Marketing Funnels: Why they Matter and How to Build Yours
Marketing Funnels: Why they Matter and How to Build Yours
Marketing funnels are the best way to build an engaging journey for your customer. Here’s how to build and optimize your own funnel!
By definition, marketing funnel is a series of designed stages that guides prospective customers through first contact of a brand to the actual purchase of the product or service. The funnel is the best tool available to marketing teams to convert leads to sales over time. It also works to attract, engage, and retain prospects using content and other marketing materials (ads, emails, landing pages).
Companies design marketing funnels to understand and meet their customer needs at every stage of interaction with their business. Funnels can also provide valuable data about a target audience and their preferred goods/services, methods of communication, and typical buyer journey.
Table of Contents
Why are Marketing Funnels Important?
- Develops a big-picture marketing strategy that is efficient and effective
- Keeps marketing teams consistent and clear in messaging
- Increases overall sales
- Provides insight into a buyer’s journey
- Saves time and effort with content creation
- Predicts future sales or effective marketing campaign strategies
- Helps retain customers over the long-term
- Can be analyzed and optimized over time
Do you need a B2B or B2C Funnel?
In contrast, a B2B funnel must consider many more decision-makers and a much longer sales process (weeks or months). Content should be designed to engage stakeholders over the long-term and should target rational thinking. B2B funnels also often benefit from a real-person touchpoint such as a sales call or “hard sell” pitches toward the end of the funnel.
Let’s Build Your Marketing Funnel!
Develop a Buyer Persona
This is where you get to know your audience. Use any insights and data at your disposal to really construct a full buyer persona. This piece of funnel development is critical to understand how to target, reach, and communicate with your audience in the ways that interest them most. Without the proper marketing and communications tactics, your funnel cannot succeed.
Consider Your Buyer’s Journey
Try to understand how your target audience will find and interact with your brand. What doubts and problems might they encounter on their buying journey? Answer this question, and you can begin to optimize your funnel before construction!
Consider the Number of Stages in the Funnel
How many touchpoints are necessary for your marketing funnel? What kind of content will you create for the start of your buyer’s journey? What kind of content will come toward the end? For example, a buyer may find a paid social media ad that features your product.
This social media ad may focus mainly on education or showcasing the product engagingly. Once the user clicks through the ad, they may be redirected to a landing page that is more persuasive in terms of sales jargon. Perhaps the landing page offers similar suggested products to add to their cart.
It may also include an email newsletter subscription for a 10% off discount code (and to ensure longevity as a customer). Consider the steps that you want to include in your sales funnel from start to finish… and beyond, if you’re looking for repeat purchases!
Research Effective Marketing Tactics
Don’t just add stages to your funnel because you think more is better. Hone in on the efficient and effective marketing tactics that you and your current team can execute. Over time, you can use the analytics from your funnel to double down on the tactics that work and pull back on the ones that don’t.
This is more for a B2B funnel, but a CRM system is a great way to keep track of sales interactions with your leads. It can also help document your buyer’s journey and assist you with automating more pieces of your funnel over time.
Optimize for High-Conversions
As with anything in marketing, your marketing funnel does not have to be perfect prior to launch. It could even be broken! What matters is that you monitor the funnel efficacy over the next few weeks (or months) and return to optimize your funnel for a higher conversion rate. The more that you fine-tune your marketing funnel, the more success you will see in conversions and total sales for your business!
Conclusion
Marketing Takeaways? If you build a funnel… they will come.
Do not underestimate the work that it takes to create an effective marketing funnel! There are loads of questions and unknowns that marketing teams should take into consideration.
However, the sales and automation that a well-designed marketing funnel can bring to a business is invaluable. Creating a marketing funnel is one of the best things that a company can do to drive business, meet goals, and continue to grow over time.
To read more about Customer Segmentation, check out Customer Segmentation: Get to Know and Engage with Your Audience article.
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