A marketing funnel is simply a framework in which we define how a customer is introduced to the brand and how they will become a loyal paying customer.

The marketing funnel shows step by step process of how a customer is introduced to a certain product or a service and how they become a paying customer. Normally there are many ways to create a marketing funnel (depending upon the company’s requirements) but today we going to focus on 4 stage marketing funnel:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty

Benefits of a Marketing Funnel

Understanding the Buyers’ Journey

What do people think about your brand when they first visit it? What experience do they feel while going through the process and what do they do after they experience your brand’s first image? These questions will help you understand your customer’s experience with your brand and enable you to devise strategies accordingly.

Optimizing your Marketing Strategy

All marketing strategies have room for improvement and marketing funnels help in continuously improvising your strategies. For example, the graphics of our ad (display ad) is not likable by many people or the design aspect is good but the content is ambiguous. Sometimes the design and content are great but when a customer clicks your ad and comes to your website they suddenly decide to leave your web store because your website loading time is too long or they are unable to find the desired product which they clicked on.

Increase the Conversion Rate

Marketing funnels help you in increasing your conversion rate by figuring out what is missing and what can be done. For example, 100 people come to your web page by looking at your ads. Out of those 100 people, only 1 person buys your product. This means that your conversion rate is only 1%. This clearly shows that we need to optimize our strategy to increase our conversion ratio.

How a Business Creates Awareness for Their Products

Awareness Stage
Many businesses use organic and inorganic means of marketing to generate awareness about their products or services. When a potential customer becomes aware of the product or service they become aware of your brand. This is the first time a potential customer is getting to know you.

As it said, the first impression is the last impression hence, we want to give our best shot. Here the customer will make up their mind whether they want to trust this brand or not. If the answer is yes then your efforts will bring results and if the answer is no then you need to work on improvising your campaign with more insights in hand.

Now the next question you may be having is how to create awareness strategies and tactics. Below are some of the tactics you can start with.

• Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Video Marketing

By implementing any of these strategies you can reach out to your potential customers to generate awareness about your product and services.

Practical Examples of Awareness Tactics

Let’s imagine we have a brand that is selling online watches. Now we will try to implement all tactics mentioned above so we can introduce our brand to new customers.

Search Engine Optimization

The first thing that we need to do is identify which keywords have the maximum search volume. By identifying the right keywords the next step is adding content to our website that can cater to all the related queries. By ranking our website higher on Google Search Engine we can introduce our brand to all those potential customers who are searching for products or services like the ones we are offering.

This way we are reaching out to new people continuously and generating more and more awareness for our brand.

Search Engine Marketing

We are doing SEO but it is nearly impossible for us to rank our website on the first page of SERP initially. So, what we are going to do? Should we wait for six months to one year so our website can appear on the first page? The simple answer is NO. We will run SEM campaigns on Google by placing paid advertisements on Google. SEM gives us the boost to appear on the first page of Google and most importantly in front of potential customers who are searching for our products. In the meantime, we will continue doing SEO of our website as well.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is all about creating your presence across famous social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. How do we do it? Suppose we already have social media accounts set up and we are posting general stuff. This only engages either our existing customers or very few new customers. What we are going to do now is capture new and high-quality pics of our watches and post them online. Those pictures show the practicality of our watch.

For example, a model is wearing our watches and promotes time management. Once we create such engaging content the next step is to run paid ads across all the platforms. By doing so we are reaching out to all those people who recently searched for online watches or best batches. Our paid ads will appear in potential customers’ search feeds multiple times and maybe by looking at our ads twice or thrice. Once they click on our ad they will be redirected to our website page where they can either pay or book an order right away.

Content Marketing

Content marketing includes writing blogs, research papers, or talking about innovations. As our brand is selling online watches so we will add multiple blogs to our website. For example, we will write about who invented the first watch. What is the future of watches or anything like that? Just make sure our content should be unique, to the point, and engages the reader’s attention.

Influencer Marketing

Many brands hire celebrities or vloggers to promote their products or services. For our fictional online watches brand, we will hire 3 or 4 influencers and ask them to make a 1 min video. In this video, influencers will share their experience with our watch in terms of quality, pricing, and useability. On top of it, they are encouraging their followers to try our watches and follow our brand. Ultimately what we are achieving are new customers and a great awareness campaign.

Video Ads

Many people confuse video marketing or do not even try to do it. We encourage you to do it even if it is just a very basic video. For our online watches business, our strategy should be reaching out to our existing customers and asking them to share their experience with our product in 30 seconds or so. If they have any emotional attachment with our product then that is something we will be running ads on. For example, a person gifts a watch to his wife and they loved it. A dad buys a watch for her daughter on her first day of school. Stories like these, if incorporated into a marketing campaign, can generate 10 times more conversions than our regular marketing campaigns.