Hello guys, this is the making it easier series for brand practitioners, advertisers, brand enthusiasts, marketing students, and professionals; here, I try to summarize the tad-bit-more complex marketing concepts in a way that’s easier for my audience to understand. I also like to keep it digital-centric because, let’s face it, traditional marketing is already in the ICU. So in my last article, I took an overview of creating a brand and how to do it from scratch. You can read it by clicking here if you haven’t read it yet. Creating an effective marketing funnel is often the next step towards creating your brand since all your promotional strategies will depend on this.
Whenever a client service executive/accounts executive (the role varies from agency to agency) joins the company, they have to go through a few extensive training sessions, which I am pretty sure is a universal practice. One of the first things I teach them about is the marketing funnel; I believe whether you are a strategist/a planner/ a client service executive, you need to have a good understanding of the marketing funnel.
Why is it necessary:
It’s pretty simple when you look at it top down, so for example, you have a new product, and you need to bring sales for it, and your brand manager or your supervisor has asked you to make a plan for it. The marketing funnel is where you start.
In this article: We will make sure that your sales funnel doesn’t look like a cake!
So in this article, I will talk about my understanding of the marketing funnel and hope that it helps people starting out with brands or advertising. This is a method we extensively use at our company at Wire- Digital Multimedia Marketing, and over the years, we have used it successfully to bring in leads and sales for our clients.
I can assure you that after reading this article, you won’t be this guy.
Customers nowadays need to see a product/brand many times before they make the decision to buy because whatever niche you are in right now, chances are there are a lot of big brands and businesses playing in the same area, targeting the same market segment you are going for and competing for your market share. Thus, the marketing funnel gets absolutely imperative at this phase:
Keep in mind that this is the global standard and may vary regionally depending on socio-economic segments, need, age range of your segment, etc. Source: LocalIQ
First things first: What is a Marketing Funnel?
Source: Flyclipart
The above image pretty much sums up the primary stages of a marketing funnel and gives you a good overview.
But first, Plan it Out: Figure out how much time you have till you need to achieve your specific volume of sales and your marketing budget, and figure out how much you will allocate in each phase. Now let’s go through the phase step by step. Find keywords and USPs that you will promote, and find TP (Trade Price) and MRP (Maximum Retail Price) variations so you can set offers when you are in the funnel.
- Awareness/ Attract: Ok, so this is where you basically start outreaching for your products. You can begin with BTL, ATL, or TTL, any phase at this point, but you have to ensure that your key metrics are: Reach (Paid & Organic), Views, Website Traffic, Visitors, and Downloads. Make sure you can keep track of these data: Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and App Download Data are just some of the tools you can use to retarget people who have shown initial interest in your business. You can also use this data to determine which demographic and audience segment responds to your ads the best.
It would also be noteworthy to remember that along with being in the top of the funnel. The Awareness phase is sometimes called TOFU (Top of the Funnel) and is sometimes divided into a further segment called interest.
So what is interest? Well, we see ads for new brands every day, think of Awareness as the hundreds of ad names and brands you scroll through while subconsciously absorbing the brand name and message; meanwhile, let interest be the specific ad where you stop for a few seconds.
The world Famous brand Heinz Puts it as “Awareness occurs when the prospect knows who you are. Interest doesn’t happen until they care about what you do.” Read up more on it by clicking here.
Source: Thanks to Visme for this Excellent Summary.
- Nurture: Ok, so you have been spending awareness campaigns for 2-3 weeks or a month now, and you have troves of data (Don’t worry, if you don’t have troves of data, you can run awareness campaigns and Lead nurture campaigns at the same time while targeting newer segments for awareness campaigns and retargeting your older awareness data to nurture).
Sometimes marketing funnels separate intent and nurture and sometimes bundle them up as consideration phases. Regardless, understand that your key during this phase is to promote your product USPs, create sales channels that are easy for customers to navigate, set up digital conversational media, and set up offers and campaigns that allow them to consider your product for longer times.
Lead Nurturing is a specific subset of the consideration phase of the marketing funnel and is usually placed in the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU). The other subgroup of lead nurturing is intent.
So What is the difference between intent and interest?
Well, I would have gone to explain but I think the guys at badgermappinghave pinned it down spot on:
Key Metrics during this phase are Quality Conversations (Are your fans tagging their friends and talking about it?), Product Reviews, Meaningful Engagement (Messages with Real Intent, Shares, and Comments), Organic Reach, Newsletter Subscriptions, and Product Queries. Influencer campaigns are beneficial during this phase.
- Convert:
This is the phase when you push in to run conversion campaigns on social media and give out offers, focus intensely on call-to-action, and set up sales campaigns. In the conversion phase, we have reached the Bottom of the Funnel, as depicted by the social media automation platform Buffer:
The BOFU or the Bottom of the Funnel where the conversion phase is active, your customers are at the hottest phase and most willing to purchase your product:
Source: Growthmarketeracademy.com
You must remember that the funnel is shrinking, and not all who enter the TOFU will come out of the BOFU.
During this phase, you need to offer customers proper sales channels where they can make purchases, train your digital query team to upsell and cross-sell products, and ensure that your products are available online with high visibility.
The critical metrics during this phase are Offline/Online Sales, Click to Purchase Rate and Revenue/ Profit.
This is also the phase where you would like to keep a close track of Return on Investment using a simple formula:
Source: LocalIQ
KEEP IN MIND: Conversion rates for different businesses and industry maybe different, the following graph shows the conversion rates for different industries and businesses in the US (This is not a standardized data, data may vary depending on campaign type, creativity of campaign, relevancy of campaign and from geographical and socioeconomic standpoints)
Source: LocalIQ
The entire marketing funnel explained using digital channels would look something like this:
Source: Suresh Parekh, slidesIn
An example of TOFU, MOFU and BOFU based on facebook only:
Source: Stablewp.com
This effectively sums up your brief introduction to marketing funnels and how we can effectively acquire customers through it. Hoping to look into how to retain existing customers while talking about the digital customer journey using the marketing funnel in the next post. Till then, have a great time and take it easy!
If you have read to this point, I thank you, and I am honored and humbled that you have given me the time to read this article. Share it with your friends if you find it worthy enough. I sincerely hope that this helps you in your life. I am always open to queries or questions, just comment or inbox. Criticisms are welcome too!
The entire marketing funnel in a nutshell.
About the Author:
Hi! I am Sabbir Islam, I started my first business when I was 15, it was an online magazine called Youthsparks, we ran it for four years, and at its peak had 100k visitors worldwide per month. Then I ran a food cart called Cinnamon Sugar where I handled the digital marketing and branding. Then I worked in a digital agency as a project manager alongside being a freelance writer and an undergrad student; throughout the last six years, I have run my digital agency, Wire (kixmol.com), and helped build, nurture, and grow sales of 200+ SMEs and nationwide brands. We have a 50+ people team HQ in Dhaka with regional operations in Chittagong, Sylhet, Australia, and India. Brand building and strategization are the core of what I do in Wire and most of Wire’s success has been based on the fact that we even brand SMEs as multinational corporations do. That’s our forte and our data-centric marketing allows sales increment within months of retainers for most clients. We believe proper branding, witty campaigns, catchy copies, statics, and exciting creatives can generate much more ROI than extensive budget campaigns.