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Unless you woke up today with a dream to kick start your Marketing career and landed on this article, you’ve heard of the ubiquitous Marketing Funnel somewhere. That said, most of us do know a handful about the What and the Why of a Marketing Funnel but struggle to figure out the How. How to mould it to the nouveau digital marketing platforms and users, how to leverage it to measure their marketing ROI, or how to gain from it without getting sucked into analysis paralysis mode.
Some of these are exactly what we walk you through in this read.
IN THIS BLOG
1. A quick refresher on WHAT
2.Introduction to the New and Improved 21c. Digital Marketing Funnel
3. The big WHYs of using Digital Marketing Funnels
4.The best ways of using them – simply and effectively
5. The Funnel in action – case study
A quick refresher on WHAT
Prima facie, a Marketing Funnel is a visual tool that helps understand the process of turning leads into customers. It is based on the premise that people do not buy immediately – for several reasons – price only being one of them. In effect, you don’t start selling the moment you set eyes on someone who looks like a potential customer. Much like in romance, there’s need for building trust and credibility, and displaying competence. Definitely until you earn yourself the right to ask for customer’s money, and even after that – if you want their continued business.
This tiny, agile tool has been the go-to model for marketing and sales professionals across industries & eras since 1890s. No, that’s not a typo. The Funnel is really amongst the longest living business models that continues to kick ass even in the world of Facebook and Email marketing.
Fun Fact – The origin of the Marketing Funnel is traced back to Elias St. Elmo Lewis. No. Frank Hutchinson Dukesmith. No. Lewis. Er… Don’t know that for sure. To put the curious cat in you to ease, give this a read.
What we do know for sure is that the acronym AIDC – Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Convert – eventually evolved into its visual avatar now known as the Marketing Funnel. No. Wait. The Sales Funnel. Or is it the Purchase Funnel. Nope, they haven’t agreed on that one either. 
Along the way, the Funnel has been subjected to much customization. There are variations to what the stages may be called or the sub-stages it may be divided into. Across industries, they differ in length, layers, and in use of tactics. There is, however, consensus on the fact that marketing strategies need to differ as your potential customer moves from being at the top of the funnel, to being in the middle and at the bottom. In fact, this consensus contributed to the widely accepted terminology of Tofu-Mofu-Bofu.
1. Top of the Funnel – is where your journey to market a brand begins. Here, your marketing efforts focus on building awareness of your brand amongst the new, unaware or as they are commonly called “cold” users. You identify your buyer persona’s explicit and implicit needs and build high quality, original content to establish your brand’s competence in addressing them.
2. Middle of the Funnel – Now, your prospects know about your brand. You begin to reach out to these “warm” users with a more detailed account of the brand and its offerings. Your marketing efforts seek to nurture them with value-adding and credibility-building content. In the process, you collect information from your interested leads and qualify them for the sales pitch
3. Bottom of the Funnel – Having figured out that there is a problem which your brand can address, the lead is now ready to consider your brand worthy of his/her money. Your marketing and sales teams now collaborate on enabling the buyer to make that purchase.
New, Improved, and Agile 21c Digital Marketing Funnel
The new-age Digital Marketing Funnel shares the DNA of its predecessor in structure and functionality. As you build your digital marketing strategy to promote your next brand on the internet, use this funnel as a roadmap. Align your content to each funnel stage and in effect to the readiness level of your prospects and leads.
This ensures you don’t shoot from the hip hoping that something from your many digital marketing toolkit will get your buyer’s attention. You don’t take every step in the digital marketing rule book at the same time nor do you resort to that one tool you and your firm are good at. Flaws that many new digital marketing teams are plagued with.
Instead, you strategize. You allow the funnel to tell you the platforms your user is most likely to reach at different stages. You allow it to guide you to the content they’re most likely to understand or get drawn with.
A complete 21c. Digital Marketing Funnel is a step up from its predecessor on 2 counts:
1. it extends the funnel by taking within its scope the after-sale engagement. Hence, it requires you to strategize how to retain customers and build brand loyalty. Given that a company loses up to $1.6 trillion a year when customers leave them, this has only become more critical in the post Corona world
2. since there are finite digital platforms, the funnel allows you to design a tight mapping of strategies and content to each stage – this contributes to greater accuracy and higher ROI while leaving scope for creativity in content strategy
6-stages of a Digital Marketing Funnel
1. Awareness: Your leads come in the garb of viewers, visitors or fans and begin to get familiar with your brand. You aim to strike that right first impression by thoughtful combination of educational and viral content. And no matter what channel you choose, this content should be ungated so it can be distributed and shared freely with no need for a signup.
2. Interest: Fuelled by relevant content, the lead now starts to engage with your brand online – investigates your solutions, consumes more content, is willing to part with important information to get hold of your content. You aim to heighten curiosity and interest about the brand.
3. Desire: Leads that reach here are your Marketing Qualified Leads. Basis the information you have collected from them, you are now equipped to nurture them with personalized content that propels them to consider your offering as a viable solution. Your aim is to make it easy for them to evaluate your offering against that of your competitor.
4. Convert – The step where your leads become customers. Your aim is to enable them to take the decision in your favour and commit to your offering – smoothly and swiftly.
5. Retention – Your marketing efforts now aim to turn one-time buyers into repeat; one-time subscribers into continuous ones. Through well-engineered onboarding, help and assistance gateways, your content focuses on keeping your customers. Hopefully, for a long time to come.
6. Loyalty: The ultimate destination, this stage is set for your most loyal customers. Through a combination of incentives, contests, user-generated content, you aim to deepen your relationship with them and take their permission to leverage them as your brand ambassadors.
The Big WHYs of using Digital Marketing Funnel
The Marketing Funnel has really stood the test of time. Today, as we shift our marketing journey to the digital terrain, the funnel continues to punctuate it with structure, guidelines, and goals for each milestone. Of the many reasons why it is a must in your Digital Marketing tool kit, here are the top 3.
1. It provides you a framework with which to analyse how well your customer conversion process is performing. These inputs, across campaigns, will give you a keen insight and necessary foundation on which to build your marketing strategy.
2. This helps drive a thoughtful content strategy. Armed with a clear rationale and objective to connect with your audience, you ensure your messages stand out amongst the cacophony of content in our lives. For example, as your lead progresses towards the loyalty stage, you’d begin to notice one-to-one channels like emails and specific customer-offers draw more attention than testimonials or campaigns that boast of your expertise.
3. As a measurement tool, the funnel provides a window to monitor every step of your marketing process. It helps determine how well your ads, social media posts, blogs, landing pages, offers, emails, and instant messages are performing.
The best ways of using funnels – simply and effectively
1. Align it with your persona
As you onboard a new client and devise your personas, build a practical, user-friendly marketing funnel right at the outset. Ask yourself the following questions to ensure you take into account key dynamics of your buyer persona.
1. How will the personas find the brand at each stage?
2. What kind of information do we need to provide to move them from one stage to the next?
3. How will we know if they have converted or moved to the next stage?
2. Project Manage the funnel
There will be a lot that will happen simultaneously the moment you start working through the funnel. And if your funnel is doing its job, it’ll all be happening very fast. Content, lead management, traffic management, remarketing. In fact, all these linear paths will need to move at the same time because of interdependencies. To ensure you don’t drop the ball at any stage, Project Manage your funnel well.
Download this free resource that can function as your cheat sheet to truly leverage the Digital Marketing Funnel in your next campaign.
3. Customise it to client industry and business model
One of the biggest reasons why the funnel has stood the test of time is that you can customize it. From one digital campaign to another, one business model to another, your funnel will and should change. For example the funnel for a subscription based B2C firm like a health and wellbeing app, should be short – connecting leads to freemium or paid account creation landing page, and intensifying post-purchase engagement so that users keep coming back. Prospects of a high-ticket training or education product, on the contrary, should be able to explore a lot of ungated content at the Top of the Funnel.
Your goal as a marketer is to make that funnel as cylindrical as possible, guiding maximum potential customers towards conversion.
In practice, the funnel really allows you to play around with tactics at each stage. Fuelled with the right strategy and creativity, it can enable you to deliver the best conversion results in the form of increased email response rates or opt-in rates, higher frequency and value of repeat purchases, improved click-through rates for ads and social shares, better customer purchase rates and number of loyalists.
The Funnel in Action – Case Study
Let’s deepen our understanding through this case study of the funnel our team built and executed for a cosmetics company.
Client:
A new Indian cosmetic brand specializing in skin care products designed by dermatologists.
Their USP/s:
1. Cosmetics curated by expertise of 3 generations of dermatologists
2. Especially crafted for Indian Skin
3. 99.9% organic ingredients
4. Vegan
5. No animal testing
The Strategy:
Step 1: A few engaging dialogues with the client and a deep dive into their industry had us walking out with 2 clear goals.
1. Increase sales from digital marketing campaigns
2. Build brand awareness
Step 2: We set out, then, to design our buyer persona and paint an accurate picture of what our target audience may want. Focusing, amongst others, on the questions here…
1. What skin concerns do they have?
2. What solutions do they currently have?
3. What solutions do they seek?
4. How many of these solutions do we offer?
5. Where will we find our target customers? (To lead us to preferred platforms / channels)
6. What are the best means to communicate our solutions to them? (To fuel content strategy)
Step 3: What followed were a series of iterations, discussions, & split testing. Its findings came together in the final version of our campaign funnel that looked like this.
| Strategy | Content | Platforms | Call To Action |
| Awareness | |||
| Position brand as the ONLY – Dermatologically crafted – chemical free brand in Indian market | Mix of high quality educational and promotional videos /images drawing attention to: – skin problems that the brand addresses – dermatological, chemical free solutions the brand offers | Instagram & Facebook Stories; Feed Ads; YouTube Ads | “Learn More” & “Know More” buttons Website and Page visitor tracking through Facebook pixel codes and Google Tag manager |
| Interest | |||
| Identify “interested” prospects and give them more insight into the brand and its solutions – Prospects who had visited the website and/or watched more than 75% of the branding videos selected as the target group. | High quality product composition videos Eg. – One video highlighted the key ingredients in the Under Eye cream and another one highlighting the texture of the daily use sunscreen to draw attention to its clean ingredients | Instagram & Facebook Stories; News Feed Ads; YouTube Ads | Learn More Know More Find Out |
| Desire | |||
| Reinforce and deepen the connection with the prospect | Teach them the “life skill” of taking care of their skin at home through: – subscription to ‘Skin Care’ blog – ‘How To’ videos by dermatologists on board on common skin care questions – ‘Customised Skin Care Routine’ – We created a Skin-care routine finder on the website where visitors who entered their email IDs and filled in a short survey, got a DIY skin care routine customised to them Guide them on their journey to choose the right productions and solutions for skin care through: – high value gated content like downloadable checklists on what their products should and should not have and PDFs on specific skin care routines | Retargeting Instagram & Facebook Feed Ads; YouTube Ads | Subscribe Download Now Know More Find Out Watch Now |
| Conversion | |||
| Retargeting them using data gathered by pixels and the client website Dynamic Ads and Promo codes were built in to trigger conversion | Targetted content marketing through showcaseing products most relevant to their specific skin concern or skin type – Emails retargeting series – 15% discount in first time buyer ads – Combo Offers | Instagram & Facebook Feed Ads; YouTube Ads; Google Ads (search based); Emails | Buy Now |
| Retention | |||
| Retain customers by increasing 2-way engagement; Offer solutions/deals/value to build repeatability | Special offers, Important Day and Festival promotions for existing customers – 25% Discount on next purchase – Seeking Customer feedback – CRM with customer data established – Reward Point based loyalty program initiated | Facebook; Instagram; Emails; SMS | Special Offers; Holiday Offers; Write a Review |
| Loyalty | |||
| Encourage customers to keep coming back; build brand loyalty | Deepen brand loyalty through relationship building initiatives – Birthday and Anniversary discounts – Loyalty program on website – Customer feedback – 15% discount on sharing feedback | Facebook; Instagram; Emails; SMS | Write a Review; Redeem Rewards |
In Summary
As the funnels have evolved to suit the online world, they have become increasingly complex too. But there is no doubt that they offer a roadmap that assures your prospects, convert. You have to establish the basic funnel as a part of your campaign scope if you want it to work. Without it, you will find it difficult to take a grip of all the marketing and sales activities, let alone ensure high conversion.
It’ll be worth your time to master this model and use it to monitor, direct, and optimize your marketing efforts. As is the case with any tool, with consistent and intentional practice, you’ll reach a stage where it begins to serve its true purpose – effortlessly.
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