A marketing funnel is a tool that helps you visualize your customer journey, it contains all the stages that the prospect customers take in order to become a loyal buyer.
Through these stages, you will be able to develop a strategy to capture prospect customers and persuade them to take action to become loyal to your brand.
The traditional funnel used to end when the purchase action was taken. However the customer relationship should never end, You will always have to make sure that your customers are satisfied with your product/service and they’re willing to make another purchase or to recommend your brand to their friends and surrounding so you’ll have word of mouth and add new prospects to your funnel.
Marketing funnel stages
There’re 5 stages in the marketing funnel
- The first stage is Awareness, in order to get your customers to notice your brand you should create a marketing campaign to talk with your prospects about their exact problem. When you understand your brand: what is it, what it does, who is it for, and why is it important. You will be able to develop a clear message to introduce this brand to your prospects. In this stage, you have to choose your awareness tools like where your ads will be on, how it should look like and what it should say. You have to choose your catching phrase so your targeted prospects get curious to know more.
- The second stage is the Consideration. In this stage, you have to work on the content to reach your prospect target. It shouldn’t be a sales content rather it should contain information and value to build a need on why your prospect should consider buying this product/service. Offer your specific product/service as a tailored solution to your subscribers in order to start building a customer relationship.
- The third stage is Conversion, here you will have to take the lead. You have to state your benefits clearly and add a call to action button. In this stage, you want to make sales and in order to do that, the purchase journey should be easy and friendly to use. After the prospects learned about your brand they might consider making a purchase, so you will tell them what they should do to get your product/service. Explain the steps clearly on where they should click to buy, clarify why they shouldn’t waste time to look for an alternative brand, stimulate them to take action immediately and you might even add a discount to make sure they end up buying your product/service.
Doing the math you should have a clear number of how many prospects you had and how many of them end up being buyers at the end of stage three. By calculating the number of visitors or number of clicks you got after the awareness stage and comparing it with the numbers of purchases or orders you got.
The funnel doesn’t end here, it continues to make sure that those who bought from you will still be part of your brand.
- The fourth stage is Loyalty, once you have customers that don’t mean you should stop communicating with them. Keep on adding values to your subscribers, give them valuable information, and provide tips.
- The fifth and last stage is Advocacy, turn your customers into fans. You can always benefit from your customers to gain new prospects, by making them a part of your campaign. To do so, you should collect feedback and take into consideration everything your customers are telling you about. Remember that your fans know you better and know how to present you to their surroundings, so you should give them the chance to prove their loyalty. Ask them to tag, mention and share your content. Ask them to send you pictures of their experience while using your product/service.
This stage is the most important one to maintain your growth in the market.
To calculate how many prospects you might get from your fans, consider making a survey to know how your new prospects heard about you. So you can add the number to your funnel and know what strategy to use next.
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