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The Marketing Funnel
· 7 min read ·
A user’s interaction with a company and it’s product is like a journey with milestones. Each milestone brings the user a little closer to the product. The user’s understanding or curiosity about the product increases as they reach more milestones. The Marketing Funnel enables organizations to look at users through the lens of these milestones.
What is a Conversion Funnel?
A conversion funnel is a way to visualize a user’s journey with the brand and the product. You can build a conversion funnel to better understand how the user is interacting with the product. There are a number of different conversion funnels that are common in both B2B and B2C. You can have one big funnel. Or you create micro funnels to better understand a particular stage. Some examples are:
What is the Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel looks at a user journey as they become aware of the brand and start interacting with it. It visualizes this journey in a way that it becomes easy to find where the funnel is leaking and users are dropping off. There are four stages of a marketing funnel. In the next section we will go through each of them.
What are the Stages of the Marketing Funnel?
You can have as many or as little stages in a funnel. You will find the marketing funnel being created in 3 stages or a marketing funnel in 5 stages or in 7 stages. The important point here is that you are able to capture all the user’s interaction. Whether you club then in 2 or 10 stages is completely up to you. It will in most cases depend on the unique nature of your business. So let’s look at the 4 common stages of the marketing funnel. Another way to look at funnels is to divide them into top, middle and bottom half. Each half contains a grouping of stages.
Awareness
This is the first stage and right at the top. As the name suggests this is the stage at which users become aware of your existence. The awareness comes as a result of marketing activities that your team does. The activities vary depending on where users in your industry go looking for solutions for their problems. Examples of awareness activities are:
So do you start spending time and resources in all these medians? Absolutely not! That is never going to work. Run tests to see the conversion of various channels and overtime you will be able to identify the ones that work the best. Once you know which median works the best, double down on it.
Interest
At the beginning of this stage the user knows that your brand or product exists. At this stage they are curious about what your brand stands for and what your product does. For example- You have a website and the user lands on it. This act alone does not mean they are interested in you. Users landing on your site is the successful completion of the awareness stage. When the user lands on your site they can do two things:
So how do to you nudge the user to move from being aware to being interested? The following helps:
At this stage the user has become a lead.
Consideration
The user has spent enough time researching your product and is pretty convinced that you are one of their “potential choices”. At this stage the user may:
Generally the consideration stage is where the sales team takes over the baton. If you are a B2B company then at this stage your sales team will start talking to the prospect. Your sales team is likely to undertake the following activities during this stage
For B2C businesses it might look a little bit different. For example for an e-commerce site the following actions by a user can be considered as consideration:
For your business consideration can be one or more of the examples listed above. It depends on the unique behavior of your users. The definition of these stages need to be agreed upon by the sales and marketing teams. These stages are often represented as Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or Sales Qualified Lead(SQL).
Conversion
This is the final stage of the marketing funnel. In the end this is the one that eventually matters. Will the user/lead/prospect signup and become a customer? Or will they choose a competitor instead 😭 . In B2B companies sometimes at this stage the product manager actively works with the sales team. Depending on the size of the opportunity your team might need to fill gaps in the product for the customers. This requires the product manager to:
How do you create a Marketing Funnel?
You need to do the following to create the marketing funnel
Some of the common metrics that companies measure as part of their marketing funnel are:
Marketing Funnel is a great concept. But in the real world it doesn’t work linearly. For example:
What is a Sales Funnel?
Sales funnel visualizes how a lead travels through the sales pipeline and becomes a customer. Some stages of the sales funnel might overlap with the marketing funnel. The lead travels from the marketing funnel to sales funnel at which point the sales team takes over the engagement. At the end of the day all teams need to work together to get more customers.
Conclusion
The goal of creating the marketing funnel is continually learning from it. As you see users go through the funnel you need to analyze the data and find where users are dropping off. Find the part of the funnel which needs the most attention. Try and optimize it. Please don’t try to optimize the entire funnel at one go.
You don’t have to limit yourself to 4 stages for the marketing funnel. If you think your business needs more stages then go ahead and further break down the funnel.
