do something different.
The marketing funnel leads nowhere
“We have leads lying around” is pretty much the most common and critical phrase in established companies. With start-ups, we also often hear “We try a lot, but it leads nowhere.”
On closer inspection, this is actually the case because the marketing funnel was not thought through and built to the end. For example, if you generate leads with a lot of effort via events and then they only get an impersonal follow-up and then nothing more, you have planned a few touchpoints too few. Or, leads are collected at various points with unrelated content and then not subdivided in a meaningful way or with impersonal content in an attempt to move contacts to the next stage of the funnel. Then you didn’t go into enough detail with your measures and Campaign.
This is what happens when you market “opportunistically” and don’t have a clear strategy. Many of these opportunities then peter out. Therefore, better to do one strategy right than five opportunities half-heartedly.
Pains and gains in the marketing funnel are not balanced
What does that even mean? People move when something bothers them, they want to change something, and/or when something great beckons. When there is suffering, we look for relief, a painkiller. When we see something desirable in front of us, we want it.
In the funnel, the Pains and Gains are addressed and linked to corresponding offers – ideally. Because again, if you try to solve problems that a contact doesn’t even have or constantly offer things that a contact doesn’t even want, you can miss the point of communicating.
Besides, we humans react critically, even dismissively, when we are told all the time that we have a problem. On the other hand, we also fade out at some point when something exaggeratedly great is held up in front of our noses all the time.
There are simple rules of thumb to avoid becoming a prophet without disciples in the funnel: Don’t overdo it, listen in between. Yes, the problem should be addressed and may also be examined from a few sides. And yes, presenting a few highlights from the offering as Gains is important too. But if you don’t get a response, it’s better to just ask, e.g. with a short feedback form, to check if what you’re offering is relevant at all.
Summary
No matter what you’re trying to sell, a marketing funnel gives structure to your strategy and helps you better understand your prospects. Create a funnel per customer profile and you’ll see that it’s instantly easier to decide what content you need and how to deliver that content to your customers. If you don’t overthink the funnel and keep it simple, you’ll add a powerful tool to your marketing toolbox.
