Scenario A:
Suppose a ship full of passengers has an accident and all its people drown except the captain, he saves himself and takes himself to a port by boat, and from tomorrow his picture will be in all newspapers and magazines. It will be full, a flood of reporters will flow to his place of residence, and he may even write a book about these few hours of the tragic incident, or luck will be with him and his story will become a movie!
Scenario B:
The captain of the ship concentrates a little more on his work and no accident occurs. The passengers arrive safely at their destination and there will be no news of movies, gossip, or stories.
Surely this will never be known because he has always done the right and wise thing and has never had any accidents.
In today’s business market, this story is also happening, we see businesses that have reached fame and income generation with minimal failures, and on the other hand, businesses that have come out of thousands of failures.
It is more interesting for us to listen to the story of the second case, but it is the first business that is wiser to fight the problems and avoid failure at any cost (although there are many variables, in this story I assume the same) I got conditions.)
Having a correct strategy and knowing the basic concepts of marketing and the more complex concepts of digital marketing is the wise thing that helps you achieve your goal, one of these concepts greatly helps us in knowing the audience and knowing the stages of his journey for Becoming a customer helps us, it is the marketing funnel.
Certainly, every business needs to attract customers to survive (apart from the important issue of customer retention), therefore one of the most important goals of any company is to convert its visitors and users into customers. In this way, we are working on the marketing funnel and the next step is the sales funnel. Now let’s see together what the marketing funnel is.
Table of Contents
What is a marketing funnel?
Marketing Funnel includes the steps a customer goes through to reach his goal, which is to satisfy his needs. Or more precisely, the marketing funnel is the path that we put the customer in to reach his goal.
The marketing funnel has become very popular in digital marketing and Internet businesses, and many companies use this strategy to increase their sales without increasing their site traffic.
There are different models for defining the stages and describing the marketing funnel, and in this article, I will discuss the most efficient and convenient model in Internet businesses.
What are the stages of the marketing funnel?
In general, we should say the stages of the marketing funnel that everyone goes through the following 5 stages to buy goods or services:
- To become aware
- Creating interest
- Attracting attention
- Conversion to a customer
- Loyalty
- Defending lawyer
These 6 steps mean that the customer first becomes aware of your product or service.
Now, either you have done this with advertising or the audience has come across your product according to their needs.
In the second stage, the attention of the audience is drawn to it. In the third step, he becomes a customer by buying from you. In the fourth stage, he will feel loyal to you and will defend your brand or product and service if he is satisfied with it and his needs are met.
Therefore, the main key in this theory is the customer. To better understand the importance of the customer, pay attention to the words of Sam Walton, an American entrepreneur, and businessman:
There is only one boss and that is the customer, who can fire anyone from the CEO to the lowest level just by spending their money elsewhere.
Of course, the recovery funnel can be different depending on the type of business to get better and more returns.
However, in this article, we have tried to describe the simplest and easiest pattern for you to understand better with this method.
Note: The marketing funnel is different from the sales funnel. The marketing funnel is a way to draw customers or users to your brand and business, but the sales funnel is a way to encourage the user to buy using the marketing funnel.
Now let’s go to the different stages of the marketing funnel:
1) Awareness
The stage of brand awareness or branding, which is also known as Awareness, is the highest point and mouth of the funnel many audiences enter the funnel from this stage. (You can refer to our article for a complete understanding of the fascinating topic of brand awareness)
Using different methods, you try to inform many audiences and leads about the existence of your brand or products, and tell them that you can help them.
Audiences try to satisfy their needs and want through various methods such as researching, querying, etc., now at this stage, you can use different methods such as collecting leads, producing useful content and content marketing, running different campaigns, networks Social, and… Attracting such audiences. At this stage, there are two very important discussions, some believe that the more we can get the audience into our marketing funnel (i.e. get more traffic), the more customers we will probably have. But others say that this is not the case and that the quality of the obtained lead is important and we should go to the target audience, most of whom we are sure will become customers.
Note: Both of the comments we made in the above article can be true depending on the type of business and your business.
2) Creating interest
The second stage of the funnel is to generate interest. Suppose you have managed to attract users to your website through Google with quality content. According to the proposed definition, the user has entered the first stage, which is awareness.
Now, to make him interested in your product, site, or brand, you can get help from the following methods.
For example, the quality of your content is very effective. If the user does not find what he was looking for after entering your site and closes the page, in addition to increasing the bounce rate of your site, he will quickly leave the funnel.
User exits will lead to an overall decrease in conversion rates at the bottom of the marketing funnel. So to prevent this from happening, you need to work on the quality of your content. Try to provide comprehensive and attractive content to the user.
In this way, from the first stage of the funnel, the user enters the second stage, which is interest. Therefore, the content that the user first encountered and became aware of your business is very important.
Note: At this stage, working on visual content and using attractive titles will have a positive impact on your work. In the future, you can keep the user on the site by creating internal links and suggesting other articles on the site. And make it more interesting in your business. Invitations to read other content of the site, invitations to download a file, e-book, etc. are other ways that you can keep the user interested.
In short, no special strategy is going to be used in this section, but what is very important is the quality of your work and your efforts in keeping the audience on your website.
Note: We are still at the beginning of the marketing funnel and nothing is going to be sold to the user. This means that if you immediately offer the user to buy a product instead of other articles on your site or other educational content of your business, he will naturally not trust you. And it may fall out of the funnel at this point.
3) Attracting attention (CONSIDERATION)
The next step is the step of attracting the customer’s attention, which is also known by other names such as evaluation and considerations in other articles.
At this stage, the audience who entered our marketing funnel and as a user showed interest in our products, services, or solutions after checking the site, decides to have a more detailed review.
This step is almost the step before the purchase; because the other audience almost knows that we can meet his needs in the best way and he tries to determine the desired product or service by checking more carefully and then entering the purchase phase. We know this stage of the user as an attracted customer so that in the next stage he becomes a real buyer. To do this step, you can use the following methods.
By using a pop-up, you can give the audience very good offers, such as signing up for the newsletter or using special discounts, etc.
Other things you can give users in exchange for receiving an email or a phone number are an e-book or free special content. This item can draw people’s attention to your business.
4) Becoming a customer (CONVERSION)
All our efforts in the marketing funnel and customer journey are to convert him into a real buyer.
Therefore, it has not fully occurred until this stage, so we should not be happy and optimistic; because many times, customers have stopped buying at this stage for various reasons, and we have had to bring them back with various campaigns such as retargeting, etc.
Of course, since the final conversion is not only related to the purchase of products, any other action such as registration, filling out the form, or downloading the desired application can also be done at this stage.
But in general, the most important goal is to sell the product, and when the purchase happens, our marketing funnel is complete. The buying stage is the last part of the end of our marketing funnel.
Steps after purchase…
The marketing funnel ends when it reaches the purchase stage, but many prominent international marketers believe that our main job is not to sell, but to keep the customer after the sale.
According to the analysis done on about 200 businesses and their customer management methods, we conclude that this opinion is completely correct. So the marketing funnel will continue.
5) Loyalty
The main work begins only after the purchase stage; because many people think that buying the product is the whole story and when it is done, we have succeeded. But it’s not really like that and we shouldn’t let our customer be just a passing customer. We have to make him remain our customer and for this, we have to make him loyal.
The cost of acquiring a new customer is 16 times that of retaining an old customer.
Therefore, the stage after purchase is the stage of loyalty, and by providing better services, establishing constant communication, providing new offers, discount codes, high-quality products, etc., we must make our buyer a loyal customer who will not buy from us anywhere else.
6) Advocacy
This stage is the ultimate trust and loyalty of a customer towards our brand.
At this stage, not only the buyer is a loyal customer, but he appears everywhere as a lawyer defending our brand and products and defends us with all his might.
If the buyer and customer reach this stage, then the most valuable step has been taken for us; Because this customer no longer goes to competitors and even defends us with all his strength, and according to the research, this type of advertising is the most effective and useful advertising for any brand.
What should your marketing funnel look like?
If you follow the above steps carefully and patiently, over time you will notice something strange in your marketing funnel: your marketing funnel is not static or even like an hourglass. When you look carefully at a successful marketing funnel, you will realize that it has no end, but a chain of these funnels connected and automatically expanding your market.
As the support from your fans continues, so will the number of your customers. After a successful shopping experience, new customers become your new fans, and they in turn bring new customers into your marketing funnel, and if you’re lucky and don’t follow the wrong strategy, this cycle continues.