What is a funnel? Main strategies out there today for digital businesses
Research shows that over 37% of digital marketers find it challenging to implement a successful funnel marketing strategy. According to Salesforce, about 68% of businesses fail to measure and evaluate their sales funnels, leading to reduced conversions and decreased return on investments (ROIs).
A survey conducted by Hubspot highlights that funnel marketing is an effective strategy for lead conversion. Researchers conclude that 69% of businesses and digital marketers believe that funnel evaluation is essential for lead conversion. Another study shows that about 44% of companies give up on their marketing strategies after one rejection.
These stats show why companies and marketers should focus on their funnel marketing strategies for higher productivity, increased conversions, and improved ROIs. The funnel is an essential marketing concept that involves three stages:
Generate Awareness
Nurture Potential Customers
Turn prospects into spending customers
In today’s article, we will discuss funnel marketing and essential strategies that companies can implement to streamline their business operations. Read on!
Funnel Marketing
The funnel focuses on your customer journey, ranging from brand awareness, prospective customer engagement to conversions. While each customer has a different journey, funnel marketing requires you to break it down into the following stages:
Discovery: Your target audience becomes aware of your business or brand.
Interest: Your potential audience or customers engage with your business through your website, social media, and other platforms.
Intent: Potential customers take an interest in your business offerings, such as spending more time on your website, downloading free resources, or placing items in the shopping cart.
Conversion: It occurs when a prospect completes the action, thus converting into a qualified sales lead or customer.
Loyalty: Customers who like your products or services become your repeat customers and encourage others to purchase your products via word-of-mouth marketing.
Bear in mind that funnel marketing focuses on three crucial elements: Attract, Convert, and Grow. Attract refers to running campaigns toward the top of your funnel by driving awareness and developing a steady stream of new potential customers.
Convert and Grow refer to running campaigns towards the bottom of your funnel. It requires you to encourage prospects to complete the desired action. Conversion is the most challenging funnel marketing stage because it requires you to make substantial efforts to retain customers over time.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Funnel Marketing
Top of Funnel (TOFU)
Optimize your business website for new visitors with KPIs, such as:
Quality of new visitors
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
Number of conversions
Lifts on retargeting
Middle of Funnel (MOFU)
Optimize your conversions using the following KPIs:
Return on Investments (ROIs)
CPA
Number of closed deals
View-through-Conversions (VTCs)
Grow Stage
Optimize your customer retention in the funnel via the following KPIs:
ROI
CPA
LTV
VTC
Flywheel Marketing
Flywheel marketing goes side-by-side with funnel marketing, but they are still different. Unlike the funnel that follows a top-to-bottom approach, flywheel marketing is circular, meaning it does not focus on a linear model.
Attract, engage, and delight are three stages of flywheel marketing. Marketers consider other factors, such as content creation, social media promotion, content marketing, etc., to push their flywheel marketing initially. Let us now talk about flywheel marketing phases. Keep reading!
Attract Phase
The attract phase requires you to grab the attention of your target audience. You can use content marketing, search engine optimization, and social media to drive traffic to your business website. That way, your potential customers will know about your business, products, services, and value you offer.
Engage Phase
Although the “engage” is a challenging phase, you can overcome difficulties and streamline the entire process if you implement the right strategies. During the engage phase, you have to close deals, get leads, and perform other necessary actions.
Make sure your prospects start purchasing your products or services and engage with your content. However, the challenge is to understand the factors that make the purchasing process easier for your buyers or become leads. You can minimize the challenge by providing enough valuable and relevant content to your target audience.
Likewise, your business website should be user-friendly, responsive, and easy-to-navigate. Implement a two-way communication system by employing a state-of-the-art customer support service. Increase the steps needed by your buyers to close the deal. These include:
Signups
Email confirmations
Product pages
Cart page
Checkout page
One-time password (OTP) verification
Delight Phase
The delight phase is the main difference between flywheel marketing and funnel marketing strategies. Instead of focusing on creating better products, we recommend you focus on delighting your customers. We think this is a much better approach to achieve a better product-market fit, increase your sales, and boost your overall ROIs.
Delight refers to focusing on the customer experience. The purpose is to make them happy to do the word-of-mouth marketing for your company and bring more customers. Remember, flywheel marketing is a customer-oriented approach that focuses more on word-of-mouth. When you retain your existing customers and get new ones through them, it means your flywheel marketing is successful.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing campaigns focus on more conventional marketing and advertising strategies, such as direct paper mail, cold calling, TV or radio ads, sales flyers, telemarketing, etc.
Besides, the outbound marketing approach allows you to reach your customers via media ads, in-person contact, including trade shows and face-to-face meetings, etc., or impersonal methods, such as blanket emails and cold calling.
These strategies are effective in generating leads and sales. Once your business becomes more established through outbound marketing, you can focus on online marketing strategies, such as SEO, social media, email marketing, etc.
If you want to streamline your business operations and increase your ROIs, focus on outbound marketing because it offers you a jump-start before you drive into online marketing.
Inbound Marketing
According to Statista, over 4.5 billion people use the internet across the globe, and about 4.32 billion users perform online activities through mobile devices. Inbound marketing is an umbrella term for different digital marketing strategies and channels, focusing on creating valuable content to target and attract your potential audience and prospective leads.
The strategy involves creating and running marketing campaigns through different digital channels, such as social media, SEO, content marketing, SMS, and email marketing. Inbound marketing consists of, but is not limited to:
Social media platforms
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube
Pinterest
Twitter
LinkedIn
SEO
E-Books
E-newsletters
Podcasts & Videos
Blogs
Whitepapers
Inbound marketing is an excellent way to attract potential customers through organic search. The purpose is to push-start your funnel “attract” phase and take a step forward toward the “convert and grow” stages. Here are a few practical ways to get started:
Create a Blog
Create valuable, relevant, and long blog posts using long-tail keywords. Use different keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs, Google keyword finder, and others to find low-to-medium competition keywords. Apply on-page and off-page SEO techniques to achieve higher rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Create Free e-Books
Creating eBooks and whitepapers on subjects or topics relevant to your product or services is a helpful way to engage your prospective customers. Make sure you use long-tail keywords to help your audience find you. Post your eBooks and white papers on your website, blog, and include links on social media pages.
Use Attractive Landing Pages
Use landing pages for your potential customers to sign up or subscribe for free products. These include eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, tip sheets, infographics, etc. Make sure you have an engaging description on the landing page followed by a signup form.
You can email your customers free items after they input their names and emails. Remember, this is a practical approach to collect emails and contact with your audience in the future.
Final Words
Funnel marketing is one of the most challenging tasks for businesses and marketers. However, if you remain focused and work diligently, you can achieve your goals. It is crucial to implement the strategies given above to optimize your funnel and flywheel. That way, you can achieve your marketing objectives, retain existing customers, and attract new ones, leading to improved ROIs.
