Understanding the Marketing Funnel: A Comprehensive Guide to Attract, Engage, Convert and Retain Customers
A marketing funnel shows the way a potential customer goes from becoming aware of a brand to actually purchasing their goods or services. This model involves several stages of customer engagement with a brand.
Creating and sticking to a well-constructed marketing funnel means ALL of your marketing efforts are working in unison. The goal of a solid funnel is to guide potential customers from one stage to the next.
AWARENESS
Awareness is located at the top of the marketing funnel. This is where customers first learn about a brand.
How do we generate awareness?
Post on social media
Highlight the features and benefits of your products.
Introduce the brand’s owner.
Show your audience behind the scenes (warehouse tour / introduce staff members / day in the life).
PR
Reach out to magazines, news stations (online as well as TV) and SELL yourself AND your business.
Generate reviews from trusted sources - eg beauty influencers.
Influencers
If you’re a small business that is in the beginning stages of creating a business, it’s more important to leverage ‘micro’ influencers (with around 2k to 10k followers) than it is to pay for one HUGE name.
Influencers work in many ways - they not only will hopefully drive immediate revenue for your brand, but they will provide you with content to use as well. This is why leveraging micro influencers is even more important - they’ll provide many pieces of content for you to use.
Ensure you are picking the RIGHT influencer for your brand. Ideally, an influencer growing in popularity, relevant to your brand, but even more importantly, one who has a good engagement rate. We always recommend checking the engagement rate of the influencer you’re thinking of using. A tool like Social Blade is great for this!
Competitions
Who doesn’t love a chance to win? Competitions are such a valuable way to grow your brand. There are so many different ways to do this and competitions have more benefits than just awareness - they’re great to help grow your remarketing audiences too. Here are a few of the teams favourite competitions for some inspiration:
Comment to Win Competition - Encourage people to comment on a social media post to win a prize pack. This helps the algorithm to know that your page is one that people want to engage with, which helps it to push your content even further. By stipulating that people must follow your page to win means that you’ll also grow your following as well.
Countdown Competition - This is perfect when you have a sale or launch coming. On Instagram, you can add a sticker that counts down to your chosen time. Encouraging people to click ‘remind me’ and then share the timer means that not only will they be reminded but their followers will hear about it as well.
Win Your Wishlist Competition - By getting people to add their wishlist to cart and sharing a picture in the comments, we have a two prong strategy. First, engagement of course! Secondly, you’re building up those remarketing audiences and fuelling that funnel.
*Always try to make the competition focused on YOUR product or offering (rather than a Gucci bag etc) so you know that everyone who is entering is actually interested in your brand and will enjoy your content post competition.
CONSIDERATION
In the consideration stage of the marketing funnel, your potential customer is looking at the different products/services available to them to address their needs. It’s now our job to convince them that a product like ours is the BEST solution to their problems.
How do we do this?
Highlight the features / benefits of the product
Personalisation services (a nice added extra that creates a point of difference)
Show the price (if it is competitive)
Make the product seem like it’s the most popular / on trend in the market
Include reviews of the product (this builds trust)
CONVERSION
Ever left something in your cart and received an email about it a day after? That’s what entering the conversion / intent stage feels like.
Potential customers move to the intent stage once they demonstrate a clear intent to purchase a product, such as by going to the store’s website or adding an item to their shopping cart. This doesn’t mean that they are going immediately, but it does indicate they are ready to purchase.
With that in mind, the conversion stage is the time to prove why our offering is the number one option for the potential customer. We’ll need to target them with ads and content that really prove WHY our product is better than our competitors.
How do we do this?
Offer ‘Free Shipping’
10% off if you buy before X date
Encourage the use of AfterPay / Laybuy
Remarketing (show ads over and over - high frequency)
LOYALTY
At the loyalty stage of the funnel you’re now trying to reach out to ‘current customers’. It’s easier to reconvert someone who has purchased from you previously than to begin the awareness, consideration and conversion stage of the funnel again. This group of people is smaller than the three previous stages of the funnel, but it’s still very profitable.
How do we encourage repeat purchases?
Loyalty program (buy 2 and get the 3rd item free)
20% off your next purchase
Review our product for 10% off
Send emails to remind them about your product
Serve ads / send emails when they’re most likely to be almost finished their current purchase
ADVOCACY
Advocacy happens when your customers become something more than just customers: they become fans. Fans are usually so excited about something that they tell their friends and family all about it, they share positive reviews on social media, and they might even try to convince others to become fans as well. This is by far the hardest part of the funnel to pull off. If brands can pull off ‘advocacy’ then it is easier to take their business to the next level. It’s much more convincing for people to advertise for you rather than seeing an ad from a company.
How do we do this?
Encourage reviews on social media
Create a unique, quirky hashtag and encourage people to use it when posting about the brand online
Post in Facebook groups about the product / service
You’re now across the ins and outs of a marketing funnel. Now it’s time to construct your own OR if you’d rather hand it over to the professionals, The Social Lab specialises in constructing sophisticated ad funnels to encourage a high clickthrough rate, increase average order value and maximise conversion rate. We've worked with businesses across the globe, generated over $400 million NZD for our clients and currently manage a portfolio with one of the highest Facebook and Instagram ad spends in Asia Pacific ($20 million in the past year alone).